97: Building web3 Mobile Phone | Andrew Watson, Senior Android Developer at Solana Mobile

Speaker A: Andrew, just last night I met a partner who was flexing his Solana Mobile Saga and in his phone he then showed me Converse, which was built with xmtbs. It was cool to see like both our products merged together over there. But let's talk about this Saga. It's so cool. I'm really curious, like, how hard is it to launch your own device today? How hard was it for you guys?

Speaker B: Well, I think it's very difficult. Uh, but thankfully we didn't have to do the hard parts. So that, that was the. That's the sort of awesome. One of the awesome parts of this whole endeavor is that um, uh, Anatoly, the CEO, obviously got uh, connected with Jason Keats, who's the CEO of Awesome and Awesome O S O M m. They're the, uh, there are a number of employees who were formerly with Essential, Andy, uh, Rubin's Android, uh, startup. And it's interesting because they had, they had the Essential Phone which was really good but had some sort of key limitations. Um, and you know, just didn't perform well in the market and stuff. And ultimately, uh, you know, many of the employees of awesome wanted to keep building phones. So they start. Jason Keats started this company. And you know, these are all like just hardware phone experts. Like Keats has like, done hardware, you know, development for like Apple products and all sorts of stuff. I mean these are, these, these guys just know what they're doing and they know the industry. So they had started putting together what ultimately became the Saga. And they were looking for, uh, a company to partner with. And uh, ultimately Anatoly and Jason Keats got connected. And uh, you know, Anatoly had this vision of bringing this Web3 phone. And that was the, that was the sort of vision and uh, partnership that awesome was looking for. I think, you know, in a lot of ways trying something new, something that hadn't been done before. Um, and so here we are. So all of the really, really hard stuff around, like, you know, just everything that is involved in putting together a phone, they are experts. They know what they're doing, they know how to, you know, move it through the process and all that sort of stuff. And so we just got to think about, uh, you, some sort of like key pieces of software which I think we can talk about, um, and other things and just sort of partnering with them on that.

Speaker A: That's really interesting. There's so many directions we can go right now. But I'm really curious, what's the timeline where this idea came about Solana Mobile and how did you guys get in touch with awesome. What happened over there?

Speaker B: Yes, so I believe. Well, so, you know, Anatoly, again, he is formerly at Qualcomm. Uh, he was formerly at Qualcomm, worked at Qualcomm for many years. And apparently, you know, he knew, uh, people who worked on, like, parts of the processor that were in the. The saga. Right. Um, and so what's interesting, too, is that I.

Speaker A: This.

Speaker B: This is an aside. I'll try not to talk about this for too long, but, like, even to this day, I don't really understand how Solana works and, like, how the whole proof of history. But what I do understand is that, like, you know, what Solana is trying to solve, what every blockchain is trying to solve is this idea of shared state, right? Like, uh, you need to have independent computers all, uh, agreeing on what is the state of the network. And when you. And making it public and open. And when you have that, you can build lots of cool things on top of it. Right? And so there's various ways to solve that problem. But what's interesting is that that problem has been solved by other industries. And one of those industries is the cell phone industry. Because, in effect, what you have with the cell phone networks is a global shared state. You know, like when you're on your phone talking and talking to a cell tower, uh, you need to be able to move between cell towers and to be able to, um, you know, have whatever state you're. You're connected to now, whatever state, you have to be able to be moved between these, you know, any number of cell towers. And then there's, you know, like, signals and signal loss and all sorts of stuff. So the best way that I understand Solana is that the light bulb m moment for Anatoly was that he realized that this idea of shared state had sort of been solved by the cellular industry. And then there was an analog that could be brought to a blockchain platform. I hope I'm not butchering it. If anybody understands Salana better than me, you know, who sees this, I hope they'll correct me, but that's how I understand it. So it's kind of, you know, in analog to the way cell towers work. Anyway, so all this is to say Anatoly has this in his mind. He knows people. You know, he knows the processors and stuff at Qualcomm. And it sounds like Breakpoint, uh, 2021. It was August or September, between August and November. I don't remember when in 2021. I was not There, um, that's sort of when this idea of like, well, hey, what if we, you know, build. Built a phone that was, um, you know, had, you know, Anatoly understood like the trust zone, the trusted, Trusted execution environment for like building secure key storage, stuff like that, secure seed storage. Um, and so, yeah, I think the idea sort of crystallized in Anatoly's head in, um, August or, you know, Breakpoint 2021, late 2021. And then I think things moved fairly quickly. Um, and, you know, within. I think by early 2022, the agreements and everything had been signed, uh, with, uh, awesome. And they were getting started, you know, awesome. We had the hardware like, it was mostly baked, um, and then they started building the team. And so our fearless leader, Steven Laver, who you may or may not know, uh, he is, he's the brains behind a large portion of what we have now in the Solana Stack. Solana Mobile stack. And uh, I joined in June 2022. So that was coming up on a year now. So, you know, pretty recent.

Speaker A: Definitely. Over here in Web3, a lot of things are happening just the past few years, but that is very interesting. I'm curious, like, what does having a device that is built from the ground up to serve Solana ecosystem, how does that change? What difference does that make in the ecosystem?

