Airdrop & Fund Your Wallet
Before deploying your program, you need devnet SOL to pay for the on-chain storage (called "rent").
How Much SOL Do You Need?
Deploying an Anchor program requires approximately 2 SOL on devnet:
- ~1.4 SOL for the buffer account (temporary storage during upload)
- ~0.1 SOL for the program account
- ~0.3 SOL for transaction fees (200+ transactions)
The good news: most of this rent is reclaimable after deployment.
The Devnet Faucet
Solana provides a free faucet on devnet. You can request 2 SOL per airdrop.
Use the widget below to fund your wallet. You'll need at least 4-5 SOL to comfortably deploy.
Tip: The faucet can be slow during peak hours. If you see "faucet is busy," just wait 30-60 seconds and try again. This is normal — devnet is a shared resource.
What is Rent?
On Solana, every account must maintain a minimum balance called rent. This prevents spam accounts from filling up validator storage.
The rent amount depends on the account's data size:
rent = base_rent + (data_size * rent_per_byte)
For a 200KB program binary, the buffer account rent is ~1.4 SOL.
Accounts that maintain the minimum balance are rent-exempt — they won't be garbage collected.