Solana’s Plan to Put Crypto on EVERY Phone

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]What I'm seeing now that gives me a ton of optimism versus previous kind of downturns is the developer community is like really really really showing up. Solana is known for having one of the most resilient and innovative ecosystems in all of crypto, but they have been facing challenges and competition from general market headwinds and other players in the market. Could mobile be the key to unlocking the next phase of growth for Solana and what exactly is a Solana phone anyway? Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that whatever your phone runs on, the core function is sending memes to your friends. I'm your host John Gillan.

[00:00:38]Today is Thursday, April 30th and today we are joined by Emmett Hollyer. Emmett is the general manager and head of Solana Mobile at Solana Labs where he leads business development, partnerships, strategy, and operations to integrate blockchain into consumer mobile devices. Emmett has driven key initiatives across the Solana Saga phone launch and the expansion of the Solana mobile ecosystem overall. Emmett is going to give us a ton of great insight about this product. I'm really excited to learn more from him. So if that all sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe. Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.

[00:01:08]Today's episode is brought to you by Cape, the privacy-first mobile carrier, Pharo's, the layer one built for real fi, and Consensus Miami where the next cycle starts. And without further ado, welcome to the Milk Road Show, Emmett.

[00:01:20]How are you, sir? Good, John. How are you?

[00:01:23]I'm doing really well. Emmett, I just I wanted to get right into it and start off with the Saga phone. For those who aren't familiar with Solana Mobile, the Saga phone, you all launched this back in August of 2025. What is Saga and what is a web three native mobile device?

[00:01:37]What does that mean?

[00:01:38]>> [laughter] >> Good good starting point. Good question.

[00:01:42]Saga is what blockchain blockchain should be on phones. For us, we know that there's a bunch of users out there who really deeply care about crypto and about having access to assets everywhere.

[00:01:56]And the truth is like the current non-Saga mobile experience leaves a lot to be desired. For some users, a centralized exchange works fine if you just are going to buy and hold a couple assets, but the moment you want to tap into the stuff that makes crypto great, whether that's defi or all of the interesting apps being built, you're stuck with a pretty gnarly set of trade-off decisions to make. Do you want something that's secure? Do you want something that's usable? Do you want to do workarounds in in-app browsers and wallets? There's no there's no like corollary to the rest of what web two gets to do on a mobile phone until we built Saga. Saga is really our attempt at bridging the gap between what great web two mobile experiences look like and what great crypto mobile experiences look like. Gotcha. Okay, so now correct me if I'm wrong on this, but the numbers I've seen is that you have over 150,000 Saga devices that are live now in the market out in the wild. What have been some of the lessons learned from the first year of having this product on the market?

[00:02:53]What are some takeaways you've had from from getting this out there to people?

[00:02:56]We've we've learned a lot.

[00:02:58]I've one important piece of context, the Saga is actually our second phone. So we shipped Saga, its predecessor, back in 2023. That was where we learned a lot very quickly.

[00:03:08]You know, it was admittedly we we took our lumps, you know, we won worst smartphone of the year from Marques Brownlee back in 2023. And we might have earned that in some respects, but that gave us an opportunity to learn and to bring a lot of new innovation and a lot of improvements to Saga. And so what sets Saga and Saga apart from the rest of the market is there is secure self-custody of digital assets built in. For people who care about something like a hardware wallet, you get a lot of the same features and functionality where assets are stored separate from the rest of the apps in the operating system.

[00:03:42]We have an app store with more than 800 apps that are all crypto-native. And we have a wallet that's natively integrated in the phone to make signing transactions and connecting to apps feel more like Apple Pay where it's this kind of system-level sleek experience as opposed to this constant ping-ponging back and forth. And so now that we started shipping Saga last August, we've had it in the market for however many months now, we've learned a lot, but more than anything, people who care about crypto care about doing it everywhere they are and taking their phone on the go with them and making that a core part of their on-chain life. So we've got really impressive usage both on the user side, but also really impressive developer uptake within our store and a bunch of partnership programs. If you're not seeing this, you're trading blind right now. There are real moves happening behind the scenes that most people don't see until it's way too late. Inside Milk Road Pro, you can track exactly what our analysts are buying, selling, and what's on their watch list before it moves. You can try it out for just a dollar for seven days. The link is in the description. Gotcha. So that was one of the questions I wanted to ask, too, cuz I I am aware of the Saga phone and there have been a lot of changes to the Saga phone, which you went over a couple of them, but I'm interested like, you know, from the user experience and the developer experience, which you touched upon a little bit, what has changed with these new functionalities in the Saga phone?

