- The phone will retail at US$1000 upon its release
- Solana Saga’s launch will feature built-in native Android decentralized apps like Solana Pay
- The developer units will give developers an opportunity to test much-anticipated features of the Solana Saga, including the seed vault cold wallet, the Solana Mobile Stack and the decentralised apps
Solana labs recently announced that their upcoming crypto phone, the Solana Saga, has gone into pre-production, with developer units expected to ship in December. The Solana Saga is touted as the phone that is expected to reignite the waning interest in crypto phones, with its planned release early in 2023.
The developer units will give developers an opportunity to test much-anticipated features of the Solana Saga, including the seed vault cold wallet, the Solana Mobile Stack and the decentralised apps. The phone will sport a top-of-the-line Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset with 12 gigabytes of RAM and an OLED display. It will utilise the Android operating system. The phone will retail at US$1000 upon its release.
What is a crypto phone
A crypto phone is a blockchain-centric gadget that combines regular smartphone capabilities with crypto, the metaverse, and decentralized applications (DApps) compatibility. A crypto phone, for instance, can enable users to store secret keys securely, mine cryptocurrency, take part in the metaverse, and manage blockchain network nodes.
Crypto phones provide several features that let customers easily store and utilize their crypto. This idea aims to bridge the gap between web3 and the general public.
The excitement over crypto phones is quite understandable. Mobile is certainly the way to go in the present world. In 2022, 62.06% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. Web 3.0 technologies like cryptocurrency and decentralized apps (dApps) must truly go mobile to scale. However, the existing phone hardware is built for a centralized web 2.0 world.
Furthermore, phone developers are generally happy with the centralized version of the internet, which creates many profit opportunities for them. Apple counts 23.63% of its revenue from services; that’s a big chunk.
Solana’s Saga will not be the first crypto phone to launch. Polygon’s Nothing Phone 1 and the HTC Desire 22 Pro predate it. However, the Saga’s implementation of specific technologies makes it a bright prospect for crypto enthusiasts looking for a champion.
Read: Crypto phones are revolutionizing Web3 and blockchain technology
Seed vault
Cold or hardware wallets are still the most secure way to store cryptocurrency in 2022. It seems like every few weeks; there is a crypto hack story that hits the headlines. Whether the attacks are on individual wallets through man-in-the-middle scams or entire exchanges being attacked, the result is the same; people lose their crypto.
There have been stories of potentially millions worth of crypto lost along with flash drive-based hardware wallets. While people do lose phones, the prospect of a hardware cryptocurrency wallet built into the Solana crypto phone is appealing.
Solana Mobile Stack
The Solana Mobile Stack is an interesting concept. An open-source toolkit that allows developers to create native decentralized apps for Android. The Solana Mobile Stack manages separate libraries for dApps and cold wallets. This allows developers a swifter process for creating and distributing apps.
It also ushers in the age of directly connecting crypto cold wallets for transacting through Solana Pay without exposing private key information. This shuts out the aforementioned hackers.
Read: Solana: Fastest-growing cryptocurrency shakes the crypto space with its hybrid consensus mechanism
Built-in Decentralized Apps (dApps) on the Saga
Having apps built for the web 3.0 decentralized internet is paramount to improving the mobile adoption of web 3.0. The Solana Saga is expected to launch with built-in native Android decentralized apps like Solana Pay to improve the utility of web 3.0 technologies and the Solana Saga. To this end, Solana announced US$10 million in ecosystem development grants for developers building dApps on their Solana Mobile Stack.
You only need to look at the current trends to understand the importance of shifting to mobile for web 3.0. Instant messaging did well on the desktop browser but absolutely exploded when it transitioned to mobile.
Social media apps like Facebook and Twitter found their feet on the desktop but broke out with mobile access. eCommerce followed the same path that web 3.0 must now traverse. The Solana Saga crypto phone could be the development that starts to make sense of it all.
Read: Solana launches infrastructure to help understand and adopt web3 concepts