Speaker B: I mean, you know, the way we sort of have talked about, uh, the Saga and the SMS stack is that it's an opinion, it's a line in the sand. We're saying there are key pain points that exist when doing crypto on mobile. And anybody who's done crypto on mobile can understand. Right? It's a patchwork of apps and wallets with webviews and websites. And, you know, it's like everybody's kind of trying to figure these things out. And there are, there are key, uh, things that if we solve them, uh, you can now sort of start from that line in the sand and start building out this ecosystem, uh, and start building out an ecosystem. And you're seeing that because, you know, the Saga does not have huge reach today. Know, it just started shipping, um, but already people are super, super excited to, uh, you know, get their apps on our DAP Store. Even though there's like, not many users right now. We hope there will be a lot of users. Um, but, you know, it's just like, because, you know, it's this, it's this ecosystem, it's this platform. A lot of these problems have been solved and we can get into all the, you know, things that we're solving with it, um, or attempting to solve. Uh, but it's just like, I think what you're seeing is you're seeing people, you're seeing the industry was ready, our industry was ready for something like this. It was ready for a place that maybe we could call home and say, you know, we're going to, we're going to make these mobile apps available and they're going to be able to do this that maybe they couldn't. Because hanging over everybody's head is Google Play and the Apple App Store. Right. There are many, many apps that people would want to develop that would just not get approved by Apple. And I think there are maybe some more that would get approved by Google, but there are also many, many crypto apps that would not get approved by Google. So that specter of, like, I want to launch a mobile platform in crypto, but not even knowing if you can release it to users is hugely frustrating. You know, um, so this is, uh, you're seeing people just ready for a place they can call home, I think, is what I'm seeing.

Speaker A: I think so many things are coming together right now. Just last weekend I was talking to my friend who works at Microsoft, who always had this big tech life, and now he's like, hey, I want to try building something in AI right now. So, so he builds an app and then he submits to Apple Store and then Apple Store. These guys don't give him a clear definition, clear guidelines. They keep banning. They keep, like, taking a lot of time with no proper guidelines. And he's just mad.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: And now I'm like, hey, what do you think of crypto now? Now he's getting convinced. Now he's like, okay, now it makes a lot of sense. What do you guys mean when you say permissionless?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: What do you guys, uh, are talking about when you say there's no gatekeeping? So he understands that now. So that's one thing. But another thing I think, which is super important, that I'm also seeing right now, is the concept of patchwork. A lot of technologies are built on the Web2 fundamentals. And with Web3, you're just trying to somehow make it work. And then you were just doing so many workarounds, you're having performance issues and stuff like that. So we definitely need foundations built from the ground up with Web3 so that it's easier for people to deploy, it's easier for people to distribute.

Speaker B: Yes, 100%. I could talk a lot about all that.

Speaker A: Let's dive into That I would love to. I definitely want to dive more into the early story. Like let's say when you joined in June 2022, what was happening? Like, what were the uh, like exactly. What were the stories that you were hearing from the community, from the ecosystem?

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, um, boy, what I can tell you. So this is interesting. Like there is even to this day, and there was, I would say more so mid last year, uh, of severe lack, uh, of discussion around mobile in crypto. You know what I mean? Um, like, uh, you know, so I've been an Android app developer for 10 years. Um, and so, you know, my bias is towards Android apps and my bias is towards awesome on device experiences. Uh, but then, you know, I would come to crypto and it's like, it's just not even on the radar. People just aren't even talking about it, you know, they're talking about the next blockchain or whatever. Um, and you know, so you would find people sort of having uh, discussions like, oh, well, it'd be great if we could do this on what would be great if we could build these things. Um, but uh, you know, I just think the cold start problem was there, like, there's no, you know, formality, there's no guarantee you can get released. So, um, what, you know, we saw, what I was seeing in like June was like, it was almost like people were kind of waking up to this idea of like, uh, you know, mobile. It's like, you know, it's funny because like, you know, in 2017 I had a tweet conversation with um, then dapper, uh, labs during the Cryptopunks era. Uh, and like, you know, MetaMask was a very weird concept back then and that was just 2017. And um, you know, now it's just sort of like a given. Right? Like, you know, if you're in web three, you're going to have metamask. Um, and so like you kind of, it's amazing how quickly things can just become the way they are. So it's like, oh, well, you know, we have our mobile wallet and you just go into a web view and stuff like that and people just don't necessarily question it, you know, and it's like, well, no, what if we can do better? You know, and so I feel like what you found is that people, uh, we're kind of just starting to wake up to this idea and like being like, well, oh yeah, I mean like I'm on my phone all the time. Obviously I want my crypto apps there. You Know, what if we can, what if we actually can solve it? Um, and you know there were, there were teams that were wanting and thinking, wanting to, and thinking about mobile apps, but just kind of hadn't gotten started. So again it really was kind of the start like that gave people the motivation to start, uh, who otherwise wouldn't, you know. I think, I think maybe teams that um, were already building and we're already ready for this. Were some of like your games, you know, like there are, there are web3 games that are on the Play Store. Um, and they were already like, obviously we're going to do mobile.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Like they already knew, they already knew it, but it was the rest of the industry that kind of needed to play catch up.

Speaker A: Very interesting. Um, I'm actually now also curious that how does the entire manufacturing area work? Is everything outsourced to awesome? Is awesome just building the technology and manufacturing is taken care of someone else or are, ah, they doing everything end to end?

