Solana team unveils Saga, a Web3-focused smartphone

Solana Labs has unveiled the Saga smartphone, built on the Android operating system. The device is expected to go on sale in early 2023 at a price of $1,000.

Saga is a customised version of the smartphone from OSOM with built-in cryptocurrency-wallet features. The device will come preinstalled with a toolkit called Solana Mobile Stack (SMS), enabling the creation of decentralized applications for mobile devices.

The smartphone will allow storing digital assets and NFTs, signing transactions, and paying for purchases via Solana Pay. The device will support Solana-based apps and will have its own dapp store.

Solana Labs said it intends to develop the Saga ecosystem with partners such as NFT marketplace Magic Eden, DeFi platform Orca, and the non-custodial wallet Phantom.

According to the site, the device features a 6.67-inch OLED display, 12 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage. The smartphone is built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 mobile platform.

The SMS toolkit supports the Seed Vault protocol for securely storing private keys. The latter places them in a dedicated enclave separated from the wallet, apps and the OS. This mechanism is used in Saga.

Solana Labs explained that SMS provides developers with a set of libraries and an API, enabling the creation of mobile decentralized applications for Android-powered devices.

Solana Mobile Stack is already available for download on GitHub.

Those wishing to purchase Saga can place a pre-order for 100 USDC — this amount will be deducted from the total price of the smartphone. In the initial rollout, the device will be released in the United States, Canada, the EU and the United Kingdom.

Earlier in June 2022, Solana Ventures and the Solana Foundation established a $100 million fund to support Web3 startups in South Korea.

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