Solana Unveils Details of Second Crypto Phone 'Seeker'

Seeker will launch in 2025.

Solana Labs' phone designing arm, Solana Mobile, announced at Token 2049 Thursday the upcoming launch of its second crypto phone, called Seeker, slated to ship in 2025.

Units will ship with a specialty-built crypto wallet that ties into the device's partitioned Seed Vault key storage. Users of the wallet will be able to execute crypto transactions more seamlessly on Seeker than they could on Saga, Hollyer said.

Solana committed to building a second phone after securing over 100,000 in pre-orders in early 2024. The capital infusion and buyer commitments helped Solana Mobile access better supply chain deals than was possible with the first edition, Hollyer said.

One of the Saga's big appeals as a smartphone alternative to iPhone and off-the-shelf androids was its debut of an independent app store, called the dapp store. Developers could build highly-tailored crypto apps and then launch it through the dapp store without incurring the high fees of Apple's App Store and Google Play.

Seeker's Dapp store improves on its predecessor with better discoverability of different apps, Hollyer said. That variance is possible only because of a surge in interest among builders. While a handful of teams built apps for Solana's first phone, "tons of teams are reaching out" for guidance on building for Seeker, according to Hollyer.

"When we announced this phone and people saw that we had presold 100,000 of them, ecosystem teams have been chomping at the bit."

The store will also better track toke rewards users are accruing, he said. Hollyer anticipates Seeker will have plenty of payday potential from the many teams planning to issue rewards to owners of the phone.

Seeker will be more permissive about third-party apps gaining access to its "digital exhaust" like GPS data, cellular data and compute that device manufacturers usually lock down, said Hollyer.

This comes with tradeoffs. Usually, devices treat this internal intel very carefully for privacy and other concerns. But all that data is valuable, especially for crypto projects building decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN).

Solana Mobile consulted with user-bootstrapped cellular network Helium and other Solana DePIN teams to figure out what sensor data they might want to harness in Seeker. Otherwise forgettable "digital exhaust" data points might help a team better track the growth and performance of their physical infrastructure, for example.

"We think that those are going to be unbelievable opportunities for our users to earn and engage and interact," Hollyer said.

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