Speaker B: Uh, they're just facilitating all the, all the actual uh, you know, hardware production logistics. So they know how to make all that happen. Ultimately like, I think we are handling like the sales logistics. Like we have, you know, we have a team that's in charge of that. So I think awesome takes care of like everything, you know, through the factory experience and then ultimately it gets sort of sent to us, uh, if you will, to be shipped out to the people. So there's like, and stuff like that. We're not like, you know, running a warehouse or anything. We're working with like logistics company.

Speaker A: Makes sense. This is an idea that I was sharing with a lot of my friends which is basically that Apple today has built such a good device and Apple today has also figured out the entire logistics, the entire manufacturing capabilities. What if we can decentralize that? What if anyone who has an idea of a smartphone, they can tap into this ecosystem of manufacturing, uh, logistics and they can build their own. Um, and this is really cool that you guys have actually found the perfect player to be able to do that.

Speaker B: You know that's, that's a really interesting idea because like you know, phones, you know, you will, there are teams that are like building open source phones. Like Pine Phone for example, uh, is a really interesting project. There's a couple more that I've seen where it's like, you know, basically, you know, in a way like it seems like phones have kind of been commodified. Like, you know, you can just, there's just like off the shelf components that you can sort of like put together and stuff like that, but knowing the ins and outs of like actually moving it through the um, uh, like, you know, actual production process and stuff. That takes somebody with experience, someone like Jason Keats and his awesome team.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But, uh, you know, one of the things that people ask us a lot is like, well, is the seed vault on the Saga, which is the uh, you know, secure seed storage that runs in the trusted execution environment. They're like, is that going to be open sourced? And the answer we give is, unfortunately no. We are open sourcing as much as we can of the Solana Mobile stack. But you. We cannot open source the seed vault because there are sort of like NDA type arrangements that hardware manufacturers have to get with Qualcomm, uh, for example, like, you know, Qualcomm, it's licensed, um, you know, the processor's licensed. And I'm sure there's potentially or there is proprietary information about the processor that is published, um, when you end up working with such a processor. So we literally can't uh, publish the ah, seed Vault source code because of NDAs and things like that. But you could imagine a situation or a scenario where um, like a dao, for example, wanted to facilitate a phone and there are, I think, more like open chipsets out there, like, or less licensed chipsets, um, all winter, other things like, you know, you sort of see these like, budget phones, right? So you theoretically could imagine pulling together like a number of people who understand the industry and kind of know all these pieces who could facilitate building their own phone, you know, and then have it. Have the seed vault on it, you know, and open source that code because they're in control of the, you know, the licensing and stuff like that. Like, it's very possible. I remember I heard a podcast about like, you know, desire. Decentralized science definitely seems like something that could be done. It'd be cool to see, honestly.

Speaker A: Definitely. I think this is, this is a very interesting space. In Desire is Research Hub, I believe, or Nanohub. I think it's Research Hub. And they are doing something really cool where it's like, hey, earlier they're like scientists. Researchers had to go through such a long process just to get their paper out. And then to view that paper, to read that paper, everybody has to pay. Like there's a huge paywall for that. That doesn't make sense. That means that the information cannot be read, cannot be used by people down the road. And also the process of licensing that particular research, that is so difficult. So with research up there doing that, that hey, just put your ideas out there and also make licensing super easy so that we can actually. People have a really good incentive to throw their ideas out there because of the current system of patent and stuff. People are trying to not give their ideas out easily. They are trying to reserve it to themselves. So yeah, it just shifts the mindset.

Speaker B: Yeah, people have on a much simpler uh, level there's sort of been conversation, people have toyed around with the idea of like a case dao for uh, the saga. So like pulling together people who can like pool funds to build, you know, to put produce cases for the saga because you know like the cost barrier for cases is much, much lower. So like theoretically you could have a scenario where like you sort of crowdfund production of a case in multiple cases or something like that hasn't happened yet. But if anyone wants to do it, I'm here for it.

Speaker A: Perfect. That makes sense. A very good example right now to see is Moondao. Moondao is basically getting people on the moon. They gave two free tickets to blue Origin, uh, space flight where you get to spend 12 minutes.

Speaker B: I haven't heard about that.

Speaker A: That's really cool. That's a really good inspiration for casedao or phone dao. Mhm.

Speaker B: Yes, exactly.

Speaker A: But let's get into now the key features also on our mobile. So you mentioned a seed vault. What are the other things that people are looking at here?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the big things, um, the big pieces of the SMS stack that we wanted to bring to the table and that we think solve problems, uh, is solve key problems is the seed vault, the uh, mobile wallet adapter, um, and then the Dapstore. Those are the three big ones. So the seed vault is as I've said, it's secure seed storage that runs in the trusted execution environment on the phone. Uh, like an example of other uses of the trusted execution environment is where like all your fingerprints go. Uh, it's what keeps your fingerprints secure uh, when you're doing biometric authentication. Um, and so uh, it's a fully custom uh, software uh, product in effect that's built using very particular SDKs. And so what happens is your uh, your seed phrase goes into the seed vault, doesn't leave, never leaks. Um, and so. Oh, I'm sorry, sorry. The, the, the analog to the seed vault is the seed vault SDK. That's the other part of the stack that's very important. Um, the seed vault SDK is what allows uh, wallets to interface with the seed vault. And so in effect when you're interacting with the seed vault. Unsigned transaction bytes go in and sign, transaction bytes go out. Your seed phrase is never exposed to anyone. No app on the phone can get access to that seed phrase. It is only in the seed vault. Like I say, can't come up. All it can do is take bytes in for signing, send bytes out that have been signed. Um, and so, you know, a very painful, uh, event for the Solana ecosystem was the slope Wallet hack. I don't know if you heard about that. No. Okay, well, it was. It was painful. Basically, what had happened is Slope Wallet had been leaking seed phrases to their, like, analytics provider or something like that. Literally plain text seed phrases being leaked into the cloud.

