• Solana’s Steven Laver brings BlackBerry and Apple experience to the Chapter 2 laptop.
• Cryptocurrencies need to break free from the desktop if they want to grow, Solana team says.
• Solana is undertaking a Herculean task by diving into the manufacturing sector.

At first glance, Steven Laver does not seem like the person who would lead the boldest project in the cryptocurrency field.

The 43-year-old software engineer worked on the BlackBerry in the 2000s and then helped develop the Windows Phone app store at Microsoft.

He didn’t even work in the cryptocurrency industry until early 2022.

However, Laver is now the lead software engineer in Solana Labs’ attempt to change the crypto experience by putting blockchain capabilities in the palm of your hand.

“This has such great energy that the sky is the limit,” Laver said DL News in a rare interview. “It seems crazy, but at the same time it seems like the end result.”

This achievement is Solana’s second mobile phone.

It’s called Chapter 2 and is scheduled for release in early 2025. Pre-orders for the new device cost $500, and Solana says it has more than 130,000 pre-orders. That’s $65 million in pre-orders.

Bold bet

It is a courageous bet for the blockchain network born four years ago. Mobile telephony, one of the most regulated industries on the planet, is dominated by Apple and Samsung.

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Because Solana, a DeFi supporter with symbolic value 82 billion dollars and one of the hottest brands in the cryptocurrency industry, making such a big bet on hardware production?

“It’s a very, very difficult question,” said Chris Lewis, an independent telecommunications analyst with more than 40 years of industry experience. DL News.

The answer: control.

Chapter 2 represents Solana’s attempt to liberate cryptocurrencies from the desktop and the dominance of Apple and Google’s app platforms.

Silicon Valley powers have long harassed crypto-friendly mobile developers by charging huge fees or banning apps from their platforms.

In a world where investing, purchasing, banking and everything else happens on a smartphone, cryptocurrencies are still struggling to gain a foothold.

“We’re used to everyone bringing a laptop to dinner, so they never miss a delivery or complaint,” said Emmett Hollyer, business development and operations manager at Solana Labs DL News.

The madness of memecoins

Solana, of course, is not the first crypto firm to try to open up the hold of incumbents.

Over the past decade, more than a dozen custom crypto phones have hit the market. But none have gained significant traction.

Last year, Solana tried it with the Android-based Solana Saga. Customers have collected about 20,000 of the $600 phones, well short of the 50,000-unit goal.

In comparison, Apple shipped more than 80 million iPhones only in the fourth quarter.

Graphics by Darren Joseph/ DL News

But Saga discovered what has emerged as a not-so-secret weapon in the development of crypto phones: memecoin.

The device was delivered with a dog-themed memecoin called BONK. Somehow, collectors fell in love with BONK and its price increased 560% last December.

As investors rushed to pick up the phone in secondary markets, Hollyer and his team realized they had stumbled upon a new type of marketing strategy.

Now they are producing a sequel.

“Consumer hardware is hard, but phones are an order of magnitude beyond that.”

—Steven Laver, Solana

While the company declined to disclose how much money it is investing in Chapter 2, it’s not a small amount.

“Consumer hardware, in general, is hard, but phones are an order of magnitude beyond that,” Laver said. “Building a phone is as much an operational, logistical and compliance exercise as it is the underlying technology.”

There was a time when BlackBerry dominated the smartphone market and Steven Laver was there. Photo credit: Shutterstock

The project comes as Solana rides a wave of momentum. Her native token, SOL, increased by 78% this year compared to a 64% increase in the price of Ethereum, according to CoinGecko.

With a market value of $81 billion, Solana is the fifth largest digital asset.

Solana has also largely conquered the red-hot memecoin market. Activity was so high in March that the net generated more commissions of the heavy Ethereum: no small task.

Persistent questions

However, doubts remain about whether to launch a mobile phone.

“What are you carrying?” Lewis said. “Is it just a question of safety? Is it a new interface? Is this the latest chip power? I think those are the questions you have, and then being able to build the brand and launch it to market.

And, perhaps most importantly, is there really a demand for a crypto phone?

Deep roots

Solana’s project has deep roots in the Silicon Valley mobile scene.

It was born out of a little-known but well-regarded project called Essential, founded by Andy Rubin, the mind behind Android at Google.

