What Will the Saga Phone Do For Web3?

foreign [Music] gaming podcast where it is our mission to explore the business and future of video games we bring together the industry's brightest Builders investors and thinkers to keep a full sun current events dissect emerging Trends and games share Lessons Learned and have a great time this podcast is also part of novik's growing ecosystem which ranges from free and premium research to Consulting and advisory services for more information visit www.navic.com now let's jump into the episode hello and welcome to the navic gaming podcast I'm your host Nick ovori today we are once again talking about web3 and mobile as listeners well know we have done multiple episodes on this topic uh you know the subject of bringing web 3 to mobile and absolutely everyone who we've had on the show has and who's been involved in these efforts has found it very challenging and very difficult in

multiple ways there is of course 30 Apple and Google App Store tax there are there are stances on crypto which to put it mildly are a little bit unfriendly there are other positions on nfts and digital ownership which if implemented as they are demanding go completely against the ethos of web 3 decentralization and digital ownership and then of course is the Byzantine App Store review process which is especially tough for web3 apps in many cases it's hard and some cases impossible to be a developer and actually bring your vision your web 3 experience to a mobile audience at least through the traditional Avenues available to us and of course at the same time we all surely recognize that our mobile device is now the primary Gateway into our digital lives whether it be for payments or banking or gaming or any other number of use cases Mass market adoption of web 3 will not and cannot happen until mobile becomes a viable pathway for consumers to get into web 3. but what to do if the primary mobile Gatekeepers Apple and Google will

not or cannot open that gate for web3 well you can do what Solana has done and that is you can build your own phone Solana as we know is one of the top layer ones out there they have recently launched the Saga phone which is the world's first mobile device that treats web3 as a first class citizen these are their words the device was announced last summer with pre-orders starting around that time and then the device had public availability uh recently on May 8th of this year so just a couple of weeks ago as of the time of this recording and as a web 3 developer and as somebody who has struggled with the path to mobile and to the mass Market I wanted to learn more about how the Saga phone works what it does what it's intended to do and why Solana went down the path of building their own Hardware and so to tell us more about the sagraphone our guests on the Pod today is Laura Shen who runs marketing for Solana mobile Laura welcome to the pod thank you for having me Nico that was quite an intro still absolutely Authority we are going to go into all of

that um and we're going to start right away so let's get into the first question here and I think it would be helpful for our audience to kind of get a 30 000 foot aerial view of what the Saga phone is what it's intended to be uh why build a crypto first phone why does The Saga phone matter yeah you've had quite a few questions in there so let's start the from the the top so Saga like you said it was announced last summer and we um officially launched it in April but what Saga is it is a custom made it's built from ground up it's a premier uh Flagship quality Android device with built-in crypto functionality so there are two parts so it is a flagship device so we can talk about all the specs and all the um the services that you are already familiar with but I want to focus on the crypto side which is what we call the Solana mobile step

that's currently built onto the phone so what Solano mobile stack is it is our set of solutions and they're all software so software solutions to answer a lot of the questions or pain points that's currently existing in crypto and the reason we started with that is I don't know if uh you you or the audience of the Pod already know that Anatoli the founder of Solana worked um a long time and Qualcomm and when he was talking to some of the developers at breakpoint in 2021 a lot of them mentioned to him that one of their pain points was that exactly what you said they want to build for mobile but they don't have distribution channels and they have a hard time uh getting their apps into the dab store and that's why they're focusing on desktop they are kind of chained to desktop so and I totally

started thinking about what is the solution to help ease those problems so the answers are twofold one is the seatbelt which is a secure enclave and Hardware enabled a secure key storage on your phone so that solves a secure security and um and uh and safety uh challenge of uh interacting with keys on your phone and the other is we built something called the salon adapt store which is an alternative publishing platform for webstery and crypto applications that are building on blockchain so that's those are the two pieces that are consumer facing that makes up the the Solana mobile stack so that's what I meant by software um solutions to the uh Webster pain points so you asked why do we need to

build hardware and that is a very fair point uh and that's probably the one question that we get asked the most is why Solana has to build Hardware uh why can't you just build the salon on mobile stack and wait and hand it off to some OEM or some existing partners that to just integrate into their devices so two reasons one is when you are um we we like this quote saying basically saying if you are serious about building software you need to be building a hardware because all software are running all Hardware so we it was before my time but when the team was contemplating what is the best form factor to integrate the Solano mobile stack with we realized that we actually need to have our own phone and we have to integrate seamlessly this is

on a mobile stack and the hardware so that is why the team went down the hardware route and we were very lucky that we found a team um a partner called awesome o-s-o-m and they're a team with very very solid and long experiences building Hardware so we partnered with them and they were luckily already building a premier Hardware so that was kind of a partnership made in heaven so we worked with them to bring users a hardware device that's Premier quality Flagship quality seamlessly integrated integrated with a Solana mobile stack so that's what came about and the second reason we kind of had to go down this custom route is if you don't already have a proven product it's really hard to get the existing oems to work with you um so we decided to go down this road to prove that this is something that there is a product Market fit there's existing need and it solves pain points for users

