A crypto phone is good, actually
I didn't really understand it until I held one.
A couple of days ago my Solana Seeker came in, and it’s amazing. Looking from the sidelines, thinking, “I already have an iPhone that I love, why do I need another phone?”
I absorbed this stance from mostly perusing YouTube and seeing what was out there, first seeing the Saga phone a couple years back and now curious on how the Seeker was going to go.
This second adaptation of a crypto phone, with the Seeker, feels far more thought out. While the first Saga was mostly a rebadged “Osom” phone, the Seeker is fully a one of one build. I would say it largely feels like a Samsung A Series phone, which is Samsung’s best selling model and best selling Android phone globally.
If you were to ask a random person of the street to borrow their phone in any country, they would probably hand you some A series variant, and this is a good thing, because Solana decided to try to be as close to that experience as possible.
Native crypto mobile wallets are the closest thing possible to Apple Pay.
Apple Pay is more secure, and in my opinion easier to use, than Google Pay for this reason, because when utilizing Apple Pay, your card number never leaves the Secure Enclave, just like your seed phrases never leave the Seed Vault. Native crypto support on either Android or iOS is definitely not going to be driven by Google/Apple, it’ll only happen if Solana decides to push the cause, and they’ve successfully negotiated deals with Mediatek to possibly be integrated into 50% of smartphones globally.
Obviously Solana is the best choice to make this happen given their system architecture and daily user count, and if this model is proven, I believe more will come from it.
For useorni.xyz’s case, which is mostly my vision into bringing the 80% of transactions that happen offline online, I believe there are great opportunities to keep a Solana specific version that utilizes all benefits of the Seeker network going forward. I think for even further adoption, the Seeker needs to be under $300 for emerging markets. Currently, if bought through the Seeker token, you can get one for about $250, (*I am unaffiliated, as of publication date, with Solana Mobile*) which is a great deal if you’re okay with buying crypto through an exchange. I’m curious around the idea of a chain’s token being able to purchase a phone, it’s certainly interesting and we’ll see how it plays out.
The Seeker’s Seed Vault is secure element built on top of the phone’s Secure Element (SE) or Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which are isolated hardware zones in the processor that are physically separated from the main Android OS. The private keys generated are only stored in the secure enclave, which is actually no different than how Apple’s Face ID system works.
Interestingly, most laptops/computers today utilize TPM 2.0 (Trusted Platform Module) chips with similar isolated hardware, and TPM is required for Windows 11. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite laptops, (any ARM based laptop competing with Apple Silicon) also have Secure Processing Units built in. The one issue, is that in developing countries most laptops are HP/Dells/Lenovo’s, which typically use an x86 chip architecture, and because the security is handled by a separate chip, Solana’s vault implementation would need to work through the TPM layer, which would be doable but less secure.
I yap about computer chips, but alas, focusing on laptop payments isn’t the highest and best use case of time as the majority of the world uses mobile for everything, mobile accounted for 63.3% of web traffic vs 35% for desktop.
The number of people globally using crypto is anticipated to reaach 993.64m users by 2026, with the average revenue per user being $98.30. The Solana Seeker has sold 150k+ units globally, which is a solid start. A “guesstimation” of how many Samsung A series phones is around 240-280 million units each year, as the A series has historically constituted 70-75% of Samsung’s total shipments. The Seeker isn’t trying to outsell that, it’s trying to be the default phone for the 10-12%, and growing, of the world that already uses crypto.
I really love using the Seeker and have used it alongside my GrapheneOS equipped Pixel and iPhone, and seeing how easy the wallet integration works.
The Solana app store dev team is great at monitoring submissions! From my travels, the main goal is to focus near exclusively to bringing more of APAC and EMEA fully on crypto, and I’m happy to say that’s where the majority of Seeker’s have been sold.