[00:04:56]And talk to us a little bit about what that looks like now that these changes are in place in this new phone.

[00:05:01]Yeah. I'll start with the hardware.

[00:05:03]First off, hardware's hardware's hard.

[00:05:05]It's kind of sucks, but it's it's it's fun, but it's hard. We learned a lot with Saga. With Saga, Saga was really a very premium device in some ways with respect to the decisions made for fit and finish and its weight. It's like hefty and it's big and the screen is big. But what we learned from our users is they just want something that feels easy to bring with them. And so with Saga, we really took a step back and tried to build something that felt more portable, more mobile for lack of a better word. And, you know, when Saga went out, we had a lot of anxiety about the review cycle and it was tough, admittedly.

[00:05:41]When Saga went back around, we had that same anxiety. Like would we get all of the decisions we made to build a phone right? And fortunately as, you know, the community has responded and reviewers have responded, I think we got a lot of those changes right. It feels easy to hold, it feels premium, but it's half the price of its predecessor.

[00:06:01]So really we wanted to keep that sort of premium aesthetic, but make it feel light and bright and easy to take with you. So I would say hardware was kind of like first and foremost the thing we had to change. But there are some software changes as well. You know, we carry over seed vault, which is that secure self-custody layer I mentioned, but this time we built a wallet that sits on top of that. So for users, it all feels like one cohesive package. They don't have to think about which wallets do I have to download that work with seed vaults and we reduced that strain to make the software experience really seamless and I think users have really responded positively and we see tons of active usage and and frankly lots of assets being stored on their Sagas. Gotcha.

[00:06:38]Okay, cool. So I'm curious about surprises because like I think something that's common in the history of technology and software is that, you know, people will design these products and put them out, but users will use them in ways that, you know, people never thought of before and you'll see dapp categories explode that you wouldn't have expected. Have you seen anything like that that has been sort of surprising to you or the Solana Mobile team? The thing that has been least surprising is that defi and trading continues to be a be a driver. So I'll put that out of the way. I think it's unsurprising that people want to have, you know, the beauty of crypto is the markets are always on. There's no like on-off switch. So you kind of need to be able to trade if you care about trading wherever you are, whenever.

[00:07:16]So that's one of the beautiful things, one of the the patterns we've definitely seen. But in terms of surprises, I think games has been a really interesting unlock. I think when you look back over the course of the storied history of gaming and crypto trying to find a path forward together, there's obviously been plenty of ups and downs.

[00:07:36]But if you look at the kind of the last 10 to 15 years where games have been successful broadly, it's on mobile devices, right? Like Candy Crush and all these games that people addictively are playing on trains and on buses and wherever they are, that's because of mobile phones. And today a lot of the innovation happening on crypto-based gaming has not been mobile-first. But now that we've made secure self-custody on phones easy, now that we have an app store that is free of some of the draconian terms that Apple and Google put onto developers, we've been able to see a lot of like the promise of games and crypto come together.

[00:08:15]Gotcha. I want to talk more about the the app store versus the dapp store soon, but I'm curious about the the outlook for the onboarding process, right? There's been a lot of people in web three and in crypto who have been trying to find what is the way to bring millions of users into web three. And I'm curious about this this strategy from Solana with Solana Mobile. And, you know, like I think one of the big, honestly like pieces of friction is it's hard to get somebody to move from their their comfortable familiar web two mobile device, like, you know, the Apple products, the Google products, etc. to one of these things. What is your outlook on that? Do you think that now that you've got things right with Saga, you're you're more likely to bring in more people? Or do you still think there's friction there? What's what's the outlook there for you? Saga and Saga have been really targeted at what I would consider the more pro audience.

[00:08:59]People who care enough to buy a crypto phone from a crypto company, right? So that onboarding wave that you're talking about, that hasn't been how we've thought about our users historically.

