Solana Mobile is planning to launch a second crypto smartphone. The successor to Saga is expected to be more affordable, despite having new hardware.
Solana Mobile plans to launch a second crypto smartphone
According to what is reported, it seems that Solana Mobile plans to launch a second crypto smartphone.
The successor of the first Saga phone will have more or less the same basic features such as a crypto-wallet, customized Android software, and a “dApp store” for cryptocurrency applications.
According to the words of a person familiar with the matter, the difference between the two smartphones will be that the second one coming will have a lower launch price and new hardware.
From what emerges, it seems that this plan to launch a second Solana Mobile is also a strategy. In fact, it could reduce what has become a very hot secondary market for the extremely limited supply of existing Saga smartphones.
And indeed, at the time of printing, a factory-sealed Saga device was collecting bids at $3,200 on eBay, five times more than the price five weeks ago.
Solana Mobile is the second crypto smartphone to remedy Saga
The goal of Solana Mobile, with the launch of a second crypto smartphone, is precisely to ride the unlikely success of its first smartphone Saga.
In practice, Saga had been launched in the summer of 2022, and distributed to the public in the first quarter of 2023. Specifically, Saga was sold starting from May 8, 2023 at the price of $1000 base.
The presentation had been made on Solana Mobile Stack as a toolkit for building seamless Web3 mobile experiences. Not only that, the Solana Mobile Stack is that open-source encryption layer built on Android that already included:
- Integrated Seed Vault in secure hardware
- Easy and platform-level transaction signing
- SolanaPay for Android
- The Store for decentralized applications (dApps).
In August 2023, Solana Mobile decided to cut Saga’s price by 40%, bringing it down to $599.
According to what the platform claims, the reason for the decrease in the selling price is to promote the adoption of Web3 mobile technology, improving the experience of the emerging Solana mobile community.
However, some analysts have hypothesized that the decision was made due to a probable decrease in enthusiasm.
How does the 2024 SOL start?
At the time of writing, SOL is worth $96.64, up 30% from last month. In reality, the price of SOL experienced a surge during the holiday season, going from $68 to $123, before stabilizing at the current price.
Just before the Christmas holidays, it must be said that the crypto-meme on Solana, BONK, had recorded an exaggerated price spike, which led it to reach its all-time high of $0.000024 in mid-December 2023. However, after that moment, BONK experienced a -70% dump, reaching the current price of $0.000013.
Anyway, SOL started with a price of $100 on New Year’s Day 2024, and it ranked fifth in the overall crypto ranking with a total market cap, at the time of writing, of almost $42 billion.