The company behind the Ethereum (ETH) challenger Solana (SOL) says its flagship phone Saga is now available and will start shipping within the month.
During the Saga Launch Event in San Francisco on Thursday, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says the tech firm will start rolling out the crypto-friendly smartphone to those who pre-ordered on April 20th and will debut the public sale on May 8th.
“Today is a really big day for us. We’ve done what no one has thought was possible. We built an entire mobile software stack and a flagship phone all optimized to bring crypto to the mobile era and now you get to experience what crypto should be like on a mobile device.”
Solana Labs built the Android-based Web 3.0-enabled smartphone with the aim of bringing more people into the cryptosphere. Yakovenko says the device will allow people to store and manage their digital assets themselves.
“Since the founding of Bitcoin, since 2008, there’s been this dream to get a billion people to self-custody using crypto and the self-custody piece is really important because that’s really the foundation of crypto – not your keys, not your coins. You really actually have to have your private keys and it’s very challenging to do this and there’s a lot of skepticism for the entire space. Can we actually ever accomplish that? Can we ever get there? I personally can’t imagine living in a world where crypto has a billion users and your phone is not your hardware wallet.
The Saga is the first device where crypto is actually treated as a first-class citizen in mobile and today without Saga, the user experience of Web 3.0 is still, I would say, pretty bad. Self-custody is really complicated. Security is really, really hard for mobile wallets and for wallets in general and that means that innovation and user experiences in those wallets move very slowly.”
The $1000 device features 512 GB of storage, two back camera lenses, a 6.67-inch OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display and a fingerprint scanner. Yakovenko says the phone also uses hardware that allows some software to be run separately from the operating system keeping it highly secure.
“As soon as I started working in crypto, my immediate thought was like the device that I hold in my hand, the computer that’s the primary device for most people in the world, that should be the actual most secure place to store your keys.
I believe that the way to make the Web 3.0 experience better is through mobile and through a very secure hardware device.”
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