for us to later on potentially get this technology onto all devices our long-term goal is that we should get at least a billion people self-custody we want a four people the benefit of self-custing and it's really hard for us to imagine that on your mobile phone the the one artifact I don't know about other people but the one artifact that I probably touch most in my daily life we can't imagine that this not being part of the solution so in short um we went down this route because we want to in our first iteration build that end to end best web3 experience that we can imagine and bring that to Market as our test Grant that's a great answer um I know I asked a lot of questions so you um you answered a lot of questions and I appreciate that so we're going to dig into a few pieces in there and just go a little bit deeper so that was a great overview of you know why Hardware um why the phone and what have you done

to to make it web3 friendly um and I'm going to dig into both of the the pieces there which I think are really important you touched on them but I want to go a little bit deeper and so the first one in the Solana mobile stack or SMS for short not short messaging service but still on a mobile stack um the first component there is the the seed Vault um which as I understand it is you know that's that's the piece of the phone that essentially turns your phone into a crypto Hardware wallet that securely stores your seed phrase um hopefully that's about the right understanding and then the second piece that that makes this a web 3 first device is the DAP store which I believe stands for decentralized App Store and that's your own web3 app store that Iran runs alongside the Google Play Store because you're it's an Android device um so it doesn't replace it but it runs alongside it so let's talk a little bit more about both of those components so let's start with the seed Vault um what is the problem that that you said it's a security piece but tell our listeners more about what is it actually doing how is it solving uh the security

problem how do I know as a user that my seed phrase is secure and actually I can trust the device uh to to store it securely and then we'll talk about the DAP store next but let's start with that component because that's really that's really the key to self-custody is correct that's it that's the absolute the whole ball game right there correct and that is why it absolutely has to be a piece of Hardware because that piece of technology is written onto the chip so let me probably um step back one second to talk about why we wanted to do this Hardware backed seed security seat storage so if you think about before seedfold there are essentially two large camps of um uh crypto wallets so either have your very secure Hardware wallet or you have a hot wallet that is a software wallet

right there's like nothing in between so let's take a look at both um so the hardware wallet it's very secure we all know we trust them but the user experience is very difficult if you want to interact with a hardware wallet you essentially have to pull out your computer uh plug in your your Hardware wallet or you pair it with your phones through Bluetooth and half of the time that does not necessarily work and then you have to click the little buttons on your Hardware wallet and then uh click um click uh approve and then it's just a somewhat silly user experience that you have to be oh yeah clicking those two buttons like constantly right um so we all know if anyone who has used a hardware wallet um knows it's not a good user experience but um we trade off user experiencer for the Safety and Security so that's on the hardware wallet side and then on this

software Hardware wall uh hot wall aside uh they're really convenient they're sitting on your phone um there are a application that sits on top the operating system but because it is software it does not bypass the operating system so it does have some secure vulnerability that we've seen that people sometimes get their wallets drained we've seen a couple um wallet issues so there there's a inherent um risk that's built into a hot where a hot um uh hot wallet that's backed by software only so that's the your spec that's your choices and there's like nothing in between right and what the problem we're trying to solve is how do we get the convenience of a hot wallet but also a four people as close to the um Hardware wallet level of security as

possible and that is we will put those two together and the solution is a sepal so what the sea vault is it is um so your keys are actually um securely derived and also stored in the on the chip we take advantage of this thing called a secure Enclave it's part of the chip um that's a basically a separate operating small operating system that's sitting us apart from the Android's operating system that um that keeps your uh that stores your keys so what what that does it is it kind of creates a separation from the Android operating system so whenever you're actually inside the uh seat Vault the operating system in this case Android cannot get access to any of your input or interactions with siebel so the

example I always like to get a give is if you're in your receipt board and you try to take a screenshot there is something on the screen but you actually it will show up just completely blank because operating system cannot read what's on receivable and also disguises all of your um your keyboard stroke inputs so the operating system cannot get get access to that so it is separated on a operating system level and it's pretty similar the technology behind it is pretty similar to what a ledger would use it's a secure enclave and it's actually nothing net new in terms of chip technology it's just like no other company has done it at a large scale to actually use that part of the chip to secure your your private keys and we work that we built that onto the chip that we use for Saga

so that is Westie Vault it's basically hardware-backed security for your private keys and now you can take it with you and the other thing I wanted to talk about so we talked about Solana mobile stack being C Vault and the app store right so those are the two pieces that are consumer facing then there's actually a third piece that we don't really talk to Consumers about but I think it's worth mentioning here which is uh um the mobile wallet adapter we call mwa so this is a piece of tool that's really only relevant for developers so what that thing does what what mobile wallet adapter does it is essentially SDK that a wallet developer can use to connect with the seed bolt and then um so then any wallet can actually access default for a transaction so the