Speaker A: That's crazy. Wow.

Speaker B: Yeah. That was a rough day. That was a rough day. Um, that can't happen with seed vault. Just can't happen. You will never have your seed vault. Uh, sorry, your seed phrase, leave the seed vault. So, again, you know, the solution that it's solving is, um, when you are interacting with crypto on your phone, uh, that seed phrase is very important. Uh, you need to keep it secure. And if it's only stored encrypted on the disk, if you will, which is what most wallets are doing, there is a risk at some point that encrypted data has to be decrypted and brought into system memory. So there is a risk. There's always that risk of that seed phrase getting leaked somehow. Right. And, uh, I mean, the wallet, uh, you know, developers are very good. It is very secure. Right. It's. It's. But then things like Slope Wallet can happen. So, um, you know, this is just an added layer of security that says, you know, we want to make sure your seed phrase just really is in a safe place. And so the seed vault, like I said, the seed Vault SDK is how wallets can communicate with the seed vault. What's interesting is, like, when you are interacting directly with the seed vault, like configuring it or something like that, it actually takes over the screen. It actually draws to the screen separate from Android itself. It's like its own, I guess, you know, or like mini operating system. And so it can't be screenshotted, can't be tampered with, whatever. Um, so like, if you ever see a screen recording of people signing, uh, with the seed vault, like, the screen kind of just freezes. Like, you can't. You can't see them doing that because you cannot screen record the seed vault. So that's pretty cool. So then the next Piece is mobile wallet adapter which you know right now if you go to any Web3 website on any blockchain, there's like that connect button, right? And that's what connects the website to your, whatever wallet you're using. And uh, what makes that connection on uh, the web is like a JavaScript library that is like an adapter or a connector that connects the website to the wallet. That's sort of like a key piece of Web3. Everything in Web3 depends on those connector libraries or adapter libraries. The mobile wallet adapter is the same idea applied to mobile. So the idea is that what we want is we want to build a world where on device dapps don't have to have their own internal wallets because they are um, then you run the same risk, right? Like they, they can then, then they're the ones managing your seed phrase or your private keys and then they can leak it and we want to avoid that. So we want to say is we want to let wallets do wallet things like signing transactions and we want dapps to do fun other things. And so mobile wallet adapter is a way for on device dapps to connect to on device wallets so you can choose which wallet you want to use uh, for doing your transaction, signing and other things. And so um, you know like if you're thinking about building a consumer crypto experience, you now don't have to think about doing wallet stuff. You can just say hey, let's connect to a wallet. And there are, you know, there are user experience and sort of again other cold start barriers that can exist there. But the idea is that in a crypto world people are going to have wallets and then now you can start downloading apps onto the, onto your phone that interact with those wallets. Final piece of software is the DAP Store. It's our felis permissionless, you know, DAP Store. When you publish dapps with our tooling you end up um, you're, you're actually minting them as NFTs on chain and then you sort of submit them for whitelisting uh, into our DAP uh store. The best way to think of the DAP Store is kind of like it's, it's just like a big whitelisted catalog uh, of on chain apps. Like we want to say like these are safe, these are good actors. You can come to our, our DAP Store and know that they're safe. But uh, we're, you know, all of the restrictions around crypto and stuff like that are gone. You Know, and we're thinking about, you know, all of the execution of that App Store. But, you know, the big thing is it's fearless. We don't want, you know, we don't want to make any money from, like, you know, in app purchases or anything like that. Like, your relationship with your customer is yours. You can, you know, make money however you want. So, uh, that's, that's. And so, again, it's a, it's a safe place for crypto apps not going to get rejected if you have any crypto functionality. Right? So these, you put these three things together and you have a pretty good, um, mobile ecosystem. You know, you have a pretty good set of operations that you can do. Um, and. And it just, again, unlocks things that, you know, were maybe questionable before.

Speaker A: Interesting. So the Seed Vault gives you security, the mobile adapter gives you user experience, and the DAP Store gives you more and more apps to actually make use of the Solana mobile app.

Speaker B: I'm gonna take that recording. What I will say. What I will say too, is that the mobile wallet adapter was designed to work on any Android phone. So it's not just Saga.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Um, it's just an Android library that allows Android apps to connect to Android wallets. So when you're on a Saga, your wallet can use the Seed Vault. When you're on your Samsung Galaxy, it'll use your wallet and, um, you know, your seed phrase is stored. However your wallet is storing it, it's just less secure than the seed ball. And again, like, the. I'm not trying. Like, these wallets are doing a great job of security. They know what they're doing. So I feel safe. I mean, I use wallets up until I had a Saga, I have a Galaxy S22. And, you know, I was using crypto wallets and feeling very safe about it. Um, so, yeah, like, the idea is that it's not just for Saga. It's just that, like, you know, the more crypto stuff you put in your app, the more likely it's not going to be approved by Google. We're also working on iOS support, but again, the big, you know, looming barrier is the App Store, so.

