Solana Labs co-founder teases chance of third cell gadget
Final month, Solana Cellular’s flagship web3 smartphone, the Saga, bought out. Final week the Solana Labs’ subsidiary launched its second cellphone and received over 40,000 preorders in lower than every week. However the firm will not be slowing down anytime quickly.
“After Saga bought out, it felt like there’s a chance and the timing out there was proper,” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, mentioned on TechCrunch’s Chain Response podcast. “The timing [for the new phone] labored out proper round that second.”
And if the second gadget is successful, there will probably be a 3rd cellphone launched afterward, Yakovenko hinted. Web3 cellphones aren’t a punchline, in different phrases, however a possible progress class.
However Solana Cellular’s street to progress wasn’t a simple one. Its first Saga handset didn’t see a lot demand when it launched mid-2023 at $1,000. It quickly lowered the worth to $599 in gentle of weak demand.
Saga’s fortunes improved after crypto customers seen the dog-centric memecoin BONK’s decentralized app (dApp) offered Saga homeowners with 30 million of its tokens free of charge, which was valued across the identical worth because the cellphone on the time. The Saga then bought out shortly.
“I believe crypto was going by way of a tough bear market, and the Solana ecosystem was feeling the worst of it,” Yakovenko mentioned. “We have been on the lookout for extra devs to go to launch and I’d say [we were] sort of in survival mode as a result of throughout that chasm of despair you simply have to survive till one thing like macro [turns the market] round.”
