Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko took the stage final evening at Disrupt, TechCrunch’s annual international startup convention, and hinted that Solana’s new smartphone Saga will provide a recent various to the present enterprise fashions utilized by firms like Google and Apple.
“This is among the moonshots,” he mentioned, describing the Saga as an experiment that’s “low-cost sufficient to attempt.” He added that it may current a problem to the present rental fashions employed Google and Apple’s app shops, which may each take as much as 30% in income from builders.
“They’re constructed round a rent-seeking mannequin the place all of the content material is owned by the creator and also you as a person lease it,” he mentioned. “Once you purchase a video from Amazon, you don’t really personal it; everybody realizes that you simply don’t personal it.”
Yakovenko additionally made clear that Solana isn’t anticipating excessive gross sales quantity for the Saga, including that he can be “very pleased with 25,000 to 50,000 models offered within the subsequent yr.”
Solana cellphone joins rising market
Solana introduced Saga again in June alongside the Solana Cellular Stack (SMS) software program equipment, a useful resource for growing native Android cell apps, wallets, and video games, together with a decentralized app retailer.
The cellphone itself contains a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor, a 6.67” OLED show, 12GB RAM, and 512GB of inside storage. The system will retail for about $1,000 in Q1 subsequent yr.
Though producers together with HTC and Samsung have launched smartphones with crypto options together with built-in {hardware} wallets, Solana is aiming to take issues a step additional.
One of many principal promoting factors of the Saga system is its full integration with the Solana Cellular Stack, which is able to allow smoother entry to crypto wallets, seamless use of Solana Pay and entry to purposes constructed on Solana, together with video games, DeFi apps and NFT markets.
The Solana Cellular Stack isn’t unique to the Saga cellphone, however ought to Android cellphone makers like Google and Samsung wish to get in on the motion, they’ll should undertake and adapt the software program to allow full performance on their very own gadgets, mentioned Yakovenko.
Ethereum scaling resolution Polygon additionally introduced its personal crypto-integrated smartphone, a collaboration with phonemaker Nothing, again in July.