um the private key is not stored in the hot wallet but in the seat fold but any wallet that's integrated with um mobile wall adapter okay as the sieval for a transaction signature so that's one side and the other side of Mobile Wallet adapter is actually the dab side so they have another set of SDK that they can integrate to and but and by doing that what that does is you know currently if it's um a web app each app will have to integrate with a single wallet one by one right and it's usually through deep link however if they integrated with Mobile Wallet adapter they only have to do that once and then they get access to all the mobile wallets or wallets that are integrated with Mobile Wallet adapter so it gives the wallets and the dabs the piece of not having to

um store the private keys but also gives both sides the easiness of just connecting ones and then um boom they're actually compatible with all the different wallets so that's um that's the App Store a mobile wallet adapter uh so obviously a lot of thought has gone into this to create the experience as seamlessly as possible you know all the things that we know and Hate About web3 You know the the the lack of ease of use um you know having to whip out that Hardware wallet all those things tell me a little bit about uh how does this actually translate into the user experience right you've talked a lot about the security piece of the seed Vault and you know with these these technology components that that clearly have a lot of thought behind them but how do they actually translate into a seamless clinging user experience like walk me through a whatever use case you want to use for how this actually translates to a user coming in and

having a much better experience than they currently have with web3 yeah that's a good question and um the the simplest one is a simple transaction that I always like to use as example it's swapping let's take uh Jupiter as an example so for example before um Mobile Wallet adapter and Saga what you would need to do to um swap any token on Jupiter is you would either go to their if you're on desktop you go to their website you connect your uh your plugin and then you do it on their website but in that use case you have to do it on your desktop and then if you want to do it on mobile where you essentially would have to do is you would go into Phantom and then go into their embedded browser tab into Jupiter get onto their website connect your wallet then choose the the um the

transaction right so there's sometimes you would choose the swap transaction and sometimes if you're using a wallet uh you're using a wallet that's not Phantom or something else you might hit dead ends or you have to connect your wallet multiple times sometimes things just go wrong and we've all ran to those dead ends in the past however Jupiter they are a dab on the dab store so you can just download the the Jupiter app and then connect your wallet once and then ask for that um and then put in the swap that you want to do and then essentially you kit you click confirm and then Jupiter will ask um whatever wallet you're connected with and the wallet will ask the sequel for a transaction signature and the seat will will ask for your fingerprint and ask you to confirm that you do indeed want to do this transaction and then we'll spit out a confirmed transaction

signature and then we'll feed back through the wallet to Jupiter and Jupiter will do the transaction uh swapping on the back end and they were done and the whole thing can be done in five to six seconds um so that is a kind of user experience and the process that we're trying to simplify here uh we you don't have to go into a specific app to access this through essentially a mobile web and then go through all the pain of doing it on mobile web and then have to Trend uh sometimes you have to confirm in different ways or it doesn't go through we want to just eliminate eliminate all of that confusion and pain points and make it just how you would in web 2 interact with the app and then a lot of times we we use biometric confirmation so on in this case you can actually just use your fingerprint to sign for your transaction so that's huge uh you know when when that works

um that would be a huge reduction in friction uh for for the consumer use case so I absolutely 100 I'm incredibly supportive of what you guys are doing there but um the the other side of this is obviously you need those apps or daps um for consumers to be interacting with so that's a perfect segue to kind of it's almost like two two sides of a coin right you've got the security side and the kind of the the reduction of the friction that we all know and hate from from web3 but then you also you need developers to be building for these these use cases right otherwise you're still stuck with a mobile web experience um without these actual you know native apps so tell me a little bit more about how have you envisioned the DAP store um what are the and I won't give you too many questions here I'm famous for giving lots of questions um so uh what what are your kind what are your goals with adapt store uh what have you launched with today and then kind of what's your vision for the future uh what the DAP store would be if

fully realized to its kind of end State yeah so I think let's start with why we built the DAP store I think um the DAP store really has two groups of audience was the developers and ones the users and I think there are two the benefits for the two groups of audience are slightly different so let's start with a developers so on the developer side we're all very familiar that the web 2 the current two large web 2 application stores or just inherently not compatible with a web3 business models the simplest one is Magic Eda right someone sells a nft on Magic Eden for let's say a thousand dollars magic eating cannot turn around and charge them 30 percent to give to the Apple App Store because they don't own the nft and

then the user is not going to give them another 30 to give to Apple so it just breaks down the the web 2 business models when it comes to Webster use cases so that's one so the the uh App Store tax is a big reason and the other one you already touched on a little bit in your intro which is they have just one very ambiguous um apps web3 app approval process we all saw that um a couple apps like uni swap had issues getting on the Apple Store um are really close friends um dialect they've every time they submit a new iteration of their app to the Apple Store they essentially just say fingers crossed hopefully nothing goes wrong and if something goes wrong or deal with it so it's just incredibly ambiguous what their

