As you might remember, Solana released the details of their Web3 focused mobile phone, Saga. The team, which aims to bring together crypto related apps on a smartphone, is also determined to bring hardware wallets to mobile phones with Solana Saga.
Anatoly Yakovenko talked about the 30 percent commission that Apple and Google take from applications on their app markets at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 event and said, “The opportunity is here now,” referring to the Web3 phone Saga. Yakovenko continued his words as follows:
“I don’t know what needs to change internally for both Google and Apple to waive the 30 percent tax on apps. It would be great for them to give up in the next five years.”
According to Yakovenko, Web3-focused telephones will allow creators and platforms to enable digital property rights for organizations and users alike. Thus, paying Apple and Google a 30 percent commission for in-app sales will also be eliminated.
According to Yakovenko; according to the idea of true digital ownership, digital items should also be treated like physical items. Apple or Google, on the other hand, do not see eye-to-eye with this line of thinking at the moment.
Yakovenko emphasized that traditional technology companies are built on a rent-seeking model:
“They’re built around a rent-seeking model where all the content is owned by the creator and you as a user rent it. When you buy a video from Amazon, you don’t actually own it; everyone realizes that you don’t own it.”
For this reason, Yakovenko states that neither Google nor Apple really want to adopt web3. True digital asset ownership is disrupting Google and Apple’s business models, according to Yakovenko. At this point, he brought up Apple’s commissions from NFT marketplaces:
“Magic Eden can’t sell a $10,000 NFT for $13,000 on the iOS app, they can’t tack on tax nor can they eat it because that’ll destroy profits.”
After the App Store began accepting NFT applications, Magic Eden chose to pull the application from the market after learning about the commission rate. After this move by Magic Eden, Apple made a proposal to reduce the commission rate to 15 percent. However, Magic Eden did not accept the offer.
Solana aims to sell between 25 thousand and 50 thousand units.
Emphasizing that the goal they are trying to achieve is a difficult journey, Yakovenko stated that they entered this road because it was cheap enough to be tried. According to Yakovenko, the phone market has reached maturity where teams can quickly create a device with a Web3 experience with minor changes to an Android device.
“Right now, this opportunity exists because we don’t need to sell $10 million right away. We can actually target a very small niche audience that is crypto-heavy web3 users.”
However, Anatoly Yakovenko stated that their goal is not to sell 10 million devices, they set themselves smaller targets:
“Our goal is not to sell 10 million devices. It would be great for us if between 25,000 and 50,000 devices were sold next year.”
While Anatoly Yakovenko’s comments on Web3 were kind, Solana has been plagued by interruption problems in recent times. Solana suffered an outage of 6 hours and 19 minutes in the first days of October. With the October outage, Solana has experienced a major outage for the fourth time since January.
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