Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) will be a new era of web3 with the first Android mobile platform. Solana is making strides to become the most usable blockchain in the world.
Solana is not only a cryptocurrency, it is also a platform for decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), games blockchain and the metaverse. Solana is now the second largest player in the NFT market and its performance in this key area has held up well, even in the face of the FTX market crash. In my view, Solana has been unfairly punished for her ties to FTX and its former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried. As soon as investors discovered that he had sponsored and funded Solana, the cryptocurrency went into freefall before finally stabilizing around the $10 level at the end of the year. In 2023, I think much of that stigma will fade and investors will be able to return to evaluating Solana based on its underlying fundamentals.
In 2022, the Solana community has focused on bringing cryptocurrencies into the real world. This decision was characterized when the Solana blockchain introduced two new protocols from Solana Labs, seeding an entire ecosystem with new projects. Like Solana Pay, which will be introduced in February, it has also enabled a frictionless, permissionless payment ecosystem. Now stores and brands are using it. It will continue to grow throughout the year.
But surely the most important is Solana Mobile Stack and Solana Mobile’s flagship device, Saga, announced in June, aimed at liberating web3 from desktop computers while increasing the usability of mobile applications. Saga also aimed to introduce a level of security close to the hardware wallet on mobile devices, thus combining security and simplicity.
The Solana ecosystem
One of the biggest shortcomings of cryptocurrencies, NFTs and Web3 in general is the lack of easy to use products. Crypto wallets are difficult to manage, security is difficult, and using decentralized applications is too difficult. Most cryptographic activity is done through crypto extensions. Navigator clunky on Chrome, which is a workaround at best. Even if you think that blockchain can revolutionize technology, improve privacy, decentralize finance, or have some other rationale, it won’t happen if regular people can’t actually use these products. I encourage you to listen the podcast with Ouriel Ohayon from ZenGo speaking very well on this topic 🙂
In June 2022, Mobile Solanaa subsidiary of Solana Labs, introduced Solana Mobile Stack, a software toolkit open-source for Android that enables native Web3 Android apps on Solana with the Seed Vault secure custody protocol that facilitates instant signing of transactions while keeping private keys separate from wallets, apps, and the Android OS.
- xNFT -> Decentralized executable NFTs (think App Store apps)
- sms -> Solana Mobile Stack: A mobile toolkit (SDK) for building mobile Web3 apps
- Saga -> a true cell phone solana with a cryptocurrency app store
Did you know that an extensive world tour known as the Solana Hacker House is also planned for 2023. In 2022, this tour reached 24 cities around the world and involved 12,000 developers. We can assume that this community will actively participate in the development of Solana mobile. Furthermore, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, said: “Developers have been prevented for too long from creating truly decentralized mobile apps because the existing gatekeeper model no longer works.”
The official launch of Solana Mobile, introducing the world’s first crypto phone. The initiative is an important part of Solana’s entry into Web3, which Solana says will be based on end-to-end mobile experiences. When integrated with Solana Pay (launched February 2022), Solana Mobile offers a very powerful value proposition. Today, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, live in a crypto wallet and have very limited day-to-day use unless the wallet owner logs into a website or app with the wallet. But it could be easier. Imagine if there was an app where you can just click on an NFT and go to the site that the NFT unblocks. This is what an xNFT does, and it’s a new application operating system created by Corala Web3 development startup through a product called Backpack.
If Solana is successful in user experience and security, it could be the game changer for mobile on web 3 🙂