um Applications store policies are for Webster apps and then there are just certain things that they're straight up just not friendly like the 30 percent um anything anytime people want to buy something they want to take 30 and then that cannot work so for the developers they need a new way of Distributing their experiences and their apps so that is first thing and second thing is for users and um the primary reason we built the dab store for the users is the user experience so we already touched on this but uh right now users hit dead ends they have to pull out their computers or they have to um go into a mobile web browser to interact with their favorite apps um but our goal for the DAP store is for all of their favorite apps to be a standalone app in the adapt store so they can download it just interact with

it and um don't have to put too much mental bandwidth on it on it quite honestly you don't want to think about it you kind of just pick up your phone um mindlessly open up an app and look at some things right we don't think too much on our in our web 2 live about do I have to like on this one do I have to pull on my computer do I have to plan ahead for for this nft mint we do that in web3 in any other area in our life we just mindlessly do it our phone on our phone without a ton of planning so that is where we want to get to in terms of user experience on the DAP store so um so that's why we built the dab store and then you asked about where we want to get to for the adapt store so I I talked about this a little bit but why is user experience and three two is that we just want it to be a much better

um distribution channel for our um developers so once you have a dab store that doesn't charge fees right now we don't charge any fees except for the transaction fees on Solana and then you have a better a store was uh more clearer policy publishing policies and then you have a store that um is crypto friendly not only a sudden you uh developers can explore new business models with their um with their apps and they can establish direct um Financial relationship with their users now this guy is a limit because the intermediary is not there anymore and there is no um Gatekeepers trying to protect their walled Gardens so that's where we want to get long term is for our adapt store to be the best distribution machine for the the new um that builders

we're already seeing this happen a little bit so a lot of the current dabs that are coming to our adapt store are the existing Solana projects um kind of fitting their existing experiences onto a mobile app and that is kind of uh the first step we're thinking and then the next step is if you think back to like 2004-275 what mobile the web 2 Revolution was just happening a lot of new Builders new developers came in and looked at the phone and started thinking mobile first and this is kind of where we're seeing web 3 starting to take off there are a lot of Builders come in and start thinking okay now finally the mobile experience is unlocked for the phone what can I build because only a sudden they get access to all of these um sensors that are on the phone and you only get access to those sensors when

you're when your application so those are the camera the geolocation and for gaming specifically like the um the sensors that track the angles of the phone or the velocity of the phone so a lot of Gaming use cases can be unlocked and then you can actually tap into the on chain and crypto benefits of being a game on mobile so we are really excited to see this next phase of applications and games being developed and who have you launched with so far I understand you have a not a huge uh portfolio of daps on on the cyclophone yet obviously you're only two weeks old at least for the public but who have you launched with and uh uh you know what's what's coming next immediate next um so yes it's a huge catalog yet so on launch day

we had 14 applications for the 14 applications actually spent a pretty healthy range of categories so we had wallets we had default applications we had nft social and game one game on launch day so that was 14. um but what I always compare it to is when the first generation of iPhone came out they had 15 apps on the iPhone on day one so we're pretty on par with iPhone when it just came out so um and when I say the day one I came out is I use the day um April 13th when we actually launched the phone so on that day we have 14. and I'm happy to say that now we are a little over a month after launch we already have over 30 dabs on the on the salon at the App Store so this has the number has already doubled and we do have um quite a nice pipeline of dapps that

are still in the queue of being reviewed um one of our bottleneck is actually our speed of reviewing because we're a pretty small team so I am actually checking my dab store if not every day every other day trying to see what new apps actually came onto that App Store and I can try out so the if a month and we're already doubled and we have a lot of inbound interest from um Solana project wanting to build for mobile so I'm really really excited to see what's coming next um on the App Store um and you ask about immediately next what's coming right so um one thing I I think you would probably specifically be interested in the gaming side of things so right now we have one game on the DAP store which is um Alpha uh Alpha League race awfully gracing and then we actually have two

more uh daps that are two more games that are part of our welcome pack so one is genopets it's a game that got pretty big on Solana last year and also the other is uh honeyland I think they are going to be a live on the DAP store pretty soon so those are the two really soon imminent ones but we're also having conversations with a lot of gaming projects on um on whether they're already existing adjusting on other platforms or net new Solana gaming projects so the existing ones like aurori Step n we're having conversations with some and then there are some net new gaming Studios that are building on Solana and they're really interested in getting their phone onto the dab store so lots of things happening um but every week we just have net new applications that's being published onto the salon at the App Store and it's a

really exciting time to see this store kind of getting populated and each category just grows longer every week that's great to hear um and you know obviously you've also announced a I think it's a 10 million dollar fund um to help support third-party developers building for The Saga um you know obviously you want to Spur more tap developers to come to you and it sounds like you already have some inbound interest um what is this 10 million fund for what kinds of developers are you looking to fund with this um how much have you deployed if you're able to share any details yeah so great question show the 10 million dollar fund is actually a grant fund so it's not a investment fund per se so we just give the grants to the teams um that we do work with them on Milestones but it's not that we will take a stake in their company um so the type of company or projects that we first and foremost look to fund