[00:09:11]With that said, we've learned a lot from that audience. Like these are the people who are willing to kind of take early reps at products that are still trying to figure themselves out and we now feel like we're at a point where we actually know what crypto should look like on a phone. And so our next step, what is kind of the future for this company, this initiative, is to grow through other hardware devices.

[00:09:33]You know, I mentioned there's that subset of people who are going to buy a crypto phone from a crypto company, but everybody else out there, the billions of people who own mobile phones, they have a really kind of personal set of decisions or a personal set of factors that they use when they buy a new phone.

[00:09:47]For some of them, for people who have maybe opened a centralized exchange account or have tried a self-custody wallet, but just found it to be too confusing and too disconnected from Apple Pay and Google Pay.

[00:10:01]Building our tech stack directly natively into the phones that they would already be buying give us a much better opportunity to bring those people on chain. If it feels native to the phone, if it feels like it lives alongside something like a Google Pay, I think that's the biggest opportunity to onboard people is is meet them where they are, meet them where they're already doing money stuff on their phones and accessing the internet on their phones. Uh don't make them go find it and learn things on their own.

[00:10:27]I I want to come back to that point because I think you guys are working in that direction with a lot of these partnerships you're working on, but um first I want to ask about um the SKR token. Solana launched an airdrop the token called SKR back in January of 2026. Tell me about the decision to launch this token specifically for the Solana mobile dapp store in this ecosystem as opposed to just using Solana itself and just how is that playing out so far? Playing out pretty interestingly. It's very early days, I will say. You know, we we wanted to get a head start on these broader ambitions as quickly as possible because we knew phones had just reached the hands of our users and developers were coming on board and that was the right time to capture the momentum. In terms of why we decided to launch SKR, the truth is we have this like massively growing community of users and developers and hopefully more hardware manufacturers in the future. And trying to keep all of these parties aligned when they have totally different sets of interests and incentives and needs is really hard. One of the things that crypto does beautifully is provide coordination mechanisms, find a way to build economic systems built on top of assets so that a bunch of different people who maybe want different things can find some commonality and all push towards the same path. If I had, you know, if I walked into the the Google Play leadership meeting or the Apple App Store leadership meeting and proposed a token to help everybody who participates in making the App Store great capture a portion of its upside and be more aligned, I think heads would explode.

[00:11:54]Uh but it's something that we're in the unique position to do. And I the other question with respect to why not just tie it to SOL, SOL stands to support the security of the whole of the Solana network. It's It is a big set of protocols and products and developers and validators. Um and while it's a really critical asset, it is something that we are somewhat adjacent to. You know, in the same way that um you know, England moving to the uh moving off of the year um Brexit, that kind of like do we belong to this bigger thing or are we our own thing? I think we want to avoid a world where we're trying to build our own economic system and two to three years from now we're having this crisis of confidence like we attached ourselves to this this bigger thing that we don't have as much control over.

[00:12:43]Let's try to bring an asset in that we can coordinate around independently from how everything else is going. And as we continue to mature and evolve, we'll find the right ways to plug into that broader momentum.

[00:12:56]Um I think we tried to get ahead of of that type of kind of crisis, like I said. Uh and that's the reason we didn't ultimately attach ourselves to SOL as part of this project.

[00:13:04]Okay, got you. So it's a way to try to align the players specifically in this ecosystem of the the Solana mobile ecosystem. Um but I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit more cuz it's it's still like you said, very early days for SKR. Where does SKR and Solana like where's their overlap? Do they support each other in any specific ways?

[00:13:23]Is that still being figured out or just like talk to me a little bit about the nature of that relationship as you see it right now. Yeah, SKR is a Solana based asset. It's an SPL token. It lives on the Solana blockchain. Um all of the apps, the developers, the the wallet, all of our core infrastructure is Solana based. So with respect to the broader ecosystem, it is like we are as much an ecosystem team as anybody who's building a DeFi protocol or any type of consumer app on top of the blockchain.

[00:13:51]The difference is we're trying to build a platform on top of Solana as opposed to just a single product or a single single protocol. Um but the token, you know, as we move forward, the token gives us a lot of really interesting opportunities to experiment with new types of economics and new types of uh governance and enforcement in a new economy. So when you think about right now, we have a lot of users who have a lot of assets, who do a lot of trading.

