Solana Labs co-founder teases chance of third cell machine
Final month, Solana Cell’s flagship web3 smartphone, the Saga, offered out. Final week the Solana Labs’ subsidiary launched its second cellphone and obtained over 40,000 preorders in lower than every week. However the firm is just not slowing down anytime quickly.
“After Saga offered out, it felt like there’s a chance and the timing out there was proper,” Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, stated on crypto-news’s Chain Response podcast. “The timing [for the new phone] labored out proper round that second.”
And if the second machine is a hit, there will likely be a 3rd cellphone launched afterward, Yakovenko hinted. Web3 cellphones are usually not a punchline, in different phrases, however a possible progress class.
However Solana Cell’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 value to $599 in mild of weak demand.
Saga’s fortunes improved after crypto customers observed the dog-centric memecoin BONK’s decentralized app (dApp) supplied Saga homeowners with 30 million of its tokens at no cost, which was valued across the identical value because the cellphone on the time. The Saga then offered out rapidly.
“I feel crypto was going by way of a tough bear market, and the Solana ecosystem was feeling the worst of it,” Yakovenko stated. “We had been searching for extra devs to go to launch and I might say [we were] sort of in survival mode as a result of throughout that chasm of despair you simply must survive till one thing like macro [turns the market] round.”