are the ones that focus on um Dev tooling so we want to fund those projects that are build things that can be used by a wide variety of teams that can kind of raise all boats so if they're building tooling they're building SDK um they're building open source tools that can enable developers to build on top of the mobile ecosystem that's the ideal type of project that we want to back so we're dedicating These funds um to these developers first but we also understand that there's only so much tooling you can do and then most of the team are looking to build um direct to Consumer projects right so um a lot of the time we would fund teams that are one there are building um direct to Consumer projects but there are certain components of their project that can be used for other teams and we

would write a grant to a team like that to help them bring that part of their project to Market so the one the beauty food beauty of web3 is composability right so if some team already built something that can read for example SDK that's related to Solano mobile stack we don't want other teams to recreate this effort so we would write a check for that but also uh we we are now considering funding also teams that have proven product Market fit that can heavily leverage the mobile stack and to create unique Saga only experiences so we're also considering teams like that so um it has to be specific unique and specifically mobile and Saga only so um those teams will also now be considered but first and foremost we want to find those teams and kind of elevate um all boats raise all boats but in terms of how much we've deployed

that is a figure that we cannot um share at the moment but I can say that we still have a healthy figure left so if teams think that they might fit that description that I just give or they want to just chat with us to see if they qualify for the fund we're happy to connect awesome well that's great to hear um and actually for the sake of our listeners who many of them sure are interested uh can you share the we'll put it in the show notes can you share the the details of how to get in touch show uh for me I am Laura Shen very simply on um all the platforms Laura Shen on um Twitter Laura Shin on telegram so uh feel free to just reach out to me there um the best person to get in touch with his name is Mark Cavallo he leads our ecosystem growth so he's a person who actually reviews all their grants Pro

grants applications um and he's a kind of the first person that a lot of our projects talk to um whether it's wanting to build or whether they're looking for funding he's the right person I don't have his um contact info off the top of my head but I'm happy to send that to you later so you can put it in the show notes awesome all right we'll put those in the show notes um let's get back to gaming obviously we're we're the navic gaming podcast um and uh I want to just kind of dive a little bit deeper into uh you know what gaming means for The Saga uh both for for you as a as a company but then also for the consumer experience ultimately you know gaming is driving two-thirds of the the web 2 mobile app store revenues probably higher if you account for advertising and things like that and if you look at adjacent Technologies and uh it would not surprise me in the slightest um if that would also hold true in web 3 and of course Anatoly is a big fan of

game and he's said gaming is one of the big on-ramps uh or potential on-ramps for for you know the mass Market into into web 3 and I personally as a game developer happen to believe in that too so I I want to dig a little bit deeper one layer deeper at least to understand how you guys are thinking about gaming for The Saga um are you prioritizing it in any way uh is it more of a kind of wait and see who comes to you is it a case of tapping into the existing Solana gaming ecosystem versus bringing in new developers who might be able to tap into some of the the hardware components like you you were mentioning you know the the position of the screen and you know some of the things that you can't do on web uh certainly on mobile web very curious to hear your thoughts on uh any and all of what I just um presented to you there in that very long question yeah that's a great question so I am fully aligned was you there that gave me is probably one of the best on-ramps to anything mobile

um so we definitely think that gaming is going to be one of the biggest use cases and where a lot of the breakthroughs are gonna come from if we think back um last bull run it was step end that was one of the the biggest um onboarding um vehicles for Solana right people don't even realize they're they're interacting with a blockchain they just love the game so we're looking for those games that have just amazing gameplay um people are just not interacting with it necessarily because it's a blockchain game people are just you playing it because it's a great game and we're looking for games breakout games like that so we think that mobile and gaming are kind of a perfect match because game game sits they sit at this intersection of ownership and virtual economy and then they can actually uniquely utilize a lot of the things that blockchain and

blockchain gaming can afford them and then they can um so far we have have some games on the DAP store and then like the ones that I mentioned they're either imminently releasing on the App Store like honeyland which is a first and foremost very web screen native game or genopads who um have their own chain portion built on web but their game is more like a a raising game of your pet so we're looking for a lot of these Pro similar projects to utilize more of the on-chain portion and now that we have kind of solved the security and user experience part we want more of them more traditional mobile game designers to actually consider building for on-chain games or Webster games because they don't have to worry about creating new keys or new wallets for their users they can just do

what they do best which is build the game right so they don't have to worry about interacting with wallets because we have mobile wall adapter they don't have to worry about custody in their keys um they can just interact with the seat Vault we want them to come and tap into what web Siri does best is um self-custody real ownership of your assets and also build an economy that's on chain because right now um all the economy is kind of managed on the back end by the gaming publisher but now we're looking looking at a migration to economy that's more managed by the community so like I said we're looking for these breakout use cases and I'm really excited about those net new projects that we're seeing kind of starting to reach out to us um essentially we're hoping to find that Flappy Bird version for web 3. I think

