Why I spent $1,000 on a Solana phone
Solana's Road to Redemption starts here
Recently, I did something strange.
I ordered a Solana phone, and I did so using real human money.
Not going to lie, it felt pretty weird.
Spending 1,000 Biden bucks from my bank account felt a lot more painful than spending 50 Solana internet tokens on a Mad Lad NFT.
As a phone owner, you might think it's a weird decision to buy an untested, barely reviewed phone that will probably be extremely buggy and way worse than your current iPhone, Google, or Samsung.
But there are a few reasons why I think buying a Solana phone isn't the most braindead idea of the year.
Small Barriers mean outsized opportunity.
As we have seen time and time again, simply taking the time to overstep the most minuscule of hurdles has resulted in significant wealth generation events.
Using UniSwap early on resulted in free money.
Bridging to Arbitrum or Optimism and interacting with semi-regular frequency was worth five figures.
Drawing a picture of a Monkey to earn a whitelist paid you thousands.
And we all remember the crazy Bull market stories about how Boosting a Discord server gave you RomeDAO tokens that were worth six figures a few days later.
While I'm not suggesting that simply buying this phone will award you with infinite free money, I do think it gives you access to a huge amount of opportunity because you will be one of the few people that A has the resources to buy it, and B is willing to experiment and try something new.
In Crypto experimenting with new stuff has usually turned out pretty well.
Sybil protection for Apps & NFTs
If you’ve spent much time in Discords recently, you may have noticed that the number of bots outweigh real people about 10:1.
This is very annoying for projects as they want to foster an engaged and loyal community, but it is increasingly difficult as farmers and sybils become more sophisticated.
(Although looking at the above image a lot of them are still pretty terrible)
I suspect this will become even harder in future as AI tech develops. It probably won’t be long until bots are indistinguishable from real users and operate their own Twitter accounts and have their own personalities.
However, the Sol phone comes with a Soulbound NFT token. This is a super easy way for new Apps and Projects to determine that someone has:
Spent a large sum of money supporting the ecosystem
Is unlikely to be sybilling with multiple accounts
Is a real human being that owns a phone
Has a high level of disposable income and could be a profitable customer
Is engaged and currently active in the Crypto space
As a result of this i’d imagine a huge number of whitelist spots and airdrops take place as projects fight for the attention of this group of users.
It’s possible that the airdrops given out for simply having the phone pay for the phone multiple times over. (But also I’m an idiot, and you may get nothing.)
I like an underdog story
Solana is down bad.
Of all the major tokens that felt pain from the ending of the bull run, Solana is amongst the worst.
The effects of the FTX blow up and the continual VC murdering of Sol Defi projects have certainly done a lot of reputational damage to the coin.
Despite this, there is still some semblance of activity left. Just this week, Mad Lads minted out and did more volume than any Ethereum NFT collection.
Devs are still devving - a state compression update now means that you can mint millions of NFTs for low hundreds of dollars, something not remotely possible on any EVM chain today.
While there are still a significant number of hurdles to overcome for Solana to repair its image, it's clear they are not giving up without a fight. The community still exists, builders are still building, and they are innovating at a fast pace - they are literally launching a phone!!!!
It's also important to remember that every chain has had its controversy. Bitcoin had the big block battles, and Ethereum had the DAO hack. Both of those returned stronger for having had the hard times, and I suspect Solana may soon be added to that list.
For this reason, I'm aiming to grow my Solana position. But as you've probably realized by now, I'm a bit of a weirdo that often breaks everything down to its raw utility functions in order to determine if there is profit to be made. If I can grow my Solana stack by buying the phone, then I will for sure do it.
It’s nice to support new tech
If you never get a penny for ordering the phone, at least you can tell yourself that you bought it to support the industry and to spur on those hardworking devs that are pushing Crypto forward.
All jokes aside, I really do commend the Solana team for launching this phone.
For too long, Crypto apps have been second-class citizens on the incumbent app stores. By launching a Crypto first phone, we are at least taking steps as an industry to work around this.
Almost everything is done via mobile now, and the sheer lack of Crypto mobile apps has certainly been a hindrance to global adoption. This is a positive step in changing that.
Even if it's unlikely the Solana phone takes the world by storm, the threat of competition is hopefully enough to wake up Google and Apple and push them to add more Crypto features.
If we can start an arms race in the mobile industry, we suddenly unlock the billions of users worldwide that only operate on mobile.
In Summary I’ve been very impressed with Solana recently.
It seems a lot of people have written it off as a failed experiment, but when you take a look beneath the surface its clear there is a huge amount of community spirit and project innovation taking place.
I have no idea if the phone I’ve ordered will be any good, but I’m happy to back the underdog and the team deserves credit for trying something new.
Also,
PLEASE DO NOT BUY THIS PHONE EXPECTING FREE MONEY. I AM AN IDIOT WHO OFTEN GETS THINGS VERY WRONG. BUY THIS PHONE BECAUSE YOU WANT IT OR LIKE IT, OR YOUR DOG ATE YOUR OLD PHONE AND YOU ARE NOW PHONELESS AND NEED A NEW ONE.
Have a great weekend.