The Solana Saga phone is the new Google ads…

TL; DR

• With 20,000 actively used Saga phones in the world, each with a tagged wallet address, the process might now look like this:

  1. Take the money you would normally spend on acquiring a new customer.

  2. Give that money to the customer in the form of crypto tokens once he or she has signed up/started using your product.

• No more Terms of Service violations, no more banned ad accounts, no more middlemen. Just a direct, mutually beneficial relationship between you and your users.

Full story

If you missed what happened to the Solana Saga phone over the holidays, here’s a quick recap:

20,000 Saga phones were made → fewer than 1,000 could be sold → the price was reduced from $1,000 to $499…

This price drop then meant it was free $BONK tokens that came with the phone essentially made it a free purchase.

Once that arbitrage was discovered, Saga phones sold out within days and soon began selling on eBay for more than $5,000.

And that’s why Solana Mobile has unveiled a cheaper $450 successor to the Saga, expected to launch in the first half of 2025.

The weird thing is that the Saga is (evidently) a pretty lackluster phone.

That made it easy for us to view its success as a hype-induced windfall (which it was).

But! The Solana Saga phone and similar products are MUCH more important than they first appear.

This is why…

If you want to create and launch a crypto product, the marketing side can get pretty grim.

As it stands now, your options are:

1. Try launching Google Ads before you find out that crypto ads are not allowed on the platform.

2. Try launching Facebook/Instagram ads before you find out that crypto ads are not allowed on the platform.

3. Try launching ads on the hellish landscape that is X/Twitter’s ad platform before you learn that people are buying anything something from a Twitter ad is like getting blood from a stone.

4. Advertise through crypto news publications (hello ), which can be effective but is much more of a manual/relationship-based process.

With 20,000 actively used Saga phones in the world, each with a tagged wallet address, the process might now look like this:

1. Take the money you would normally spend on acquiring a new customer.

2. Give that money to the customer in the form of crypto tokens once he or she has signed up/started using your product.

No more Terms of Service violations, no more banned ad accounts, no more middlemen.

Just a direct, mutually beneficial relationship between you and your users.

(Helluva concept!)