Solana Transactions Are Not What I Expected (Coming From EVM)

I've been building on EVM chains for a while Base, Ethereum, the usual. I thought picking up Solana would be a lateral move. Same concept, different syntax. I was wrong, and the transactions are where that became obvious. What I thought I knew On EVM chains, a transaction is mostly a wrapper. You have: A to address Some value (ETH) Optional data (the encoded function call) A signature from your wallet The RPC figures out what to do with it. You don't think too hard about the structure. ethers.js handles most of it. Solana transactions look structurally similar at first glance. You sign something, you broadcast it. But once you actually build one from scratch, the differences become hard to ignore. The anatomy is more explicit A Solana transaction is made of instructions, and each instruction spells out exactly which accounts it touches and whether each account is a signer, writable, or read-only. You don't just call a function and let the runtime figure