Solana’s web3 phone is an ‘opportunity’ against Google and Apple, co-founder says • TechCrunch

It’s been nearly four months since tier-1 blockchain Solana announced its web3-focused smartphone Saga, and as the phone nears its official release date, the plan has changed.

“Our goal is not to sell 10 million units,” Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said on stage at Disrupt 2022. “We would be very happy with 25,000 to 50,000 units sold over the next year, that would be wonderful.”

While successfully launching a new phone isn’t easy — as we’ve seen with countless other companies’ efforts — Solana is looking to approach the launch differently, Yakovenko hinted.

This is a tool to attract developers, Yakovenko added. “This is a developer game.”

Before launching Solana, Yakovenko spent most of his professional career at Qualcomm and has helped other major tech companies like Facebook and Windows make mobile phones. It is worth noting a bunch of them that failed. But the main difference now is that it is not so capital-intensive, Yakovenko said.

“This is one of the moonshots,” Yakovenko said. “The reason we can do this is because it’s cheap enough to try. It’s not going to break the bank or anything like that.”

The phone market has matured to the point where teams can build a device quickly with small modifications to an Android so it can enable a web3 experience, Yakovenko noted. “The opportunity exists right now because we don’t need to get $10 million in sales. We can actually target a very small niche audience that is crypto-heavy web3 users.”

If there is a web3 distribution channel for mobile crypto developers, it could open up opportunities for them to build experiences outside of the laptop-centric digital asset ecosystem, Yakovenko said. Users don’t need to log into four different applications to make a crypto transaction, he joked. “Those are the flywheels we need for the next cycle.”

“Imagine you have 50,000 to 100,000 people shopping daily at Magic Eden,” Yakovenko said. “It’s a more lucrative distribution channel for developers than the app stores with hundreds of millions of users. For web3, all the money is in these small niche groups right now.”

Separately, the web3-focused phone will allow content creators and platforms to enable digital ownership rights for organizations and users alike – as opposed to handing over the 30% tax Apple and Google have for app sales.

The idea of ​​true digital ownership means that the digital objects must be treated as physical, and this is not something that Apple or Google are built around, Yakovenko said.

“They are built around a rent-seeking model where all the content is owned by the creator and you, the user, rent it. When you buy a video from Amazon, you don’t actually own it; everyone knows you don’t own it.”

So neither Google nor Apple really want to take on web3 because true ownership of digital assets disrupts their business models, Yakovenko said. “When you’re the content creator and you have an app in the iOS store, you can take the 30% fee and eat it and give it to Apple. Magic Eden can’t sell a $10,000 NFT for $13,000 on the iOS app, they can do not deal with taxes nor eat them because that will destroy the profits.”

“The opportunity is here right now,” Yakovenko said. “Both Google and Apple, I don’t know what needs to change internally for them to give up the 30% tax on apps. It’s just too good for them to give up over the next five years.”

So while the two mega-corporations continue to implement the 30% tax, a “wedge exists.”

Saga plans to implement digital asset products and services, allowing users to trade their cryptocurrency through the device, as opposed to a laptop browser. In addition to announcing Saga, it is also launching the Solana Mobile Stack, or SMS, which is a web3 layer for Solana built on the phone.

“Let’s say crypto actually grows from 10 million monthly active users to 100 million monthly active users in the next five years, I would think, as does the SMS stack or the phone itself,” Yakovenko said.

Then maybe Google or Apple could change their mind about the tax and would allow similar web3 experiences that Saga hopes to have.

“It would be a win,” Yakovenko said. “We would have won for everyone in crypto. That would have been amazing.”