Speaker A: Got it. I'm curious, like, do you guys have. Or do you guys have your own inbuilt wallet, or do you still recommend people to use Metamask Coinbase?

Speaker B: Yep, yep. No, we're not building a wallet. We don't want to build a wallet.

Speaker A: We're trying to let wallet behind that

Speaker B: because we don't want them because Wallets are actually pretty complicated. Um, you know, and, and a lot of things that you don't think about go into making a wallet. Um, like Phantom talks about this a lot, right? Phantom was sort of like the first really good UX wallet on Solana. Um, and a big part of what they do is spam and fraud detection and we don't want to mess with that, we don't want to do that. So, um, again, like, you know, and we want to let people innovate on a wallet. Like, you know, uh, there's a lot of potential for what wallets can be. And what's interesting too is that uh, when you have your seed phrase securely stored on the device, what a wallet is can change, right? Like, like the depth what you and I think of a wallet is actually a number of pieces of functionality that actually can be unbundled. Um, so like a really good example of a launcher that's coming on Saga is a guy is making. It's an Android app launcher. So, you know, like when you go, I don't know, I don't know if this is showing, but like when you go and like select your apps, right? That's what's called the launcher. And Android allows you to have a custom launcher. And so this launcher that he's making is. It integrates with, with, um, he's not making it as a wallet, but you could, your launcher itself could be a wallet, right? He's just connecting with the SMS stack. But like, what it's doing is like, let's say you want to use an app less, right? Like you're like, I'm just on Twitter way too much. You can actually use this launcher and say like, if I use Twitter more than five times today, or block me for using Twitter if I use it up to 5 times, but if I try and use it that 6 time, make me donate 11 soul to a charity before I open Twitter. So like, so you can like, you can kind of choose, right? Like, okay, well, I've opened Twitter five times. I'm addicted and I'm trying to open that, that sixth time. Do I want to donate money to a charity or not before I open Twitter, right? Like, these are, these are things just aren't possible like, you know, without crypto having, uh, a deeper integration into, um, you know, the operating system. And in just like.

Speaker A: That's a really interesting use case. That's a really interesting use case. I'm curious, like you actually mentioned this, that what do you think about wallet today? Can you actually unbundle into different things. I'm curious, like what are those different things for you?

Speaker B: Well, think about you know, what your wallet is today. It's probably a place where you see your, your balances, where you can um, sign transactions. Right. And uh, where you manage your NFTs. Right. Um, and so you know the key functionality of a uh, wallet, if I would argue is transaction signing. Right. So signing transactions for dapps.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Well you know one of the things that's happening uh, or that we're seeing a lot of conversation around on with the SMS stack is like right now if you connect on an on device dap to an uh, on device wallet, you leave your app entirely. You hop from your app into the wallet. That is not a good user experience. Um, because you know the idea is like you want people to spend time in your app, you don't want them to leave. You know, and now we're basically saying like oh, you're going to leave the app when you sign a transaction. But there are other options. There are other options for signing uh, transactions or there are other UI paradigms. So a good example is people are actually used to hopping into other apps for making payments on mobile. They just don't know it. The example or the case I'm talking about is Google Play Billing. When you make a purchase with Google Play billing it's sort of doing this modal pop up and as I understand it, actually a completely different app that you're sort of talking to because Google Play billing is its own thing or at least it's its own screen. But it doesn't make you leave your app, it just is this bottom sheet if you will.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: That kind of pops up. So you could imagine a world where there's a wallet that's sort of just a transaction signing wallet. It just, just signs transactions and it's a bottom sheet. So you're in your favorite, you know, crypto dapp and you want to make a purchase on your phone. And so instead of hopping over, leaving your app, ah, a little bottom sheet just comes up and it allows you to sign your transaction.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And that's all the wallet is, that's it. It just signs transactions. You can do that now, right? Like there's no reason because somebody else can provide you your crypto balances, right? Crypto balance app.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: And then someone else can make an NFT exclusive app that does NFT management. If every one of these apps can sort of like get access to uh, connections to your crypto functionality, uh, then you can make these parts Their own experiences.

Speaker A: Definitely way better user experience. So I'm curious, like, will that be from Coinbase or Metamask? Like, user would be like, okay, my default app on Solana Mobile, on Saga is Metamask. So whenever I have to sign a transaction, open the bottom sheet for Metamask, is that how it would work?

Speaker B: That's exactly how it would work. Yep, yep.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And it's done through. In Android, there's this, uh, concept, like it was called an intent. It's a way for apps to talk to each other. And so these intents kind of get broadcast. Like, hey, I'm looking for a crypto wallet. Somebody respond and then any number of crypto wallets say, yep, I'm a crypto wallet. And then you pick the one you want. You do it for like your browser. It's the same thing you do for like your default browser or your default email client, Things like that.

Speaker A: Interesting. Let's, let's dive more into user experience. I'm curious that once a user comes in, uh, and this question is very specific to the adapter because you explain how the adapter works on the web. I'm curious to understand that. How will it work for the apps? So now let's say we talk about Converse. You can, the seed phrase isn't stored within the app, uh, but it's stored in the seed vault on Saga. And when you come in, you download Converse, you sign it, the bottom sheet pops up, you sign the transaction and you're in. Yep, this is it.

