The Solana Labs co-founder teases the possibility of a third mobile device
Last month, Solana Saga’s flagship web3 mobile smartphone is now sold out. Last week, its subsidiary Solana Labs launched its second phone and received more than 40,000 pre-orders in less than a week. But the company isn’t slowing down anytime soon.
“After selling Saga, it seemed like there was an opportunity and the timing in the market was right,” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, said on TechCrunch. Chain Reaction Podcast. “Timing [for the new phone] It worked right around that moment.
Yakovenko hinted that if the second device is successful, a third phone will be launched at a later date. In other words, Web3-powered mobile phones are not a hot topic, but a potential growth category.
But Solana Mobile’s path to growth hasn’t been easy. The first Saga phone didn’t see much demand when it launched in mid-2023 at a price of $1,000. It quickly lowered the price to $599 in light of weak demand.
Saga’s fortunes improved after cryptocurrency users noticed that dog-focused memecoin BONK (dApp) provided Saga owners with 30 million free tokens, which were valued at roughly the same price as a phone at the time. Then the epic sold out quickly.
“I think crypto was going through a severe bear market, and the Solana ecosystem was feeling the worst of it,” Yakovenko said. “We were looking for more developers to get the launch going, I would say so [we were] Kind of in survival mode because through this abyss of despair, you just need to survive until something like a macro [turns the market] around.”