Why Solana addresses almost never start with R
We made a million Solana keys and counted their first characters. Nearly 19 in 20 addresses start with a digit from 2 to 9 or a capital A to H. Every letter after J, capital or small, starts only about 1 address in 1,000. That is why a vanity address that starts with R takes about 17 times longer than one that ends with R.
What we counted
We made 1,000,000 Solana keypairs on 3 November 2026 the way a wallet does: 32 random bytes as the seed, the Ed25519 public key from it with libsodium, and the address as that public key written in base58. Then we counted the first character of each address. The counts are free to reuse with credit (CC BY 4.0): CSV or JSON.
| First character | Share of addresses | About 1 in |
|---|---|---|
| Each of 2 to 9 and A to H | 5.9% | 17 |
| J | 1.4% | 70 |
| 1 | 0.39% | 256 |
| Each of the other 40 (K to Z and every small letter) | 0.10% | 1,000 |
5.5% of the addresses were 43 characters long instead of 44. Those shorter ones are the only addresses that can start with K to Z or a small letter.
Why it happens
A Solana address is not text that was picked. It is the wallet’s public key, a 256-bit number, written in base58: the digits 1 to 9 and the letters A to Z and a to z, without 0, capital O, capital I and small l, so that no two characters look alike.
A 256-bit number is at most about 1.16 × 10^77. Written in base58, numbers that large need 44 characters, and the first of the 44 can only go up to about the 17th character of the alphabet, which is J. So a 44-character address always starts with 2 to H, or with J for the very largest numbers.
Only numbers below 58^43 come out at 43 characters, about 1 in 17.5 of all keys. Their first character can be any of the 57 that are not 1, about equally. That is where every address starting with K to Z or a small letter comes from: 1 in 17.5 times 1 in 57, or about 1 in 1,000.
An address starts with 1 only when the key’s first byte is zero, because base58 writes each leading zero byte as a 1. That happens 1 time in 256.
The last characters are even: each of the 58 shows up about as often as the others, because they come from the low digits of the number.
What it means for vanity addresses
A vanity address is found by making keys until one fits, so the odds above set how long it takes.
| You want an address that | Keys to try, on average |
|---|---|
| Starts with A | 17 |
| Starts with R | 982 |
| Ends with R | 58 |
| Starts with RVN | 3,303,741 |
| Ends with RVN | 195,112 |
| Starts with RAVEN | 11,113,785,147 |
| Ends with RAVEN | 656,356,768 |
Three ways to make a long vanity address finish sooner:
- Put it at the end. Every character at the end is 1 in 58. A start after J is about 17 times harder for the first character alone.
- Start with 2 to H if you can. Then the start costs no more than the end: “ABCDE” takes about 192 million tries, fewer than five letters at the end (656 million).
- Allow any case. Each letter that has both a capital and a small form in base58 doubles your chances. L only has a capital, and i and o only a small form, so those do not help.
The vanity address generator works these odds out exactly for the letters you type, before it starts, and runs in your browser.
Questions
Is an address that starts with a letter after J less safe?
No. The key behind it is just as random. The first character only reflects how large the public key’s number happens to be, which says nothing about the private key.
Do other blockchains have the same thing?
Yes, wherever an address is a fixed-size number written in base58 without a version byte in front. Bitcoin’s older addresses start with 1 or 3 because they put a version byte first.
Why do most vanity guides say 1 in 58 a character?
It is true for the end of an address and for most of the start’s characters after the first. It is not true for the first character itself, which is where the 17 times comes from.
Sources
A wallet address is a number written in base58, so the first character depends on how big that number is, and most of them are big.
Join the waitlistSee how Raven does it: How Raven works, Earn.