Speaker B: Yep, that's it. And so it's actually, the model is actually like oauth on device. So what happens is you, you, in effect your app authenticates with the wallet saying, hey, I'm a crypto app and I'm going to be requesting transactions. And so then the wallet, like the wallet, uh, ends up giving you an auth token that says, I, the user has said, yes, I want them to be able to use this app. And so then anytime you want to do a transaction like say in Converse, you would then sort of initiate new contact with the wallet and say, hey, the user is going to, you know, um, you know, I'm sorry, I don't know what transactions it does but like maybe like if you're going to send, you know, send some crypto within the chat app or whatever, um, you would sort of send, ah, a message to the wallet and say, hey, I want to initiate this transaction. Here's my auth token. Let me do this. And then your app congress would be responsible for constructing Those transaction bytes and then sending them to the wallet. And then on non Saga devices, the wallet would sign those bytes in uh, software, uh, and on Saga it would be signed in the C vault.

Speaker A: Very interesting. I'm really curious to understand the security aspect over here. How does the app, uh, the DAP use or leverage the seed phrase without storing the seed phrase? Because the seed phrase is stored by seed board.

Speaker B: Yeah, it doesn't. That's the kicker. That's the kicker. It doesn't. It's. It does take a bit to wrap your head around, right? But like ultimately like, you know, um, with, with uh, like an app like Converse, like your identity is sort of tied to your address, right? And so you need to have a way to validate that I own this address, right? Like, so if I'm connecting it with my main MetaMask address, um, I need a way. Or let's, let's just say Solana, because I know this exists in Salon. I don't know if exactly. Actually it kind of does. There is deep linking in metamask. I know it exists, but I haven't used it. Um, so we could, let's just say it's MetaMask. So like, you know, what you, what you do is you say, um, hey, um, well, sorry, let me back up. Let me tell you about the way I know it works. Let's do this because I don't want to say something inaccurate on, um, what happens on Solana is what you do is with the mobile wallet adapter is you say, connect me to this wallet. And when you connect to the wallet, the wallet says you have to first be asked, do you want to connect to this app? It's just like when you connect to an app for the first time on web, right? The wallet comes up and says, hey, Converse is trying to connect. Do you want to let it? You say, yes. User says, I want Converse to talk to Phantom because Phantom's cross chain. Now, um, Phantom hands back an auth token and an address. And there's actually quite a bit you can do with just an address. Any read operation, all you need is an address. So like getting a list of chats for example, Right. So I assume Converse has some way of sort of querying on chain things for uh, this address. Give me all the chats that exist right now. You might want to ensure that the user owns that address, right? So like you're going to connect to Phantom M and it's going to give you address. You don't really know if the user owns that. That's where a signing message, that's where signing, just a message of bytes comes in. And so for that you would construct the transaction in apps. So the transaction is built in your app. And you know, there's lots of ways to do that. There are, there are Java, uh, ways to do that, there are Kotlin ways to do that. There are JavaScript, uh, like React native ways to do that. You build the transactions transaction itself. And this is, this would happen even if you were managing the seed phrase yourself. Like, ultimately your app is responsible for building transactions because that's what makes things register on the blockchain. So in this case, you would build a transaction in your app and then again you would say, hey, Phantom, sign this transaction, sign these transaction bytes. And then phantom would. It's a black box. You don't really know what phantom is doing to sign the bytes. All you're doing is say, phantom, sign these bytes, send the signed bytes back to me. Then it does. And then now you know that the user owns that account and you can keep on, keep on going.

Speaker A: Very interesting. All right, I got it. Yeah, I am looking forward to use this phone. Uh, and let's talk, let's talk about the launch. When did the launch start and how many, if you can talk about it, how many Sagas have been out in the market so far?

Speaker B: Yes. So the launch event was April 13th. Um, we announced the phone that it was coming in June of last year. That was actually my first week at Solana. And then, um, you know, we, we were big on pre orders. We wanted to get people pre ordering. And so we had a, uh, an NFT mint for this, what we called the Saga Pass. And if you pre ordered the phone and put down 100 bucks, you'd get this Saga Pass. Um, and we did some sort of NFT drops to Saga Pass holders, that sort of thing. And so it was Saga Pass owners that had first dibs at buying the phone. So we launched it on April 13th. And I'm pretty man. I mean like, that was not long ago, but my memory is already. I'm pretty sure we opened up purchasing the phone that day, but it was only for Saga Pass owners, so you had to have a Saga Pass. It is not open to the public yet. That's actually not happening until May 8th. On May 8th, anyone can order this on. Um, and the only, uh, the only numbers or the only thing that uh, we have publicly, uh, stated, I believe is that the fir. So they're coming in waves, they're coming in batches. Like that's just the way manufacturing works. Um, we sold out of the first batch, so I don't, I don't think we've said what those numbers are. I'm not even sure what those numbers are. Um, but uh, we sold out for the first batch, so that's promising.

Speaker A: That's really cool. That's really cool. Yeah.

Speaker B: And then, and then now I, I believe if, if, I hope I'm not misspeaking here. I think we got more orders than we had in the batch. So like the first batch is going out. So you're seeing on Twitter people are posting photos of their box when they get their box. Um, and I think as more batches come in, more will go out. And then again, May 8, it opens up to everybody. But there's probably going to be a backlog for a little while for people to get the phone.

