Permissionless is a property of the chain. Access is still a service most people rent.
Users will always need to pay for some level of access. Bandwidth, low-latency paths, reliable reads, and consistent performance have real costs. Pretending otherwise is cope. The question is never whether you pay. It’s who you pay, under what terms, and how much control you keep after the payment.
There are two parts to doing this right:
Finding an access partner you trust.
Securing that access and privatizing it as much as possible.
Most people skip both. They pick whatever RPC is convenient, route everything through popular terminals, and never revisit the decision. That is the opposite of sovereignty.
What a Solana RPC Actually Is
Most people never interact with the Solana blockchain directly. They interact with an RPC — a Remote Procedure Call endpoint.
An RPC is a server that speaks the language of the chain on your behalf. When your wallet shows a balance, when your bot checks a pool, when you submit a swap, or when a dashboard updates in real time, it is making requests to an RPC node. That node talks to the actual Solana network and returns the answer.
There are two main flavors:
Public RPCs (like the ones the Foundation runs) are free, shared, and heavily rate-limited. Fine for light testing. Not reliable under load. Not meant for real trading.
Private / dedicated RPCs are what serious users actually pay for. Better rate limits, lower latency, more consistent performance, sometimes staked connections that improve transaction landing rates, and access to streaming data.
Validators secure the network and produce blocks. RPC nodes are the access layer most people actually use. The quality of that connection, the hardware, the location, and the operator’s priorities all affect what you experience.
Most providers support the same core set of standard Solana RPC methods — getBalance, getAccountInfo, sendTransaction, getLatestBlockhash, subscriptions, and the rest. On top of that, many ship custom methods that only work on their infrastructure. These extras can deliver real edge: faster reads, better indexing, or more efficient paths for the things traders care about.
This is one reason the choice of access partner matters. The standard methods get you on the chain. The custom ones can give you an advantage. SolanaTracker (my current choice) has a few custom RPC methods worth looking at if you’re serious about direct execution.
For a trader, that server is not merely answering technical requests. It sits in the path of your activity. It can see timing, frequency, targets, size, and patterns. The same is true of the terminals most people use on top of it.
Core Tools
The basic tools already exist: the Solana CLI for direct interaction, Kit for modern TypeScript clients, and Anchor for programs and generated clients. None of them eliminates your RPC dependency. They simply let you control more of what happens above it.
Build Your Own Tools
At some point the pattern becomes obvious. The more you rely on someone else’s product for access, execution, or interface, the more you inherit their limitations, their incentives, and their risk.
The three main trading terminals most Solana meme traders bounce between — GMGN, Axiom, and Padre/Terminal — all have real strengths. They also all have trade-offs. Features, speed, fees, data quality, UI quirks, and trust. A lot of traders end up jumping between them or settling for the one they dislike least.
Axiom is the clearest recent example. ZachXBT’s investigation detailed how employees used internal tools to access private user wallet data. Axiom itself acknowledged that someone on the team abused those tools to look up user wallets, removed the access, and said it would hold the responsible parties accountable. The episode is a clean illustration of the structural risk: when your activity flows through a terminal, the people running it may be able to see far more than you intend.
I could keep rotating among terminals, hoping the next one would align better with my interests and risk tolerance. Or I could start reclaiming more of the layer above the RPC.
AI has drastically lowered the cost of owning software built around your own process. That’s why I started using AI agents to build tools for myself.
When you build what you actually need:
You rely less on providers who charge fees and extract value from your flow.
You can improve your security posture — keeping keys closer, shrinking unnecessary integrations, and deciding what gets logged — but only if you treat your own code as another system that must be reviewed and secured.
The tools fit how you trade. No more forcing your process into someone else’s product. You end up more comfortable and more consistent because the software matches your edge instead of the other way around.
You still need an RPC partner. You still pay for access at some level. But the stack above that access layer becomes yours.
The Real Point
There’s an obvious irony in all of this.
I’m talking about reducing dependence on platforms and systems by pointing you toward other partners, other tools, and even AI agents. Complete independence is a myth. You will always be exposed to something — an RPC provider, hardware manufacturers, network operators, open-source maintainers, or your own imperfect code.
Sovereignty is not the absence of exposure.
It is the deliberate choice of who you are exposed to, and how much of yourself you expose.
Most traders hand over more than they need to. They route everything through convenient terminals that can observe, extract, or fail. They accept the defaults. They trade comfort for control.
I decided that was too expensive.
By using AI to build tools focused on how I actually trade, I still rely on access partners and infrastructure — but I’ve taken back a large chunk of the stack. Keys stay closer. Intent is harder to observe. The software fits my process instead of the other way around. I’m not at 100%. I don’t pretend to be. But the difference between passive rental and conscious selection is massive.
Permissionless is a property of the chain.
Access is a service you pay for.
Sovereignty is the ongoing work of deciding exactly where you plug in, how much surface area you leave open, and which parts of the system you are willing to own.
I’m building these tools in public because sovereignty does not require perfection. It starts when you stop accepting every default.