This year has seen some huge moves in Web3, from heavy investment by major organizations to fascinating innovation. Solana’s recent announcement of their move for mobile with a Web3 phone may seem vaguely interesting but largely innocuous to the sector as a whole, but I believe many are missing the importance of this play.
The importance of the mobile format has risen to unimaginable heights. With the advent of social media, many Web2 platforms had to adjust to the new, growing source of traffic. Likewise, gaming is in an unusual position too. Gamers — PC and console alike — uniformly turn their noses up at mobile gamers as lesser beings, but the mobile gaming market has been surging from strength to strength. In fact, revenue generated by mobile games is more than PC and console combined.
With blockchain gaming so new and with player numbers still comparatively low, the mobile market represents an almost unparalleled opportunity. This is why we recently published the article Why Mobile Is an Untapped Market for Play-to-Earn. The early stages of blockchain gaming and mobile are a perfect fit.
However, the future is bright for mobile as it experiences superb year-on-year growth in the face of console and PC decline. This extends to beyond gaming, of course, and that is why it is no wonder that Solana Labs launched its subsidiary, Solana Mobile, and announced their flagship mobile phone with Solana integrated.
Almost 7 billion people use smartphones around the world and more than 100 million people hold digital assets – and both of those numbers will continue to grow … Saga sets a new standard for the web3 experience on mobile.
— Anatoly Yakovenko, Co-Founder of Solana
The Saga will feature a 6.67″ OLED screen, 12 GB RAM, 512 GB storage, and Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 Mobile Platform, with unspecified improved security for private keys and seed phrases. The phone comes with developers in mind, however, and they will receive priority on early devices and the Solana Mobile Stack SDK for ease of Web3 app development.
The stroke of genius I believe many have overlooked is not a built-in wallet or Web3 functionality, but instead, pending the power of the SDK, the path of least resistance for blockchain game developers shooting at mobile devices. Onboarding developers has been a pain point for many ecosystems and this might not only overcome that hurdle, but do so by also gambling on the most prevalent platform for the future.
