Update: From the time of writing this article till now, there has been some airdrops distributed to those who pre-ordered the Chapter 2. If you participated in the pre-order, kindly check the wallet address linked to your pre-order, you should have received some free tokens.
List of Airdropped tokens so far and their worth at ATH.
$MEW(~$300)- https://twitter.com/MewsWorld/status/1774891669319831836?t=4kAPpf7d3HDUm1uhxN2ELg&s=19
$WUFFI(~$30)- https://twitter.com/WUFFI_Inu/status/1777689175271055666?t=vArkoKpWrPDPhI1bxRKd4Q&s=19
$MANEKI(~$100)- https://twitter.com/DegenerateNews/status/1783402744193179934?t=ymzHh8Xlenmst-MsgGhFXw&s=19
The airdrops received so far already offsets the initial pre-order cost of $450 in January.
Based on the hype of the overnight success of the Solana Saga Mobile announced in 2022 and then launched in 2023. The Solana Mobile team is here again with a new product announcement priced at $450 (at the time of this post), and currently receiving bookings for pre-orders (with over 40,000 booked in less than a week).
A brief history about the Solana Saga Mobile, which was first announced on June 22, 2022 with a price tag of $1000 for pre-order. The device was designed and manufactured by OSOM with the following specs: 6.67" OLED display, 50MP Main Camera, 12MP Ultrawide Camera, 16MP Selfie Camera, Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor, 12GB RAM, 512GB Storage with support for a microSD card expansion(up to 512GB), Android 13 OS, 4110mAh battery capacity.
Apart from the hardware features, the device also featured its own unique integrated Seed Vault and DApp Store built by Solana, which made it stand out from other similar Android devices in the market. The Seed Vault provides the opportunity for its users to safely store and secure their wallet private keys independently on the device which cannot be accessed by anyone else not even the wallet applications without your permission. While the DApp Store based on Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) which is an open-source toolkit that enables developers to safely and easily launch their mobile applications powered by Solana which are managed separately from the renowned Apple App Store and Google Playstore.
The smartphone was then officially launched on May 8, 2023. But the sales record was very poor, which forced the team to slash down the price to $599, as announced on twitter. This still didn’t improve the sales as expected, until December when the price of BONK token hit an All time high (ATH) price at $0.000034 on December 15, 2023 according to Coingecko, which happens to be exactly the same day the device also sold out. The remaining units of the device all got sold out overnight based on the fact that there was 30 million BONK tokens allocated to each activated Saga device, amongst other incentives and rewards.
The value of the allocated 30 million BONK tokens was worth about ~$1020 at ATH, which was above the cost of the device, thereby offsetting the cost of the device in monetary rewards. This led to the rapid increase in demand for the device even after it got sold out at the official site. People resorted to checking alternative sources to be able to purchase a unit of the device. According to the law of supply and demand, some persons took advantage of the opportunity to resell their already purchased units for as high as $5,000 on ebay according to The Block.
In conclusion, this makes the next Saga device a potential opportunity to gain access to such opportunities based on the free incentives that came with the first edition of the device. The level of interest on what to expect for the next product launch is very high at the moment, which the official release timeline slated for 2025. Similar to the first edition which featured a Saga Genesis NFT non-transferrable, soulbound token unique to each device, the Chapter 2 is also expected to feature its own unique non-transferrable, soulbound Preorder token as announced on Twitter.
If you’re interested in the future of Solana Saga Mobile, you can pre-order a unit of the next Saga Chapter 2 device here.
Thanks for reading through!