Solana’s second phone is nearly here — and so are the airdrops

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Roughly a year and a half after it debuted the Saga, Solana Mobile has unveiled details about its second Solana phone, the Seeker. 

Slated for a 2025 release, the phone boasts a native wallet built in tandem with SolFlare that integrates with Solana Mobile’s secure seed vault and (it looks like) will be secured by a thumbprint. Other new features are typical phone things — a better display, camera, and battery life as well as an updated “dApp Store.” 

But what Solana natives are bound to be even more excited about is the prospect of token airdrops.

If you’ll remember, airdrop hype was a key component in Solana’s first phone go-round. Critics didn’t love the Saga, and Solana Mobile cut its price by 40% amid lackluster sales four months after launch. 

But late last year, Solana Mobile suddenly sold out of the phones, and the Saga started reselling for thousands of dollars. This was caused by the success of the BONK memecoin, which was airdropped to the phones in amounts that became worth hundreds of dollars during Solana’s bull run.

Solana Mobile seems to be leaning into airdrop hype in its early marketing campaign for the Seeker.

Every Solana Seeker comes with a Genesis Token NFT that can serve as a sort of verification for Solana OGs, Solana Mobile general manager Emmett Hollyer told me. This can help airdrop token liquidity go directly to the hands of authentic users, Hollyer added.

“The excitement we’ve seen already with the Chapter 2 Preorder Token suggests to us it will be a powerful force,” Hollyer concluded when asked whether airdrops will help drive the go-to-market for the Seeker. A zk-compression partnership announced with Helius will make it easier and cheaper to auto-allocate airdrops to Seeker users, and an exclusive app with the memecoin platform Moonshot will let memecoins be sent to other Seeker users. 

The Seeker had already been pre-ordered over 140,000 times by the time the phone came out of stealth, Solana Mobile says. At $450 a pop, that’s over $63 million in revenue for Solana Mobile.

And despite a dearth of specifics, some Solana fans feel the phone’s price tag is well worth it. 

“Just preordered another @solanamobile Seeker. If you’ve been here long enough, you know this phone will pay for itself,” one user wrote on X, adding in a reply that they had purchased three Seeker phones in total.

Months ago, I briefly messaged with an airdrop farmer who claimed to have purchased 40 of the new Solana phones — before basically anything was known about the Seeker.

Solana Mobile hopes that there will be other use cases for the phone, of course: Hollyer mentioned DePIN, DeFi, NFTs, gaming, and AI as app categories coming to the Seeker. I wouldn’t count on those being too earth-shattering because, as many in crypto have lamented, apps that don’t heavily revolve around speculation on token prices are currently few and far between. 

On the other hand, it’s notoriously hard to break into the mobile phone space, which is currently dominated by a handful of rich incumbents. By leveraging airdrops to sell phones, Solana Mobile may gin up enough revenue to build future phones that will be ready for, say, three to five years from now when Web3 apps are ready for prime time. 

But for now, I’d be curious to know how many users will actually be making phone calls from their airdrop machines.

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