After Essential closed in 2020, some staff members launched another mobile company called OSOM. A couple of years later, he developed the OV1 phone, which, with a body made of ceramic and titanium, became a cult.

If you look closely, it looks a lot like the Solana Saga. This is because they are almost the same thing. Solana Labs and OSOM announced a Association in June 2022.

Solana CEO Anatoly Yakovenko appeared at an event in Indonesia in May with a mobile phone bearing the Solana logo. Photo credit: Muhammad Alimaki/Shutterstock

In February 2022, Laver landed in Solana right in the middle of Saga’s development.

Born in Canada, Laver studied computer engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario (the same alma mater as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin).

Iconic products

Laver was present at the creation of numerous iconic products. He worked on a whole range of BlackBerries, produced by the Canadian company Research in Motion, which introduced portable email and SMS into business life.

At Microsoft, Laver worked on what would become the Windows Phone app store. He has also dabbled in other consumer electronics products such as smart watch maker Fitbit, as well as stints at Apple and Google.

“There are a lot of low- and mid-budget Android phones that look like the dashboard of a budget car from the late 1990s.”

—Steven Laver, Solana Labs

From the start, Laver said the Saga was designed to have a satisfying weight in the hand and an elegant matte finish.

“There are a lot of low- and mid-budget Android phones that look like the dashboard of a budget car from the late 1990s,” Laver said.

Solana’s device was designed with three features not found on regular phones.

The first one was called Seed Vault.

This stores the seed phrases that users use to send and receive cryptocurrencies. Saga’s security is somewhere between an Internet-connected crypto wallet like Phantom or MetaMask and a vault-like Ledger, Laver said.

It’s not meant to hold millions of dollars in cryptocurrency, but you could buy a few cocktails with it.

Challenging Apple and Google

Solana Mobile Stack allows mobile app developers to build crypto apps for your phone. And the Solana dApp Store provides projects with a marketplace for their work.

It’s designed to be a final run at Apple’s App Store, which it has taken below Some of the largest encryption apps in the industry, perhaps most especially MetaMask in October. He was subsequently reinstated.

In-app purchases on Apple’s app store are also subject to a whopping 30% fee.

As for Google’s Play Store, it relaxed its cryptocurrency policy last summer. But this, too, generally comes at a cost developer fees between 15% and 30%.

Laver says the Solana Labs team will let cryptocurrencies be cryptocurrencies.

“We have a much lighter hand with our politics,” he said. “We’re doing our best to get out of the way.”

Profit center

Solana Labs does not charge any fees, except for the costs of publishing the app’s metadata on the Solana blockchain.

“This is not a profit center for us,” Laver said.

The platform already includes NFT marketplace Magic Eden and decentralized exchange Jupiter.

“We need to find a way to give builders a reasonable path to distribution.”

— Emmett Hollyer, Solana Labs

Hollyer hopes this will put pressure on Silicon Valley to take a more enlightened approach to cryptocurrencies.

“Hopefully, Google and Apple will come to their senses and see what might be possible if they relaxed some of their pricing structures and some of their restrictive policies,” he said. “Until then, we need to find a way to offer manufacturers a reasonable path to distribution.”

Solana recently recorded her 100th dapp.

“We’re just starting to get to this point where developers are starting to see the value in making a phone like the Saga,” Laver said.

BONK goes boom

But the big change in the development of the Solana phone was BONK, the $2.1 Billion Meme Coin. Solana dropped $750 in BONK tokens with each phone.

When the token skyrocketed in December, 30 million BONK tokens were integrated directly into the Solana Saga phone. An arbitrage trade has emerged.

“With BONK I bought other memecoins,” said Lui Kohl, product manager of token vesting platform Streamflow DL News. “Overall, I think I turned $800 BONK into $4,000, so it was worth it monetarily.”

Thanks to BONK’s buzz, Hollyer said Solana was able to sell the rest of its phones in three days.

The episode also spurred anticipation for Chapter 2, which will be loaded with five memecoins. Kohl’s, for example, has already pre-ordered the phone.

Absorbing the lessons of crypto mobile marketing, Laver admitted he was “personally a little confused.”

“Blockchain is just a little different,” he said. “Ultimately putting a real physical product, that is well integrated, into people’s hands, that’s why I do it.”

Liam Kelly lives in Berlin DL News’ corresponding. Contact him at liam@dlnews.com.

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