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Howdy! 

Probably the biggest news of Solana Breakpoint just broke, and Breakpoint hasn’t started yet. Here’s to hoping Solana Mobile sends me a Seeker to play around with:

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

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 Solana natives are bound to be even more excited about 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.

— Jack Kubinec

Blockworks and the Solana Foundation are hosting Solana Founders Summit at Permissionless. Join a curated group of ~60 Solana industry leaders and founders for a day of workshops and off-the-record conversations.

$25 million and $21.75 million

That’s how much Drift and Helius raised in two separate funding rounds announced in Singapore. Based on my quick glance at the numbers, the last Solana-native project to hit $20 million in a funding round was Ellipsis Labs, developer of Phoenix and now Atlas, which disclosed a Paradigm-led round in April.

A month before, Eclipse raised $50 million. With Ellipsis launching Atlas, both Ellipsis and Eclipse are building their own blockchains, which investors tend to value highly (see: Berachain and Monad).

I point this out because neither Drift nor Helius are building a blockchain (as far as I know), which might mean Solana-native startups have broken into a higher tier in terms of how much they’re able to raise. But funding announcements tend to lag behind reality, so we likely won’t know if this is the case for several months.

— Jack Kubinec

Iggy Azalea recently pulled out of her appearance at Solana’s Breakpoint conference due to unexpected last-minute changes. She had originally proposed a performance featuring dancers in business suits as part of her debate closer. Eric Wall, the other half of the now-canceled debate, was on board with the spectacle and even agreed to participate in the... AHEM... "choreography." However, despite initially approving the concept, she claims that the Solana team ultimately rejected it with little warning, citing regulatory concerns related to the venue.

Azalea expressed frustration, noting she was informed just 48 hours before the event, despite addressing the issue two weeks prior. While disappointed, she emphasized she has no ill feelings toward the event's organizers, later sharing her debate opener where she defended the role of celebrity memecoins in the crypto space.

The crypto community had plenty to say about this turn of events, with many noting their respect for Azalea's decision to stand her ground. @valueandtime summed the situation up as, "Iggy Azalea really canceled her speech at a crypto event because the nerds wouldn't let her twerk." @m00nb0y187 asked, "Isn't this the plot of Footloose?" @SlorgoftheSlugs expressed confusion, "I've never heard people say no to something before because 'it would go too viral.'"

Others felt the venue had made the right call. @SlamDiegoZoo translated the subtext, explaining “‘Too viral’ is a nice way of saying too trashy.” @lebinxie asked, "Am I the only one that agrees with Breakpoint?" While @MohammadHaytch moralized, "True influence doesn’t come from antics or spectacle; it comes from substance, integrity, and the ability to inspire meaningful change. If all you have to offer is a momentary flash, then your message will burn out just as quickly as the attention you’ve grabbed."

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Swen Schäferjohann, co-founder of Light Protocol: