- Solana Labs launches its crypto-friendly smartphone, the Saga.
- Mobile is the first choice that treats cryptocurrency as a first-class citizen on mobile.
- Saga is available for pre-order and shipping will begin next month.
Solana (SOL), the competitor to Ethereum (ETH), has announced that its crypto-friendly smartphone Saga is now ready for distribution and will begin shipping within a month.
During the Saga launch event in San Francisco on Thursday, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said that the tech company will begin distributing the crypto-friendly smartphone to those who pre-order it on April 20 and will debut public sale on May 8.
“Today is a big day for us. We have done what no one thought possible. We have built a whole mobile software stack and a flagship phone, all optimized to bring crypto into the mobile age and now you can experience what crypto should be like on a mobile device.”
Yakovenko commented
The device has been built using Android and Web 3.0. This seeks to attract more people to be interested in Solana. Yakovenko says the device will allow users to store and manage their digital assets themselves.
“Since the founding of Bitcoin, in 2008, there has been a dream of getting a billion people to self-secure using cryptocurrency, and the self-secure part is very important because it is really the foundation of cryptocurrency: not your keys, not your coins. You really have to have your private keys and it’s very difficult to do this and there’s a lot of skepticism for the whole space. Can we ever make it? Can we ever get it? Personally, I cannot imagine living in a world where cryptocurrency has a billion users and your phone is not your physical wallet.”
He also added:
“Saga is the first device where crypto is really treated as a first class citizen on mobile and today without Saga the Web 3.0 user experience is still, I would say, pretty bad. Self-care is really complicated. Security is very, very difficult for mobile wallets and wallets in general and that means innovation and user experiences in those wallets are very slow.”
The device will arrive with a price of 1,000 dollars. It will feature 512GB of storage, dual rear cameras, a 6.67-inch OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display, and a fingerprint scanner. The co-founder also stated that the device will have built-in hardware that allows it to run some programs separately from the operating system, making it very secure.
“As soon as I started working on cryptography, my immediate thought was that the device in my hand, the computer that is the primary device for most people in the world, should be the most secure place to store your keys. I think the way to improve the Web 3.0 experience is through mobile and a very secure hardware device.”
Yakovenko stated
