The month of December proved to be quite lucrative for the overall crypto market, but did bring expansive activity to one particular ecosystem; Solanas. From Solana's native cryptocurrency SOL trading at the top of the price ladder in recent days and Solana-based NFTs selling out, the Solana ecosystem was already showing signs of recovery as a relatively new member of its ecosystem became popular again. This new member is called Bonk and it is a memecoin based on the Solana blockchain.
In a new development, Solana's Saga smartphones appear to be sold at high prices on online marketplaces in international markets.
Over the weekend, a Solana device sold for $5,000 (approximately Rs. 4.14 lakh) – which is about eight times its original launch price of $600 (approximately Rs. 49,795) on eBay. Another copy of the Saga was up for grabs for $3,316 (approximately Rs. 2.75 lakh) and many others were trading for over $2,000 (approximately Rs. 1.65 lakh), according to a report by Cointelegraph.
Notably, each Saga smartphone comes with a free airdrop of 30 million Bonk tokens, which is cited as one of the main reasons why Saga devices are selling like hotcakes.
In recent days, Bonk surpassed recent memecoin star Pepecoin, in terms of market capitalization. In the previous 30 days, the price of Bonk token rose from $0.0000028 (approximately Rs. 0.00023) to $0.000012 (approximately Rs. 0.0010) and reached a valuation of $762 million (approximately Rs. 6,353 crores ).
According to Solana Mobile's official X-handle, the Saga sold out on December 16th.
The Saga is SOLD OUT!
Words cannot describe how much we appreciate your support. We are nothing without this amazing community:people_hugging:
While the past few days will leave a mark on our history, we are excited about the future :saluting_face:
Stay informed :sparkles: pic.twitter.com/KJje8lBDLL
— Solana Mobile: seedling: (@solanamobile) December 16, 2023
Buyers of this device will automatically get 30 million Bonk tokens, the value of which would be $638 (approximately Rs. 52,977) as per the current price of the token. Saga buyers also appear to be betting big that the Bonk price will escalate even further, needing to rise by at least 620 percent before they can see any real gains.
Now that the Saga Phone is becoming all the rage in its own right, there are also some unrelated crypto projects airdropping these phones.
For example, the Memecoin project called Samoyed Coin has done that announced an airdrop for Saga in the coming weeks. GenesysGo, a decentralized storage provider, also plans to have its own Shadow (SHDW) mined via an app on the Saga phone.
Solana's Saga smartphone was launched in April 2022 and was touted as the arrival of the world's first generation of crypto and Web3-centric smartphones. In addition to a crypto payment app Solana Pay, the company says there is also a 'seed vault' pre-installed on the Saga phone to securely store all private keys linked to the handset.