[00:14:17]There are revenue streams that come off of that. They might not be the 30% that Apple and Google choose to take from developers, but there are still revenue sources very real revenue sources.

[00:14:26]Um rather than us just trying to, you know, fill our pockets and take taxes and take tolls, we want to play as minimal a role as possible in this growing ecosystem and give everybody else reason to step up and take more ownership. And so we can use those revenue streams to support the value of the token, to go back to the people who hold the token. And as more revenue streams pop up, as more apps are launched, as more services launch, that gives us that many more opportunities to continue to incentivize people to build apps, use apps, try things, provide signals to the community as to what to try, secure the network. Uh all these jobs that are going to that are a part of running something like a Google Play that we're not just going to hire 100,000 people to run, how do you have the community step up and fill those roles? That's what we're thinking about. Got you. Okay, so it's all in Solana, it's all on Solana and it brings more users, innovation, economic energy to Solana. So there's alignment there. I didn't want people to come away from this conversation thinking, you know, it's a breakaway kingdom or something. No, no. To to to put a to put a very fine point on it as well, we are Solana mobile. It's in the name. Uh we we are a part of Solana Labs, the company who originally launched the Solana validator network. So it to us, Solana, in addition to being where we're from, we also feel really strongly that for mobile to succeed, it you know, you need to build on top of things that are fast, that have super high capacity, that are inexpensive.

[00:15:59]Like one of the things that made mobile take off uh traditionally, like in web two land, was cloud infrastructure got super cheap. So, you know, the phone in your pocket could do enough and then the cloud could do everything else. And in the same way, Solana can the network can support cheap transactions, it can support lots of transactions. And so really it's like obviously the home if crypto and mobile are going to live together, it has to happen on Solana.

[00:16:29]Got you. I appreciate you being very clear about all of that. Um I want to ask some more questions about something you touched on a little bit, which is how this SKR token sort of aligns this economic model in the dapp store elements of of the Solana mobile ecosystem and sort of aligns incentives between, like you said, users, developers, and just all the other participants and how this is distinct from App Stores from from Apple, Google, other major web two players. Talk to us a little bit about that and how that economic model aligns incentives. Well, maybe a helpful starting point is to be a little bit more crisp about like how the current App Store model works, which is as a developer, I submit an app and then somebody at Apple or Google maybe reviews it and they maybe approve it, they maybe don't. They interpret their rules in a specific way. They maybe email me. I have to figure out what I did wrong. I resubmit.

[00:17:18]And then once I get submitted, I got to hope my app is found. There's all these steps that are super opaque and totally controlled by one party. That is like exactly where crypto Those are the types of problems that our whole industry should be trying to solve.

[00:17:31]And so we are trying to build a system that enables developers to build, developers to publish, and for users to discover those experiences without relying on one party sitting in the middle saying, "This app is okay. This app is not okay. Hey users, you should check out this app. Hey users, you shouldn't have to worry about this app."

[00:17:49]Um and so we're working to slowly decentralize all that and the token gives us the opportunity to enable decentralized approvals of apps into the store, decentralized curation of apps featured in the store. Um all of the things that a community can do if they work together and are on the same page, but historically haven't because they've been wholly owned by either Apple or Google. Your phone carrier knows more about you than your best friend does. [music] Where you go, who you call, when you sleep, and they're selling all of it. AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, they've all been caught leaking data or cashing in on it.

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[00:19:55]Absolutely. Yeah, the dApp store is a very kind of easy to grok starting point. It's like there's currently a closed ecosystem thing happening on Apple and Google. What if we opened it up? How do we align?

[00:20:05]That tends to make a lot of sense to people.

[00:20:08]Our bigger ambition, our bigger vision, is growing to other hardware partners like I mentioned. What does it mean for the Solana Mobile Stack to run on the billions of Android devices that are sold every single year that are not our own? To make that happen, you need to ensure security and trust in a device.

[00:20:27]Right now, the people who come to us, who buy the phone, they say, "We trust that Solana Mobile built the thing, but the moment we start handing it over and we start encouraging other OEMs, other hardware manufacturers, to implement it, we need ways to sort of control that implementation, make sure that devices are verifiable, are trustworthy.