that will be a a use case that will get most people excited about unchain games and in terms of Biz death so we are we already have incredibly strong uh gaming ecosystem and the Solana Foundation has a lot of um lots of connection with uh gaming ecosystem so we are um kind of riding on their success and we're currently talking to a lot of teams that are existing on um on Solana and trying to get them to onto our the App Store as a first step but we are definitely also exploring relationships and introductions with net new teams they're just starting to look at Webster gaming because some of these key pain points are now finally solved for them so that this all sounds great um but as a you know as a game developer obviously we want to go where the audience is right and you mentioned

step-end and they're actually in the news today I don't know if you saw um I was doing an episode with them soon where Apple seems to be loosening some of their NF T related rules and the big news today today is Monday May 22nd we're recording this um the big news today for steppen was that apparently Apple has approved uh some nft trading inside the app without having to you know link out and do the trading outside I don't know how I just saw the news literally before we started recording but that that is big news um and so I wanted to just ask you a little bit about this kind of the the juxtaposition between going after the crypto native early adopters and I know that you guys are on the record of saying like hey this is kind of your first step into this world this is your early adopter audience they are going to be crypto natives who care about a frictionless um web3 experience for what they're already doing probably right but then how do you go from there to the to the mass Market um and how do you then attract you know you need to get that flywheel going for game developers to come in and be

attracted to like oh wow the saxophone has hundreds of thousands millions of users um they're high value users they understand web3 or they're engaging with some way shape or form even if they don't know it necessarily um how do you go to that mass-market piece that's that's the big question I you know that's I'm sure the big question you guys have internally too which is you've built a great phone a thousand dollar Android device it has web 3 capabilities built in you have this crypto native audience that's definitely ready um to adopt this but how big is that audience and how do you go from there to the mass Market yeah that's a great question and we get asked that a lot is like who's a key audience of saga right like how do you sell it to mass Market the core Solana audience gets it they understand the pain point and now how do you kind of go from this one to a hundred or a thousand right so let me just start by saying what are long-term long long-term goal is and I already

kind of alluded to it which is we think self-custody is a right uh you don't want to download an app and you get some rewards on it and if the company goes out of business you lose everything that is not the ideal situation what we want is to afford the benefit of self-custody to at least a billion people so that is a long long term goal um but we can do it along so like you said it's ecosystem it's a flywheel and the flywheel is not going to grow from this big um like my my hand size to like huge in one day so we have to kind of iterate and do the right thing and let the flywheel start to turn so what I would like to say is we have the 30 000 foot view but we also have the right in front of us what is the right thing to do and what we should focus on doing so that is what Saga and our team choose to do and that's a first step so what

Saga is in our core audience are the crypto native users who want to get that better mobile experience and that is actually a deliberate choice that is by design for our team so we understand there is a pain point for these people and we want to solve this pain point for these people and we want to do it right by our audience and already current audience is the crypto native people who want to self-custody so the trajectory if I were to have a crystal ball right now is the mobile adoption um for crypto use cases will grow with the crypto audience and the crypto users and it's kind of a flywheel so the more crypto users there are there are more people who understand the benefit of self-custody and it will start turning and it's like a snowball but we are at

the point that we we are doing a essentially a proof of concept is we need to prove that um there are people who want the seat Vault a secure element um that's custarding their key on their phone so they can use it on the go and so far the early signs we're getting is people are overwhelmingly positive about having this secure um key custody on their phone so that's one part and the second part is we are again showing a lot of people wanting to natively interact with their applications just on the phone um people are saying it's this is the beginning this is early but they are happy to see that the App Store are getting populated so how we will we so we are starting that flywheel that training wheel to get more and more people understand the problem and now we right we get the solutions

um designed for them so we are actually the next step for us is to go on a listening journey of our users of our early adopters to understand what they liked about the phone what they think can be improved about the phone and then that way we actually um make sure we design the right product for the problems that we're trying to solve so we're now going to grow from a crypto Focus product to a mass-market product overnight and we will get there by making sure that every step of the way we make the right decisions so if I were to say I know exactly what are the right steps to get there for mass mass adoption the entire crypto industry would have already been there but I think what we can do is to make sure that the next two three four steps we're making the right decisions will show the value propositions of web 3 and

then improve the user experience or at the same time then the um the flywheel will start training but we have a 10 10 000 foot View and then we have the next day next week next month's view of what are the right decisions we need to make sure that we make to get us there eventually yeah that makes total sense yeah for the flywheel to start working you know it doesn't happen overnight you know you're not going to attract uh all the game developers in the world overnight unless you have a lot of users and you're not going to get the users unless you have you know killer use cases and you've got to nail that thing that makes you special compared to any other phone out there and for right now that seems like that's the you know it's the SMS right that's a lot of mobile stack um that that sets you apart so I totally buy that um it kind of leads me to the question uh you know it's early still obviously but you have been in pre- uh order uh you've been available for pre-order for for a while now for about a year um are you sharing how many devices have

