Introduction: The Solana Saga Phone is a mobile device technology developed by the Solana Foundation. The Saga phone offers an integrated and comprehensive mobile stack built on robust and secure hardware to provide users with unparalleled convenience and performance.
The Saga phone is going to be the flagship Android device of OSOM. The collaboration between OSOM and Solana Labs started based on a meeting between Anatoly Yakovenko and Jason Keats, the founder of OSOM, earlier this year.
Anatoly red pilled Jason that Web 3 was the future and it needed a native mobile experience.
Anatoly was convinced that Jason and the OSOM team had the necessary qualifications to ship a world class hardware solution to market.
The phone costs 1000$ and is expected to arrive in early 2023. You can signup here today for 100$ which is refundable.
The team hopes that the worst case scenario is that people will end up buying a simply amazing android device.
The phone will also come with privacy features that enables the users to shut down google or other services that they don't want access.
The Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) is an open source developer toolkit to create mobile-first crypto applications on the Solana blockchain.
Applications on other blockchains can also send their code to Solana Labs to get it audited and integrated. In the future the vision is to outsource the audit and integration to other teams.
“Solana is an open-source platform, and anyone can contribute. SMS and the dev kit for Saga are optimized for Solana, but we would love for other ecosystems in Web3 to participate.” - Emmett Hollyer
Solana is one of the fastest layer 1 blockchains in the world. It was launched in 2018 by founder Anatoly Yakovenko. It has raised over $330M from investors such as A16Z, Multicoin, Polychain and many others. To date Solana has almost 2000 validators and millions of active users.
Solana’s mission is to have over one billion people using crypto in the next few years. To achieve this, Solana Labs main focus is on developer tooling, developer adoption and network performance improvements that increase network speed while lowering transaction costs.
Speed increase and cost decrease enables new usecases that were not possible before. The goal is to get as many developers as possible to try new things and hopefully a few will get to product market fit.
DeFi summer started in 2020 with 4 projects (uniswap, maker, avee and compound) out of thousand's getting PMF. It's likely the next bull market will kick start through with new use-cases enabled.
Solana’s mobile phone expansion is tied in multiple ways to their overall mission of reaching 1 billion people.
How to reach most people
Most people in the world just have a mobile phone (android) as their primary computer. To reach these people, you need to create native mobile experiences.
Current users are occasionally forced to carry their laptops with them if they want to conduct time sensitive actions with their NFTs or tokens not available on mobile.
App Store Limitations
Half the conversations that Anatoly had with developers were complaints that they had in terms of mobile development limitations. Relying on Google and Apple to create these app experiences comes with risks and limitations.
- Their OS is not optimized to enable crypto specific usecases
- Opaque approval processes and swift innovation can get you banned
- App store fees of 15-30% eliminate many web 3 native business models
Google and Apple are unlikely to make the necessary changes needed to accommodate crypto specific usecases.
Only if someone forced their hand by creating a clear threat to their business model could we see a change.
Overall the crypto space as a whole does not want to be beholden to these monopolies that at any time could decide to delist crypto apps.
What Crypto specific hardware enables
Crypto today is mainly used in desktop browsers and is not optimised for smartphones.
Hopefully the collaboration between OSOM and Solana Labs will change that by enabling mobile first web 3 solutions.
Crypto specific hardware lets developers create new products that were not possible before. There are a few pieces necessary to create this amazing experience:
- Secure Elements that let’s you safely access your keys while the wallet never sees your seed phrase
- Trust Zone so that your wallet can't lie about what you are signing
- APIs that let you do Bip 39 Key Recovery
- Decentralized Dapp Marketplace with no fees initially (0.2% transaction fees in the future)
"Imagine mobile apps with no logins, no tracking. Not because the platform wants to sell your data on its own ad exchange, but because that’s how all the dapps are designed” - Anatoly
Additional Relevant Reads