[00:20:46]And so, the token's going to play a really critical role in that as well, because as devices, new devices come onto the network, they're going to need to attest to being trustworthy. They're going to need to say, "Hey, I've got the Solana Mobile Stack. It's doing what it's supposed to do. Here's a bunch of proofs. Here's a bunch of checks. Like, please confirm." And then, in a decentralized fashion, there's going to be an opportunity for the network to say, "Yep, that device is trustworthy.

[00:21:08]We're going to give it back an okay."

[00:21:10]And then, it basically gets a pass to be a part of the network, get access to the dApp store, get access to all these things. Um and SKR as a token represents one sliver of the rights to say, "Yes, that device is legit." or "No, it is not." Um and so, that is very much our broader ambition is really swim upstream to the the very early part of a phone booting up, so that phones can prove themselves as trustworthy. And I think the token is going to play a very critical role in that as we go beyond just governance of our store. Okay. Yeah, and that that makes a lot of sense because um as you expand beyond things that are already like vetted and in the system, it it helps continue to expand that security and trust as the ecosystem grows. Uh Emmett, you've alluded to this a couple of times, but I want to like read this into the record and ask some questions about this, cuz this is kind of big news here. Um a few months ago, Solana uh Mobile announced a partnership with MediaTek to integrate the Solana Mobile Stack uh directly into MediaTek's chipset environment. You're going to have to explain what all this means to me in a minute, but uh this chipset environment powers 46% of Android devices globally. Explain to us what this partnership does, what this unlocks for Solana Mobile, and just in simple terms that people can understand what this actually practically means. Yes.

[00:22:19]Okay. I will go I'll go out and I'll slowly zoom in. So, Okay. we are we are targeting Android phones as our as the area we want to hit. First off, Android is still the dominant operating system in the world. Sometimes when you live in in North America or developed countries, it's easy to forget because of the dominance of iOS, but globally it's still really critical.

[00:22:38]And similarly, when you look at the adoption of crypto, it is really taking off in some more developing markets. And so, there's obvious synergy there. Um also, Apple is doing its own thing. You know, they've filed a few patents for self-custody of digital assets. So, they're clearly thinking about it.

[00:22:55]Samsung's clearly thinking about it. Uh but we're at a point where we can work with hardware manufacturers who are not Apple and who are not Samsung and who don't have that R&D to bring really great crypto experiences to their users.

[00:23:08]But to do that, we have to work with companies who don't have infinite R&D budgets. We can't just walk into them and be like, "Hey guys, like good luck.

[00:23:14]Figure this out." We have to bring them something that's really simple and really turn-key. And that's where working with MediaTek and Trustonic and all these established names really helps, because these are vendors that the big Android phone makers are already working with.

[00:23:30]They've already got chips in their phones. They've already got secure elements in their phones. They do everything that your phone needs to do, from your biometrics to holding your credit cards for Google Pay. All we're doing is extending the tech that's already there.

[00:23:44]And the best way to do that is to work with these partners directly, rather than doing a custom bespoke implementation every time we work with a new hardware partner, cuz we've done the custom thing ourselves twice. It's hard.

[00:23:56]Uh we want to make it as easy as possible to be on as many devices as possible, uh and not have OEMs have to become crypto experts, which it's it's going to be a long shot for that to happen. Okay. So, just in terms of like practical understanding of what this means though, does this mean that if I have an Android phone, that it can become a Solana phone? Or does it just mean that I can get access to the Solana dApp store? What does that look like from a user's side once this integration starts to roll out and and you know, brings all these Android phones into the potential set of users here?

[00:24:24]Unfortunately, this isn't something that will work retroactively. Uh what we're trying to do does require the trust and security and verifiability that you and I were just talking about, where in order for a device to be a part of this growing economy, you have to know that users can trust it, that it's going to follow all the rules. And the only way to do that is to be implemented below the operating system. And so, anytime you talk about going below the operating system, that's not something you can just download from an app store.

[00:24:53]That's not something you can just download from the website. That has to be a part of a bring-up of the phone.

[00:24:57]Like, literally from the the time it is manufactured to the first software is flashed on it. And so, while I would love to just make a switch that every phone already in the market could become a Solana Mobile device, the truth is, we have to do it in a way that's really trustworthy and secure.

