SINGAPORE –– Solana Labs’s phone designing subsidiary is slated to ship its second crypto phone in 2025, Solana Mobile announced at the Token 2049 conference on Thursday.
Called Seeker, the upcoming handheld will be a major hardware improvement over Solana’s first mobile phone, with better battery, a stronger camera and a lighter design than the Saga, said Emmet Hollyer, who runs Solana Labs’ phonemaking project.
It will also incorporate improvements specific to crypto. Units will ship with a specialty-built crypto wallet that ties into the device’s partitioned Seed Vault key storage. Users of the wallet will be able to execute crypto transactions more seamlessly on Seeker than they could on Saga, Hollyer said.
Seeker represents Solana’s second big bet on a product line that at one time was approaching the precipice of failure. Its predecessor Saga was bailed out from piddling sales figures last year when crypto traders realized they could buy units to collect token airdrops worth more than the device itself.
Saga’s turabout into a sellout rejuvenated Solana Labs’ interest in pushing crypto deeper into mobile devices by creating custom hardware and software. Saga and now Seeker are built on Android-enabled devices that have their own app store for crypto developers in the Solana ecosystem.
Anticipation of the new model has been intense. Solana committed to building a second phone after securing over 100,000 in pre-orders in early 2024. The capital infusion and buyer commitments helped Solana Mobile access better supply chain deals than was possible with the first edition, Hollyer said.
One of the Saga’s big appeals as a smartphone alternative to iPhone and off-the-shelf androids was its debut of an independent app store, called the dapp store. Developers could build highly-tailored crypto apps and then launch it through the dapp store without incurring the high fees of Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
Seeker’s Dapp store improves on its predecessor with better discoverability of different apps, Hollyer said. That variance is possible only because of a surge in interest among builders. While a handful of teams built apps for Solana’s first phone, “tons of teams are reaching out” for guidance on building for Seeker, according to Hollyer.
“When we announced this phone and people saw that we had presold 100,000 of them, ecosystem teams have been chomping at the bit.”
The store will also better track toke rewards users are accruing, he said. Hollyer anticipates Seeker will have plenty of payday potential from the many teams planning to issue rewards to owners of the phone.
Seeker will be more permissive about third-party apps gaining access to its “digital exhaust” like GPS data, cellular data and compute that device manufacturers usually lock down, said Hollyer.
This comes with tradeoffs. Usually, devices treat this internal intelvery carefully for privacy and other concerns. But all that data is valuable, especially for crypto projects building decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN).
Solana Mobile consulted with user-bootstrapped cellular network Helium and other Solana DePIN teams to figure out what sensor data they might want to harness in Seeker. Otherwise forgettable “digital exhaust” data points might help a team better track the growth and performance of their physical infrastructure, for example.
“We think that those are going to be unbelievable opportunities for our users to earn and engage and interact,” Hollyer said.