you sold I have a couple of data points that um are out there I think there was an interview with one of your colleagues Stephen labor I think he went on the record of saying uh High single digits of thousands and I know that Anatoly is on the record from about a year ago um as saying that he'd be happy if you are able to ship tens of thousands of units in the first year um how many have you sold if you're sharing that information and um you know how does that compare to your expectations yeah so we've been asked this uh quite a few times we're not currently sharing the exact numbers of how many were sold and there are dashboards out there trying to track ourselves but the thing is we have um we are our storefront is on Shopify but we also take both um credit card and on-chain payment so so far now the dashboards that I saw are actually accurate but uh labor is correct Stephen labor is correct that we're in the thousands right now um but we are very well on track to the goal that Anatoly had set for us um but what I would say is

um we like you said we opened our public sales on May 8th but we've been in pre-order since um last June and then we opened up for pre-orders to complete their orders on the day that we release a phone which is April 13th and between April 13th and May 8th we actually sold out of the inventory that we had so we had a very strong demand out of the group of people who showed early interest in the phone and we actually had to um put the phone on back water for some regions of the world because we just didn't have enough units um to sell to them and some people got slightly upset that their phones were not um not getting shipped out right away because we were on back order so so far we've got very good um responses from the corestelana audience they understand um the value proposition of the phone

and then now we're getting a lot of feedback from people so we are trying to make sure that um we are iterating our product for this core group of audience and then in terms of public order uh we have gotten a lot of people kind of getting interested about the phone for various reasons so um here I want to talk about something um that we did which is very different is that any other application store out there has ever done um so for for the two larger application stores you kind of just go in there download your app um whatever you're looking for and then you kind of just start using the app for the salon adapt store we introduced something called a Saga Genesis token so that this this is a soul bound device specific token that you claim so you meant a token while you are setting up your um dap store and this showbound

token what it does it is a becomes an on-chain identifier for any app developer to identify you as a saga user so this token cannot be transferred and cannot be burned by the user they have to contact us to actually burn the token so what this token becomes it will long term form the rewards platform for Saga and Saga users so um out of the box we have something called a welcome pack so they will get a 20 usdc from Solana mobile and then 0.01 soul from us to cover a couple transactions so they're not starting from a cold wallet a problem we see is every time someone sets up a wallet you have to get a tiny bit of a soul in there to get you going so we're trying to solve that problem for you but the more interesting part what I've I'm seeing is a lot of dap Builders are really interested in that program so for

example dialect as you once you set up your dap store and you download dialect you can actually set up your dialect handle and then claim a saga specific sticker pack so only people who have a saga and a Saga Genesis token can claim that sticker pack so that is one example but people are we're getting a lot of interest from different app Builders wanting to offer um rewards for our users and we're seeing this becoming a different business model for App Store and for how app Builders and app developers can um establish relationships with their users or potential users so if you you see that some app is actually offering a reward it gives you an incentive to download that app claim their reward and try out their app so this is something

that we don't see any other App Store doing so Saga we're trying we like to call it the phone that keeps giving so this is the first mobile product that you get rewarded just by using your phone and the difference between a traditional web 2 app is if you do get rewarded the rewards tend to just stay in that app it's not transferable you don't actually self-custody it right but for example the dialect stickers once you claim that sticker pack the stickers actually show up in your wallet app so you become a true owner of those stickers so that is what we are trying to build differently for our adapt store and then um to Circle back on something that I said earlier um people are getting really excited about different things so one of the things that we're doing is a um a exclusive meant for klano so cleno for the people who are not as familiar it's a blue chip an ft project on Solana and there are some of the best

storytellers and IP builders in all of web3 so we're partnering with them to offer Saga users a exclusive mint for a 2000 piece collection of clay now and it's a limited edition and the only Saga users are eligible to Mint and the main price is um zero so it's free for Saga users so people are different people people from different parts of the ecosystem are getting excited because of the new use cases and new type of potential that um a mobile form factor a mobile platform can give people yeah for those that don't know cleanups are I believe you're referring to the cleanasaurs um they are very very cute um very cuddly looking dinosaurs uh clay clay motion or made out of clay uh animated uh really Stand Out Among nfts especially if you're you know familiar with your your air quotes traditional 10 000 pfp type projects uh the clay knows

for short or cleanasaurs are very cute so put a little plug-in for those guys they're doing a great job of building that that IP out um Okay so we've for obvious reasons because you are Solana after all um and you have the Solana blockchain um totally understand uh starting with Solana but obviously it is just for the Solana ecosystem at this moment in time The Saga phone so you you need to be in Seoul uh in order to actually get the full benefit the full value that you're talking about here and I had a question about cross chain you know I I obviously you would love for Solana to be the outright win here in the the blockchain wars of course of course you would but in a world where that doesn't happen and we're in a multi-chain world where we have you know ethereum and we've got other layer twos uh like polygon um you know we've got Solana it's its own layer one they're all different um but you know in the future I personally foresee uh you know a

