On August 4, 2025, Solana Mobile started distributing its second-generation crypto phone, the Seeker. This was the project's biggest effort so far to bring on-chain capabilities to a consumer phone. The business announced the deployment to customers in more than 50 countries and said that preorders had already topped 150,000 units. This is a lot more than the first-generation Saga's manufacturing run.
Kevin Follonier interviewed Anatoly Yakovenko, one of the co-founders of Solana, for the When Shift Happens podcast around the same time. In the conversation, Yakovenko discussed why a blockchain business would make a phone in the first place. He remarked, "Mobile was like my baby," alluding to his time at Qualcomm and the security stack that is already built into contemporary chipsets.
Everything You Need to Know About the Solana Seeker Phone
"As soon as I started taking crypto seriously, I thought that there was a whole stack for secure elements and a trusted display built into these chips... developed... to make cryptographic signatures as safe as a Ledger." So your phone has all of these stuff.
He said that the goal was to focus on both consumers and developers: "There is a chance to produce something better for people... and a chance to do something for developers, which is to do away of the 30% fees. Your app store is favorable to crypto. He also termed the smartphone "the tricorder from Star Trek," which shows how important it is to how people go online.
At the core of Seeker is a hardware-based Seed Vault that was built in collaboration with Solflare. It maintains private keys and seed phrases separate from the application layer while still enabling transactions to happen in the app. Yakovenko said it was a means to prevent hazardous things like inputting a main wallet's seed phrase into other applications: "Don't share your seed phrase between wallets or apps."
The Seed Vault keeps your seed phrase safe, but you may use the wallet with more than one app. Seeker improves the Saga's confirmation flow by making it "more like Apple Pay," with secure prompts and a trusted display for signing. Solana Mobile's own papers also say that the Seed Vault is the device's main security border, which now works with double-tap transactions and fingerprint access.
Yakovenko made it clear that Seeker is not about replacing every iPhone right now. He said that a lot of businesses force their employees to use Apple's security tools. But he said that there is a big market outside of "iPhone land" that can be reached. He also presented a practical case for utilizing Seeker as a second device: a dedicated, safer "NFT cryptophone" for hot-wallet activity, while long-term holdings remain on hardware wallets and multi-sig configurations. "Cold storage is distinct... You should always keep hot and cold things apart.
Seeker comes with Solana dApp Store 2.0, which is a place for developers and distributors to sell their applications. Solana Mobile says that this store is crypto-friendly and doesn't have the regulation issues that have made it hard for web3 apps to get into mainstream stores in the past. The gadget also adds Seeker ID, which is a single identity that links a wallet address, a .skr username, and a Genesis Token to a user profile. This makes it easier to sign up for apps and get incentives. Solana advertises this to developers as evidence of validity and a method to get in touch with "high-value users."
It's evident what the business stakes are. Yakovenko added that the project now has a way to go from 150,000 preorders to one million devices, which he thinks is adequate to support a separate mobile ecosystem. However, he was honest that getting to 10 million is still a task that has to be worked on "one step at a time."
For little background, Solana's first phone, the Saga, sold around 20,000 copies. It had a hard time at initially but subsequently sold out because of speculation about app incentives and memecoin airdrops.
Yakovenko's clear goal is "to disrupt the duopoly." Not by fiat, but by giving people a real choice where on-chain signature, wallet UX, and distribution economics are built in instead than being added on. He said, "One participant, even a small one, can change the market equilibrium."
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