Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko responded to underwhelming gross sales of his agency’s smartphone in an interview with Unchained Crypto on Dec 5.
The agency unveiled its Android smartphone, Saga, in June 2022 and launched the gadget in 2023. The corporate aimed to offer customers with a tool tailor-made to web3. Particularly, it promised an app retailer separate from Google and Apple’s app shops with a purpose to bypass these corporations’ restrictive cryptocurrency insurance policies.
Within the interview, host Laura Shin highlighted Saga’s “underwhelming” gross sales, noting that solely 2,500 telephones have been bought.
Regardless of the low gross sales, Yakovenko described optimistic suggestions, stating:
“We labored with a a 3rd occasion, proper … [it was] superior to construct this gadget, and it’s I believe a extremely, actually good gadget. We obtained actually good critiques from the folks that obtained it. The Solana tremendous followers, they liked it.”
Yakovenko added that Solana believed it wanted to achieve 25,000 to 50,000 gross sales earlier than different builders may really feel compelled to ship functions.
Future unclear
On whether or not Solana will proceed to push ahead with cell gadgets, Yakovenko implied that there’s much less want for such merchandise. He famous that, since mid-2022, progressive net apps have diminished the necessity for devoted gadgets and apps.
Relating to future Solana gadgets, he mentioned:
“… We’d have to actually give it some thought and determine [whether there is] a spot for nearly like a wise pockets, a less expensive model that someone who’s an iPhone consumer would use as a secondary gadget … however we haven’t seen a ton of sign [as to] whether or not that’s a compelling sufficient sort of factor to to promote 50,000 items of.”
Shin additionally commented on an alleged vulnerability in Saga reported by the safety agency CertiK in November. Yakovenko denied that there was any vulnerability, explaining that the safety agency rooted the telephone and displayed a Bitcoin pockets that had been hacked. He implied this discovering was partly irrelevant as a result of the Solana stack “doesn’t help Bitcoin.”