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely did. The NFT holders bought a cheaper price. I see the price right now is listed as 1,000.

Speaker B: Yes, they, they just pre ordered, so they only had to pay the remaining 900.

Speaker A: Got it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: So, so, but, but there was the NFT drop. They got, they got dropped. These, uh, playing, uh, cards. These playing cards. And uh, those playing cards actually gave you. If you had a certain hand of the playing card, you got a discount off of the phone.

Speaker A: Interesting. Okay.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, um, the max discount was like a hundred bucks or something like that.

Speaker A: Very interesting. It's, it's, it's so cool to see that. We kind of thought like every single year, whenever Apple comes with a phone, people are like, hey, what is Apple going to do next? Like we have already reached the max potential of a phone and it's really cool to see now that there is a step function change in how a phone could be built. So this is really cool. And is there something we are, that we need to talk about that we haven't talked about yet?

Speaker B: Uh, from a platform perspective, I don't think so. I think we've covered all the salient points.

Speaker A: Right, Perfect. Thank you so much, Andrew. This was a really cool conversation. I don't even, I don't even see. I'm like, wait, it's just been 40 minutes for us talking.

Speaker B: Yeah, I know, I know, I know

Speaker A: so much right now.

Speaker B: We could talk about app ideas if you want. Like that's something I really like talking about is apps. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: So you know what's interesting is like once you live in a world where

Speaker A: uh,

Speaker B: crypto apps are allowed, you know, crypto is sort of Natively integrated into these apps. It's start, it's fun to actually start thinking about um, what you can do. And so like just uh, even chat apps alone, like I was thinking about this and like there's so much potential there. Um, so it's really cool to see you know, Web three Messaging coming. I think is, is Shane the CEO of Converse or xmtp?

Speaker A: Shane is the CEO of XMTP and Converse is a partner which is being built by Pol and Noe in France.

Speaker B: Okay, cool. So I remember, I honestly I think it was a podcast uh, with him that I was listening to that sort of got me connected to your whole ecosystem. It was such a really cool interview. And I remember one of the things he talked about was this idea of like if um, somebody wants to message you, they have to pay you. You know, like even something as simple as that, right? Like that's just not possible on Google Play. Like it's, or Apple. It's just not possible. But if I have a wallet and you have a wallet, you know, it's like for me what I would like, I would love like there's probably weird like conflict of interest things but it's like you know, you get hit by like recruiters. It's like wouldn't it be what, what I would like is like if a recruiter wants to reach out to you, it's like they have to pay you. But actually maybe it like goes to charity or something, right? So stuff like that. I think there's huge potential. Like chat based apps should not be minimized in terms of their potential, um, in other locales. I think chat based apps are very, very um, are big. I think they had maybe a boom a little while ago but like you know now with AI, right, uh, and chat GPT, there's probably a whole slew of just text based apps that can be written, right? But you know like what would be really cool is like let's say uh, there's like a knowledge base or you know, just like there's some service, some AI service that um, I want uh, to interact with or know more about. What would be really cool is like a per use chat interaction. So like I just open up my chat with whatever bot, right? And I pay it 10 cents and now I can use it for today or for an hour, right? And then the chat closes because it's run out of money. So it's like enabling microtransactions to enable just in chat app. So any chat app could do this, right? Like any chat app could, could have this, this uh, AI chatbot and, and then games, like one game that I would love to see is a chat based game where uh, like it's, it's, it's AI and the, every session it generates a new murder mystery that you have to solve by talking to the characters. Like imagine that. So you open up the chat and it's like this is Murder Mystery Bot. And it's like it'll be 50 cents to play. You pay your 50 cents and now it's, it's constructed a murder mystery. There's like five characters and you're asking them, you're interacting with AI characters to solve this mystery. Like that would be so fun, you know, like, um, so yeah, just even that, like just chat as a platform with micropayment enabled experiences. There's huge potential, Huge potential. Right.

Speaker A: Um, so it's really cool. I'm also thinking about what if there could be a prize pool that every single day, let's say 100 people joined, 100 people signed up to play this game. Everybody pays $1. So there's hundred dollars in the pool and the person who solves the first that day, they get a hundred dollars or whatever, they get $50 goes to the game.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. You know, and you've seen that like, what was it, um, what was the first big pool lottery site? I'm forgetting the name, but it's been around for a while and so I'm pretty sure it's on, I'm pretty sure it's on Ethereum. I'm forgetting the name, but there's one on something uh, called Pool Party. It's that exact same idea where the funds go in, um, and everybody contributes to the pool. Someone wins and then like you get your money back because what's actually paying out the pool is the uh, defi. Interest, you know. Um, yeah, like, just. Yeah, things like that. You know, like a chatbot, a daily chatbot where you can again, this I really like. I feel like crypto can empower philanthropy uh, in amazing ways. And so like imagine if there was a chatbot where every day it's like, hey, the um, nonprofit of the day is this. Would you like to donate a dollar? Yes, I would. Boom. Done. You know, stuff like that. Like just, you know, so cool, so cool. Um, so, you know, those are some of the things that, you know, that I think about just in general, like microtransactions. Um, you know, on Solana, there's no reason you couldn't sell something for 10 Ah, cents. Um, because the transaction fee is you know, 0.0005 cents or something like that. So you know, selling in app experiences for cents on the dollar or just cents. Um, you know I think a lot about like there is, I think there's um, you know like play to earn is kind of a played out and risky proposition but I think there are valid like what I like to call X to earn opportunities um, on with crypto. So like um, you know an example would be uh, your phone can collect any amount of data right on the go in real time. It's got to be valuable to somebody for something, right? So why not have an app where you opt in, opt uh in to sharing some data that's on your phone and get paid for and you know in small, small doses. It's kind of like the dpin, you know the decentralized physical, you know like, like the just decentralized sort of data aggregation or uh, getting paid to contribute to AI models, right? Like take a picture a day of xyz, upload it for an AI mid journey, whatever and get a few cents right? Things like that.

