The team behind Solana is launching a new smartphone.
Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko announced yesterday in New York the launch of Sage, an Android phone built specifically with the Web3 concept in mind. The phone will enable access to a mobile store of decentralized applications (dApp) where users can download decentralized trading platforms and NFT marketplaces.
The dApp store will be launched without fees. The ultimate goal is to enable the Solana community to participate in the governance of the catalog.
Solana is one of the largest blockchains in crypto. Known for its high throughput (65,000 transactions per second compared to Ethereum’s 30) and very low fees, the protocol has faced criticism for its high levels of centralization and numerous outages.
The Saga phone will feature a 6.6-inch display, 512 GB of storage, and 12 GB of RAM. Although Solana Labs does not expect to ship the product before the first quarter of 2023, users can now pre-order it on the website for 100 USDC.
Other products to be featured on the device include the Solana SDK, which provides a framework for developers to publish and distribute their own mobile dApps, and a hardware-encoded Seed Vault where users can store their private keys.
The Solana Foundation will provide a fund of $10 million to help launch the new mobile ecosystem and encourage the growth of mobile dApps.
Markets did not react positively to the news, as Solana’s SOL token was trading at around $36.5 at the time of writing, a drop of 2 percent from the time of announcement.