[00:25:13]And the best way to do that is to work with phone manufacturers, so that their future devices can support our tech, our stack, all the software experiences. And so, my vision is not to to capture all the devices that have already been sold, but or to rather be an increasing portion of future Android devices that are sold.

[00:25:32]Do you think that this is going to compete with the sale of your own phones, or do you not care about the trade-off there? It's it's worth it.

[00:25:38]Like, how do you think about that like competing with yourself aspect of this?

[00:25:42]Yeah, the truth is, if other [snorts] Android manufacturers do as good a job of implementing our stack, so that the core of our power users determine, "Actually, this this phone meets my needs 100%. I don't need to buy the Solana Mobile phone." I think we're actually okay with that. Hardware is like a very hard and ugly business, and we've been doing it because we have to.

[00:26:03]But in the future, if other hardware manufacturers do a good enough job of serving the users that we've served historically, then we can just pour all of our efforts on making the software great. Cuz at the end of the day, we are software experts, right? We're crypto software experts who know systems really well and know how to implement on a phone.

[00:26:19]But we've done the hardware stuff because we've had to. And while it's been fun, it's mostly been hard. Uh so, we're not too worried about competing with ourselves. In an ideal world, we don't have to make hardware. It's not to say we won't. If there is a need from our community, if the other hardware manufacturers don't give exactly what the core of our audience needs, we will absolutely be open to making more devices in the future. But for now, I I think there's a pretty good chance that with all of the great Android phones out there, if we can get the right partners on board, we can give people lots of choice, lots of entry points, in a way that we can't as a standalone phone builder.

[00:26:56]What does the timeline look like for getting this rolled out to the point where it is in all of the new Android devices that are sold or or could be?

[00:27:04]Like, what what is the delay between like where we are now and when that's a reality? It's long.

[00:27:09]>> [laughter] >> It's a it takes time. We uh we're we're in a bunch of really encouraging conversations right now. I don't have any announcements to make in terms of specific names or exactly how far along we are, but we're making really good progress. We went to the world's biggest mobile conference back in March and met with I think uh eight or nine different big global phone manufacturers, and those conversations are ongoing. So, I'm feeling really encouraged, but the truth is, phones get feature-defined and like kind of locks down pretty far in advance at a lot of these companies.

[00:27:41]And so, the time it'll take to make sure that they understand crypto fully and that we're on the same page about what the implementation looks like and actually getting it slotted into their phones, you know, I would be shocked if there were devices in market in 2026. Uh but I do think 2027 is within reach.

[00:27:59]Okay. So, let's talk about the sort of like the the fully realized vision of of what you see happening here. Like, you know, 2027 comes, or let's say 5 years from now. You have a lot of this rolled out. You have this sort of open mobile ecosystem that's got Web3 capacities enabled. Where does the Solana Mobile team sit in that? What role do you play?

[00:28:18]And what do you see that ecosystem looking like? Like, what's that vision once this rolls out fully? Yeah. I think our team will always focus on building great experiences, great platform experiences, in the same way that the team at Android within Google focuses on the platform tools. They focus on the Google Play Store and Google Pay and sort of all the connective tissue, but don't build every app. Same is true of Apple, right? Like, Apple doesn't build the hundreds of thousands of apps that are in their store. They build a really great app store. They build really great tools and services for developers, and they build really great connective experiences for users. So, that Apple Pay works the same in an app or on a website or on your computer. It's just all feels very cohesive.

[00:29:03]Our role at Solana Mobile will be the same. How do you build all of the connective tissue, all of the platform stuff, so that all of the other developers who build apps and do things well for users and make sure that users have a great wallet experience and make sure that users have security and make sure that OEMs implement that properly.

[00:29:21]Um so, we'll always sort of be that focus on that connective layer.

[00:29:25]But in terms of what it looks like in 5 years, you know, my hunch is that we're really serving the audience of people who have maybe been interested in buying some crypto assets, maybe been interested in in trying some of these things, or maybe have already kind of gone off the deep end and have self-custody and have hardware wallets, who want better access to it. I think there's a pretty broad spectrum there that we can service in terms of kind of thinking about finance and assets, but the other piece that I feel really excited about is payments, which anytime we're talking to these hardware manufacturers, they know that their customers right now are very dependent on their phones to get to receive and send money, but on pretty untrustworthy networks depending on what part of the country they're in, they have to spend a lot to go pick it up at a counter somewhere. There's just all this inefficiency that I think crypto's really well suited to service.

