Solana’s Saga smartphone will ship on April 20

Solana will begin shipping its web-3-focused smartphone Saga on April 20 to anyone who pre-ordered it and to everyone else after May 8, the network’s developers announced during the official launch of the device Thursday. .

The $1,000 blockchain-based smartphone comes with a 6.67-inch OLED display and 512 GB of storage. It also features a fingerprint unlock that can be used to authenticate and sign crypto transactions.

While the phone has all the features of conventional smartphones, it has some Web 3 integrations, including a built-in mobile wallet adapter and a seed vault that can import seed phrases from other crypto wallets or create new ones.

The phone also has a Solana DApp Store where users can find apps for web3 platforms such as wallets, DeFi apps, NFT apps, social apps and the DApp workspace. It also has a physical paper card with seedphrase to access the crypto wallet.

According to Solana co-founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, these features make the phone as close to a hardware wallet as possible and provide the best mobile app experiences for Web-3 users. He said the following:

“Something magical happens when you combine both things. The Web 3 applications in the App Store all share the same seed wallet identity. You no longer have this 50 page menu to choose which wallet to connect to which app. All this is automatically recognized by the operating system. All of this is seamless and that’s a great experience for users and this is what crypto should look like.”

Steven Laver, the technical lead at Solana Mobile, further noted that the phone’s infrastructure connects DApps to wallets, similar to how MetaMask has a connect button on its desktop client.

When the phone is released to the public in the next two weeks, Solana hopes to add more applications to the DApp store. Saga owners will also receive $20 in USDC and 0.01 SOL as part of the DApp store welcome package, which includes an airdrop of Saga genesis token that grants access to rewards offered by DApps.

Yakovenko announced the launch of Saga last June, noting that he thought “it’s time for crypto to go mobile.” At the end, he noted that they hoped to make crypto products and services more accessible to users by offering them through a phone instead of the traditional way of accessing crypto platforms through computers.