Solana Phone “Saga” — the future of Web3? Solana blockchain and “Saga” Overview

Solana had announced that they will be launching their own mobile phone “Saga”, paving the way for Web 3 adoption in the modern society.

Published in

Coinmonks

7 min readJul 6, 2022

Solana Blockchain & "Saga" Overview· What is Solana?
  ∘ Why Proof of History (PoH) is fast
· Solana DApps and Ecosystem
· Solana’s First Android Flagship Phone — Saga
· Solana Mobile Stack (SMS)
· Why SMS is better than Apple / Google
· What it means for Crypto and Solana
· Why I am Opting out
  ∘ 1. Frequent breakdown of Solana Network
  ∘ 2. Under-development of DApps & Solana Ecosystem
· Resources

What is Solana?

Solana is a blockchain known to be the “Ethereum Killer”. It aims to provide faster transaction speed, lower fees and a more scalable solution in the Crypto space. It uses Proof-of-Stake (PoS) with integration of Proof-of-History (PoH) in the attempt to increase overall performance of existing blockchains. It was created along with its native cryptocurrency SOL in 2017 by Anatoly Yakovenko. SOL price had s 12,000% increase in 2021 with the integration of DApps and NFT platforms on Solana blockchain. SOL is the native cryptocurrency and utility token of Solana blockchain, mainly used for paying gas fees on the network and staking (7–8% APY) given the PoS structure. With the PoH innovation, they have a blocktime of 400 millisecond with 710,000 upper limit Transaction per second (TPS). Which is huge compared to the Ethereum 10 seconds blocktime and Visa’s 23,666 TPS.

Why Proof of History (PoH) is fast

PoH is essentially PoS with the integration of “Time”. Solana requires validators to solve Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) repeatedly and hash blocks with their respective time of occurrence. Timestamps are added to blocks to indicate the sequence of events occurring on the blockchain, so that validators can identify block sequence without communicating to other nodes. On Ethereum, nodes must agree on the sequence of a block before submitting it, which is time consuming. While Solana uses PoH to reduce communications between nodes on “Time”, thus having a higher TPS than Ethereum.

Find the in-depth description of PoH here in Solana’s whitepaper

Solana DApps and Ecosystem

The Ecosystem of Solana is diverse and complete, from DeFi lending platforms and DEXes, to NFT marketplaces and play-to-earn GameFi. Including Serum, Orca, Solend, Raydium and StepN which are well known in the space. You can access these DApps after creating a Phantom Wallet and buying some $SOL for transaction fees.

Solana has a TVL of $2.5 billion [4/7/2022] which has been cut down significantly due to the recent risk-on asset sell-off. You can read about the reasons behind the crash and price predictions for 2022 in my other Medium stories.

Note: SPL tokens represent assets on the Solana blockchain, similar to ERC-20 or ERC-721 tokens on Ethereum

Solana’s main TVL and transactions are from DeFi and NFTs, transactions had been growing since Opensea announced an integration on Solana blockchain. Their TVL and Transaction growth continues as more DApps continue to build on the blockchain, and their ecosystem is expanding massively across different areas in Web 3.

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Solana’s First Android Flagship Phone — Saga

Saga (previously known as Osom OV1) and Solana Mobile Stacks (SMS) was announced on 23 June, planning to help Crypto “Go Mobile”. This phone will be integrating the Solana Mobile Stack to support Web 3 applications and wallets to allow real life use cases of Web 3 projects in DeFi and GameFi. Essentially, Saga is a normal smart phone with Web 3 integration.

Solana Saga Specifications:

Display: 6.67-inch OLED
Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 (4nm)
Memory: 12GB RAM, 512GB storage
Rear Camera: Dual (50MP IMX766 primary, 12MP IMX373 ultrawide)
Front Camera: 16MP
Battery: 4100mAh, Wireless charging

Solana Mobile Stack (SMS)

SMS is a mobile software platform for Web 3 application, it enables access to native Android Web 3 applications, facilitating integrations of private key and Web 3 wallets into smart phones. It is a framework for Android that provides the environment for developers to build mobile experiences around wallets and Decentralized Applications (DApps), along with solutions to private key management.

The initial features of the SMS SDK includes the following

Mobile Wallet Adapter — for connecting wallet apps
Seed Vault — stores private key & seed phrases in secure environment
Solana Pay — decentralized payment system
Solana DApp store — add distribution system for DApps

solana mobile stack — Solana Mobile Stack

Why SMS is better than Apple / Google

Apple and Google are the major players in the Mobile Phone sector, 97% of mobile web browsing in UK is from Apple and Google. Their “duopoly” is crazy in our world, allowing them to charge 15–30% marketplace fees. Apple’s App Store grossed more than $64 billion in 2020 (based on a 30% commission rate), while Google Play increased by 24% in 2021 to $47.9 billion ( 15% for the first $1 million of earnings each year when enrolled and 30% subsequently).

Google Play and App Store vs Solana DApp Store

Solana is now offering 0% take rate for decentralised applications, this would be huge for developers working on mobile apps. Given the Web3 mobile market is new, developers could reap massive profits by gaining market shares in the field. Apart from that, Solana has allocated $500 million seed fund and $10 million ecosystem grant fund to incentivise mobile builders and developers.

Users usually switch operating systems (OS) based on prices, user experience, and features. Given Apple’s sticky customer base, we can expect a larger shift from normal Android users to SMS than from Apple to SMS.

What it means for Crypto and Solana

Mobile phones and devices account for 68% of the world’s web traffic, if Solana were to attract some of these traffic to Web 3, it would be a huge thing for Crypto. This could potentially be beneficial to other Web 3 infrastructures such as Arweave, Filecoin, Livepeer, Helium, Audius and others.

With the crypto application infrastructure cycle proposed by USV, Solana Mobile Stack and “Crypto go mobile” idea could be the main theme of the next bull market.

The global mobile gaming content market was worth 131.2 billion USD in 2021 and is projected to reach 173.4 billion USD in 2026. According to Messari reports, more than 170 mobile games have $100 million annual revenue in 2021, which is partly convertible to Web 3 GameFi through Solana “Saga” and SMS. The SMS will create massive tailwinds for Solana user and developer acquisition and $SOL price.

If we were to see Solana’s Saga gain adoption, we would be one step forward to our goal of decentralization.

Why I am Opting out

On first glance, Saga is a must-have item for Crypto enthusiasts and Solana fans and I should be buying it right away. But this time I’m gonna pass, here’s why…

1. Frequent breakdown of Solana Network

Solana had experience multiple system outage since its creation. With its low fees and fast transaction fees, Denial of Service (DoS) attacks with bots can easily paralyse the system. Last time this happened for 17 hours, locking up $11 billion of users’ money on chain. It is not a comfortable spot for me to put my life savings/spendings on the line with the Solana blockchain. I would wait until the Solana team really fix this issue, then I may start reconsidering to use “Saga”.

2. Under-development of DApps & Solana Ecosystem

I don’t see any gains for user at this point in time to use the SMS, given the lack of DApps and daily life implementation of DeFi and crypto payment systems. You won’t be able to use your SOL or USDC in 99% of the stores, then what is the purpose of having Solana Pay if no stores are accepting Crypto payment. It’s nice to see that we are one step closer to decentralisation, but Saga is a more long term play. As we see increasing adoption and growth in Crypto/Web3, it is likely that Solana and Saga will grow at a logarithmic scale.

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Go see my story on what happened to Celsius and how Alameda Research played a role in it. : https://medium.com/@tvstsang/celsius-network-crash-what-happened-to-celsius-network-adc363387c21