[00:30:23]But those people don't have computers.

[00:30:24]Those people don't have laptops. They don't They're not going to download Chrome extensions. They're not going to buy hardware wallets and plug them in.

[00:30:30]Like that's not their level of internet connectivity. They have a phone. They have a basic smartphone or a basic feature phone.

[00:30:37]That is their connection to the world.

[00:30:39]And so I think in addition to serving the growing world of people who want access to new types of assets and new ways to hold their manage There's also this growing world of people who use their phones to pay and be paid that I think our tech can help service for millions or billions of people around the world. Wall Street is here. The White House is here. All of crypto's here. We're talking about Consensus, the world's longest-running and most influential digital assets conference happening in Miami May 5th [music] through 7th. This is where 20,000 plus decision-makers from 100 plus countries gather to shape the future of finance. 72% are director level or above [music] from representing 4 trillion in crypto AUM. Three days, six stages, 500 plus speakers including Michael Saylor, Brad Garlinghouse, Anatoly Yakovenko, and Eric Trump tackling the three forces driving trillions on chain, crypto at scale, institutional integration, and agentic commerce. Deals get signed here. Funds get raised here. The next cycle starts here. Register and save 20% with code MilkRoad at consensus.coindesk.com.

[00:31:40]Yeah, and I want to ask about that as it relates to the the development of Solana overall because I think that there's been sort of this story that Solana has been sort of like a retail focused not like a a meme casino exactly, but there's been a lot of retail focus, let's say that. Um but then Solana is now evolving and trying to you know focus on things like tokenization of real world assets and offering payment solutions. Where do you see this fitting into that overall strategy? And you touched about it a little bit, but I like what does that look like for you know your your role, Solana Mobile's role in the overall Solana strategy and growth of Solana?

[00:32:13]Yeah, I think the two things are pretty aligned. You know, we're we sit separately from the Solana Foundation who is sort of responsible for the the broader strategic thinking of the network uh and adoption of it, but we think in a lot of the same terms fortunately. And so on the one hand, we've been very keen to support the use cases that have really battle-tested the network. Whether that's been the meme coin hysteria, whether that was NFTs, like our focus has been okay, there's this core of users. This is a thing that they care about. Let's make sure our technology meets their needs. We'll be able to learn from this. We'll be able to build goodwill with this community.

[00:32:48]But as we sort of like look forward, we know that those swings don't last forever, that those trends don't last forever, that they're hot and cold, and that the stickier, longer-term things, whether it's institutional and finance and payments-oriented or something else, that is where we onboard millions of people, and that's where we stick around and we're more than just a fad. So kind of meet the users where they are right now, learn from it as quickly as we can, but don't lose sight of like the bigger opportunity that crypto can solve.

[00:33:20]I'm curious your thoughts on competition and how you're building a moat around this because it's clear that Solana for most like the Web3 space anyway or crypto-native space is one of the most committed ecosystems towards trying to do things related to mobile development and and dapp stores, but there's also a lot of major incumbents in Web2 who as you kind of alluded to have filed some patents and maybe making some plans. You know, there's Meta, Apple, Google, you know, go down the list. How do you think about the the moat here and what makes the the Solana Mobile offering different, unique, and defensible going forward in in the the the landscape of the marketplace here? Yeah, so for you know, when you compare what we're building to something like just a standalone self-custody mobile wallet, right? Like if we can consider that and as a first comparison point, we are building cross-device platform-level experiences that an app you download from a store can never accomplish. It's never going to get the privileges needed. It's never going to be able to modify system software. It's never going to get access to the secure element. There's There's all these things that you just don't get when you're in when you're an app downloaded from the store. So for users with a very basic set of needs where buying some tokens on a centralized exchange or holding a few meme coins in a self-custody wallet is all they're trying to do, we may not have a moat versus those versus those experiences. But for users who want to have more meaningful more meaningful assets held on their phone where security is important or who wants to try multiple apps and not just go to web pages within an embedded browser, we have a significant moat because we're at the system level.

[00:34:59]So I feel very confident there. When you compare our moat to an Apple or a Samsung, if they are serious and will continue to invest. Samsung has already invested.