Speaker A: Very interesting. I really like these ideas, especially pay to message because this is something that is being worked on a lot, right? It's like hey, if you're Bill Gates today, there's no way for you to limit your access or monetize your access because if you have an Instagram profile your DMs are going to be flooded. If you have a Twitter profile, your DMs are going to be flooded. But what you can do in the web 3world is you can be like hey, my time is worth thousand dollars. My one hour is worth thousand dollars. If you pay me thousand dollars only then you can cold message me. That's it. It's a simple demand and supply curve

Speaker B: then yeah, yeah, it's, it's beautiful. And really, I mean it's easy to forget or uh, maybe not forget but like it just sort of messaging is quote unquote unsexy. You know, like it's not these hot flashy experiences but like it is a core component of, of the mobile system, you know, the mobile experience. And you're you know, any one of us. I guarant, I guarantee any regular mobile user is opening one or more chat apps multiple times a day among the other apps that they're using, right? So it's like, it's a huge surface for uh, opportunity, you know and it's like meeting people where they're at in those experiences. It just reduces barriers. You Know, they don't have to go download an app or whatever, you know.

Speaker A: Definitely. And also with microtransactions, this is something we've been talking a lot about, nano payments, micropayments, stuff like that. But the biggest problem, the biggest hurdle is the fact that hey, But Apple takes 30% cut. But Apple won't allow you to pay like $1. The minimum payment has to be $5 or something. So it's, it's crazy. And now we are also seeing super fluid, superfluid is allowing you to stream for a second stream money per second, stream your salary per second. That is crazy.

Speaker B: Yes. Yeah. You know, you think, you think about like again like this idea of doing X to earn. It's like, you know, what if, what if GPS for some reason, like GPS data of like traveling or whatever was valuable, you could literally go into the app, turn it on, start doing the things and the funds are just being streamed into your wallet as you do the activity. It's like, it's crazy. You know, it's like that's just impossible with other payment rails.

Speaker A: Very interesting.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: All right, do we have more ideas?

Speaker B: Oh, I could keep going for, for a long time. I mean, I think let's. We just, we have to say games, we have to talk, you know, we just have to bring up games. Um, because that is going to be a way where people, uh, are, you know, sort of get, uh, you know we say talk a lot about this, but onboarding, like this idea of digital asset ownership, you know, um, that's going to be, you know, huge. So you know, in game, you know, assets that you can then sell, leveling up game characters. One thing that nobody has done yet that I want to see, and this isn't maybe the most relevant on mobile, but could be, uh, could be on mobile is like a save game marketplace. So like, you know, I don't want to spend however many hours it takes to uh, get to whatever level in World of Warcraft. Right. But somebody else is willing to do that. So what if they could sell their save game in like a legitimate way, right? Like not like, you know, right now people, I think people sell like World of Warcraft accounts, but like, you know, it's not officially sanctioned. What if there was a, you know, sort of a standard, a platform? What if your save game was an nft so, you know, like you spend X amount of time in a game and therefore your save game becomes valuable. And when you decide you're done playing the game, you sell it to somebody who doesn't want to take all that time. Right. Like, it's a no brainer. Um, you know, there's some logistics around that that make it, you know, um, you know, like challenging or whatever games that, you know. But, uh, the concept is there, right? It's no different than, you know, any other nft. So like, I really hope somebody makes that.

Speaker A: That's really cool. Yeah. Gaming is something where you find users who are really dedicated and who are really, especially in web3world as well, we want to find those users who are very, let's say power users who are going to be using the product regularly so that you can generate a lot of feedback and you can also keep improving the product. So that's a great avenue where I'm seeing that people are like, hey, how to increase Web3 adoption? Go, go build a good game.

Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep, yep. Give people fun, you know, And I, I, I would say specifically, do not make a play to earn game. I think that is a bad idea. I think, I think Play to Earn Play to earn on its face is a bad idea because, like, people will spend. It mixes incentives is what it comes down to because like people already spend hundreds, thousands of hours of a game with no financial incentive at all. It's just fun. Gaming already has plenty of incentives. It's called fun. Make something fun, people will come and out of that will emerge an economy of things. Right. Uh, if something is fun, it is valuable. If it is valuable, you can build an economy around it.

Speaker A: Done.

Speaker B: Figure it out from there. Don't try and trick people and be like, oh, you can make money playing this game. It's like m very, I've never seen a play to earn game that isn't Ponzunomics, but some people like that. But I would, I would rather see better things.

Speaker A: Makes sense.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Make sure that your product offers fun. People will come.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Gamefi exists. It's called buying games and buying assets for games. So just start with that.

Speaker A: That's good, that's good. All right. Andrew, this was really good. Thank you so much for hopping on the.