Solana Labs is developing a Web3 Mobile Phone, called ‘Saga’

Solana Labs has announced that it will be releasing a new Android-based mobile phone, ‘Saga’, in 2023. The phone will feature speciality crypto wallet functions and the company’s Web3 development kit ‘Solana Mobile Stack’.

Solana Labs co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko released the news via the company’s website on Friday:

Users can look forward to the mobile device featuring a Web3 decentralised app store, through which Solana is offering attractive deals to developers to create apps for the platform. Solana will be taking no fees for what the apps earn on the App Store and has pledged that Solana Foundation will put $10 million towards the development of apps on the platform.

Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX cryptocurrency exchange, said that he was excited about this new development in the crypto space. “Everything is going mobile. In most countries, most of the access happens through mobile phones, but crypto mobile is behind the times,” he said. “The best solution for this is having the actual wallet built into your phone.”

Solana Labs’ Yakovenko said, “activity on Solana continues to climb, with monthly active fee payers at US$2.3 million in June, up 44% from December, and daily programs used on Solana at 1050 in June, up 169 per cent from December”.

Yakovenko said that he believes the world is ready for Web3 development, but “the app store polices of Google and Apple haven’t evolved for Web3…the software and hardware haven’t been natively integrated”.

He believes this is the way of the future saying “we live our lives on our mobile devices – except for Web3 because there hasn’t been a mobile-centric approach to private key management. The Solana Mobile Stack shows a new path forward on Solana that is open source, secure, optimized for Web3 and easy to use”.