[00:35:09]Apple has just kind of hinted that it's investing. We will be in competition, frankly. But the truth is they sort of stand alone as titans of consumer electronics with respect to their R&D budgets and how much they can spend.

[00:35:23]The long tail of phone manufacturers not named Apple and not named Samsung can't afford to invest in that type of innovation. You know, they're on razor-thin margins. They're selling commodities, right? Like RAM is super expensive right now, so their phones are becoming more expensive.

[00:35:39]They need help, and so I think our strategic moat there is we can service multiple hardware partners who are still delivering hundreds of millions of phones around the world each year and not you know and and sit alongside Apple and Samsung knowing that there's lots of phones to be sold around the world each year. I mean, that's a really helpful answer and kind of paints that picture well, and I can I can see where you're going with that. I want to end with a question here that you're free to punt on if you don't want to, but we have a lot of big fans of Solana in our community, and they would kill me if I didn't ask you this. So I'm really curious your prediction on Solana for 2026 or SOL for 2026. Right now the price is below $85. Solana has been one of the most resilient projects and resilient assets in all of crypto, but right now it's facing a lot of headwinds and like just general market downtrend.

[00:36:26]What do you think happens for Solana for the rest of 2026? Are you bullish here?

[00:36:29]Do you think we keep chopping? What's your price prediction for SOL?

[00:36:33]You know, if if I were to make a price prediction, my legal team would probably break in break in here. A SWAT team would show up. I always try to get people in trouble at least once.

[00:36:42]>> no. Here's what Here's what I will say.

[00:36:43]Here's what I will give you. I've been a part of Solana Labs for four years now.

[00:36:48]Uh I joined Solana Labs literally four years ago. Was part of this like fledgling phone project. We had our our kickoff event with SBF on stage, and then I was at Breakpoint a few months later when everything went totally upside down. I've ridden things back up. I've ridden them back down.

[00:37:06]I've I've been through a few of these cycles. What I'm seeing now that gives me a ton of optimism versus previous kind of downturns is the developer community is like really really really showing up. Our app store count went from 25 when we launched Saga to 50 apps when it sold out, and then 100 apps when we launched Seeker. We're now over 800 apps. There is this very real momentum of builders who still see the opportunity and are getting closer and closer to product-market fit each day. And so you know, I can't control the macro conditions. I can't read those maybe perfectly. But what I can read, the signals I can read is real developers building real products, finding real product-market fit, and users who love to use those things.

[00:37:51]And the more kind of dependence each of those parties builds on the network, the more optimistic you have to be about the future of it. Emmett, you uh you are are going to not get in trouble with your legal team, but if the the job at Solana Mobile doesn't work out, you can always get a backup job as a hopium dealer.

[00:38:07]That was great. Very good answer.

[00:38:10]Um thank you so much for being on the Milk Road show. Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?

[00:38:14]Yeah. Uh solanamobile.com. If you don't have a Seeker, you should buy one.

[00:38:18]They're very cool. I love mine. Um but in in all seriousness, it's a really interesting I think experiment on what building a mobile a crypto-first mobile platform looks like. And so if you care enough to be listening to this show, even if you're not a Solana maxi, it's worth seeing what mobile experiences can look like if you care about crypto. Um so solanamobile.com, you can buy one. If you're a developer, if you build apps, you can also head to solanamobile.com.

[00:38:42]We've got great documentations and and resources so you can launch your app in our store. Um like I said, we're over 800 apps. That is a lot versus where we've been, but it's nothing compared to the bigger app stores. So you get tons of exposure to a really high-value audience. We'd love to have you in our store. Um so yeah, head to solanamobile.com.

[00:39:01]Emmett Hallier, Solana Mobile, thank you so much for being on the Milk Road show.

[00:39:04]I really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah, of course. Thanks, John.

[00:39:08]Thank you all for joining us. I hope you all learned something. Until next time, as I always say, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of the Milk Road show. Thanks, everyone. Bye.

[00:39:17]Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're [music] trading each event? Subscribe to our channel, join the Milk Road daily and pro newsletters, and start investing like the top 1%. [music] This show is for educational purposes only. Nothing we say is financial advice. Investing is risky. Never invest more than you can afford to lose.