Solana Unveils Web3 Mobile Phone

Solana is planning to release a mobile phone, marking one of the industry’s first attempts to grow Web3 technology beyond the desktop. Included in the phone will be a dApp store, Solana SDK, and hardware private key security measures.

Web3 Goes Mobile

The team behind Solana is launching a new mobile phone.

Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko announced today at an event in New York City the launch of Saga, an Android phone built specifically with Web3 in mind. The phone will provide access to a decentralized applications (dApp) mobile store in which users will be able to download decentralized trading platforms and NFT marketplaces.

The dApp store is to be released without fees; the team’s avowed goal is to eventually let the Solana community participate in the governance of its catalogue. 

Solana is one of the largest blockchains in crypto. Famous for its high throughput (65,000 transactions per second against Ethereum’s 30) and very low fees, the protocol has been the subject of criticism for its high level of centralization and numerous outages.

The Saga phone will sport a 6.6-inch display, 512 GB of storage, and 12 GB of RAM. While Solana Labs doesn’t expect it to ship before the first financial quarter of 2023, users can now pre-order it on the website for 100 USDC.

Other products to be featured on the device include a Solana SDK, which provides a framework for developers to publish and distribute their own mobile dApps, and a hardware-encoded Seed Vault for users to store their private keys in.

The Solana Foundation will be providing a $10 million fund to “help kickstart a new mobile ecosystem” and “encourage growth of mobile dApps.” 

Markets were unfazed by the news, with Solana’s SOL token trading at around $36.5 at the time of writing, a 2% decline from the time of the announcement. 

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.