Crypto Goes Mobile: Solana Puts Web3 in Your Pocket with Saga Announcement

A relatively polarizing L1 blockchain, Solana has focused on user experience and growing an ecosystem of sleek and easy-to-adopt protocols since its launch in 2020. Lower fees and faster transaction speeds made Solana DeFi a serious challenger to Ethereum. In late 2021, NFTs spurred a massive burst of users and developers as well as a rally in SOL. Low transaction and mint costs fostered a profile picture (PFP) ecosystem that today appears to be a mix between card trading and vintage watch collecting.

Solana’s Mobile Saga Begins

On June 23 during NFT NYC, Solana Labs, the parent company for the Solana blockchain, hosted an event where Solana founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, the former Qualcomm engineer, revealed its plans for a new smartphone. Together, the Saga phone and the Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) have the potential to create a Web3-based mobile ecosystem and payments rail.

While many have tried to dethrone the smartphone and VISA/Mastercard payment duopolies in the past, legacy corporations continue to control most of their respective industries. Today there are zero decentralized applications (dApps) accessible from Apple or Google’s app stores without going through a web browser or using a centralized wallet such as Coinbase. While trust must be given to the manufacturer of a smartphone, the ecosystems and technology that exist on top of these layers can be improved by taking a Web3 approach to trustlessness.

A Web3-driven phone incorporating native blockchain payments may be the obvious solution. Solana’s hands-on approach to the development of Saga likely ensures that the core values of transparency and decentralization are included at the physical level. Creating an open-source mobile ecosystem combined with a secure hardware wallet disguised as a class leading smartphone could transform Solana from alternative L1 blockchain to industry-leading mobile technology company. Like the many attempts before Solana, the risk of failure lies in execution.

The Mobile Landscape Today

As of 2021, 56% of all web traffic comes from a mobile device, up from only 6% in 2011. Mobile usage has taken the internet by storm and now represents the majority of global traffic. Other than some CeFi applications, however, the multi-trillion dollar Web3 world exists almost entirely on the desktop.