ETH Rival Solana (SOL) Launches Crypto-Friendly Phone “Saga”
The company that made Solana (SOL), which is competing with Ethereum (ETH), says that its best phone, Saga, is now available and will start selling within a month.
Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, said at the Saga Launch Event in San Francisco on Thursday that the company will start sending out the crypto-friendly smartphone to people who pre-ordered it on April 20 and will start selling it to the general public on May 8.
“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 made the Android-based smartphone with Web 3.0 in order to get more people interested in the cryptosphere. Yakovenko says that the device will let people store and keep track of their own digital goods.
“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 very hard to do. 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 has 512 GB of storage, a 6.67-inch OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screen, a fingerprint reader, and two back camera lenses. Yakovenko also says that the phone has hardware that lets some software run separately from the operating system. This makes the phone very safe.
“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.”