multi-chain future um and so I'm just curious to hear how are you thinking about that with the Saga phone uh are you even entertaining the notion that there would be a cross chain component to The Saga is that even technically possible um tell me your thoughts on what does it mean if we are living in a multi-chain world cross-chain world what does The Saga need to be in order to deliver the full value to somebody who is like you know yeah I know Solana but my nfts are on Heath or you know I my use case is the best use case for me is polygon for whatever reason right um Every Chain has their own different flavor and it has its own different capabilities and is better for certain things and not as good for other things so my thoughts are sorry your thoughts on on multi-chain future and how does a saga fit into that yeah I appreciate that point of view and um so I think there are two parts of that answer one is immediate and one is more long-term

so the immediate answer is um for any um if dab that's existing today they can submit their dab as long as it's a APK on Android to our adapt store and as long as they comply with our adapt store policy I don't see a reason why would not they would not be able to get listed on our adapt store like for example if metamask wants to submit to the salon at App Store and be listed there they can do it um however what that what gets a little more complex but technically definitely possible is the hardware wallet part the hardware on security um key storage part because for you to actually be able to access the seed Vault um the secure element the OEM the full manufacturer actually has to code it onto the chip so you have to work with a

hardware manufacturer to actually make that a possibility of reality however the long-term answer and I've said this a couple of times and we really seriously mean it is we want people to have the benefit of self-custody so Solana Saga is a first step in that direction and if we do believing a future that self-custody is a right we want to see every phone in the world to come with that capability because if every phone in the world can't have the capability or at least a lot of the smartphones have the capability of recognizing your Biometrics as the way to unlock your phone the capability of offering a self-custody solution at the chip level at the hardware level is there so the long-term goal is for as many phones as possible in the world to offer a secure

element um key custody on the phone um so Solana mobile Saga is the first step however with that said um so technically it's definitely possible you just have to have a OEM actually help you work that onto the chip level however we are like you said we are Solana and we're Solana Maxis here and we want to see Solana succeed and we the first step is we want to make the experience right for our Solana core Solana users um so that's why we're very focused on making the Solana blockchain experience uh as good as possible but also there's a part that I have not talked about so far is we've spoke at Lens about why mobile is right for um web3 but we never talked about why Solana is a right place for a mobile application for a mobile platform and I

think it really has a lot to do with the the characteristics of the Solana blockchain because um so so Solano blockchain it's fast it's low cost and it's very very scalable right so if you are on your phone and I'm holding myself out here you're not going to be staring at your phone for five minutes waiting for a transaction to clear we all know how we use our phone we Bounce Around different apps We're Not Gonna stare at one application put it down to wait for it to clear um on Solana it clears within a couple seconds so that is one of the reasons why we think Solana is a right chain and two is it's just very low cost to do the trend actions um so we have this first party application called minty fresh and that's an application that a lot of people kind of blew a lot of people's mind so what it does it's actually not that complicated you take a photo on your phone and you meant it right within that application that app to to unchang

and the cost is 0.012 soul so that's a very low cost nft mint experience um so the low-cost nature of Solana actually affords a better mobile experience the second reason and the third is real quick is just the scalability for example we recently launched um stay compression and one of the first use cases of this compressed nft is um in dialect as the stickers so you can't and they don't charge anyone for minting those stickers but if those stickers are at a really high cost minting costs they cannot send out thousands or tens of thousands and I think they just crossed a million this past week so like they any applications cannot afford to do that at a mass scale so that's why we think Solana as a blockchain is actually ripe for mobile

adoption and a good mobile experience so yes um long term we want um the the uh the mobile experience to be multi-chain but here we're at Solana and Solana mobile we're very very focused on making the Solana mobile experience as good as possible yeah and that's totally fair um you know it was you got to start somewhere and if you are Solana if you are the blockchain you should probably start with Solana um and not with ethereum or Bitcoin so no that also just really think the user experience right is the Solana user experience actually is very well fitted for a mobile platform yeah for for quick High transaction volume cheap um so okay absolutely well um we are just about out of time here so Laura um I just want to say thank you very much for coming on the Pod uh today um I know you've been very very busy with the launch so I appreciate you

taking some time talking to the uh the novik gaming podcast listeners and uh really enjoyed hearing genuinely enjoyed hearing about the Saga what it can do where you guys want to take it um and you know Hardware is hard as the the famous saying goes but you know fortune favors the bold and I wish you the best of luck and continued launch um scaling up the business both on the hardware side and the software side thank you thank you for having me all right and also a big thank you to all of our listeners we'll be back next week as always with more interviews more insights and more analysis from the weird and wonderful world of web3 and gaming more broadly so until next time friends stay crypto curious and feel free to send me questions guest recommendations and comments my email is Nico navic dot Co and you can find me on Twitter at nicothefin DMS are open if you enjoyed today's episode whether on YouTube or your favorite podcast app make sure to like subscribe comment or

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