# Solana Mobile Strategy: Hardware Partnerships and Tokenomics

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-04-30

## Transcript

What I'm seeing now that gives me a ton of optimism versus previous kind of downturns is the developer community is like, really, really, really showing up.
Solana is known for having one of the most resilient and innovative ecosystems in all of crypto, but they have been facing challenges and competition from general market headwinds and other players in the market.
Could mobile be the key to unlocking the next phase of growth for Solana?
And what exactly is a Solana phone anyway?
Hello and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the podcast that knows that whatever your phone runs on, the core function is sending memes to your friends.
I'm your host, John Gillen.
Today is Thursday, April 30th.
And today we are joined by Emmett Hollier.
Emmett is the general manager and head of Solana Mobile at Solana Labs, where he leads business development, partnerships, strategy, and operations to integrate blockchain into consumer mobile devices.
Emmett has driven key initiatives across the Solana Seca phone launch and the expansion of the Solana Mobile ecosystem overall.
Emmett is going to give us a ton of great insight about this product.
I'm really excited to learn more from him.
So if that all sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
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And without further ado, welcome to the Milk Road Show.
Emmett, how are you, sir?
Good, John.
How are you?
I'm doing really well.
Emmett, I wanted to get right into it and start off with the Seeker phone.
For those who aren't familiar with Solana Mobile, the Seeker phone, you all launched this back in August of 2025.
What is Seeker and what is a Web3 native mobile device?
What does that mean?
Good starting point.
Good question.
Seeker is what blockchain should be on phones.
For us, we know that there's a bunch of users out there who really deeply care about crypto.
and about having access to assets everywhere.
And the truth is, the current non-seeker mobile experience leaves a lot to be desired.
For some users, a centralized exchange works fine if you just are going to buy and hold a couple assets.
But the moment you want to tap into the stuff that makes crypto great, whether that's DeFi or all the interesting apps being built, you're stuck.
with a pretty gnarly set of trade-off decisions to make.
Do you want something that's secure?
Do you want something that's usable?
Do you want to do workarounds in in-app browsers and wallets?
There's no corollary to the rest of what Web2 gets to do on a mobile phone until we built Seeker.
Seeker is really our attempt at bridging the gap between what great Web2 mobile experiences look like and what great crypto mobile experiences look like.
Gotcha.
Okay, so now correct me if I'm wrong on this, but the numbers I've seen is that you have over 150,000 Seeker devices that are live now in the market, out in the wild.
What have been some of the lessons learned from the first year of having this product on the market?
What's some takeaways you've had from getting this out there to people?
We've learned a lot.
One important piece of context is Seeker is actually our second phone.
So we shipped Saga.
its predecessor back in 2023 that was where we learned a lot very quickly uh you know it was admittedly we we took our lumps you know we won worst smartphone of the year from marquez brownlee back in 2023 and we might have earned that in some respects uh but that gave us an opportunity to learn uh and to bring a lot of new innovation and a lot of improvements to seeker and so what sets seeker and saga apart from the rest of the market is There is secure self-custody of digital assets built in for people who care about something like a hardware wallet.
You get a lot of the same features and functionality where assets are stored separate from the rest of the apps in the operating system.
We have an app store with more than 800 apps that are all crypto native.
And we have a wallet that's natively integrated in the phone to make signing transactions and connecting to apps feel more like Apple Pay, where it's this kind of system level sleek experience as opposed to this constant ping-ponging back and forth.
And so now that we started shipping Seeker last August, we've had it in the market for however many months now.
We've learned a lot, but more than anything, people who care about crypto care about doing it everywhere they are and taking their phone on the go with them and making that a core part of their on-chain life.
So we've got really impressive usage both on the user side, but also really impressive developer uptake within our store and a bunch of partnership programs.
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Gotcha.
So that was one of the questions I wanted to ask too, because I am aware of the Saga phone and there have been a lot of changes to the sneaker phone, which we went over a couple of them.
But I'm interested, like, you know, from the user experience and the developer experience, which you...
touched a little bit what has changed with these new functionalities in the seeker phone and talk to us a little bit about what that looks like now that these changes are in place in this new phone yeah i'll start with the hardware okay first off hardware hardware is hard uh it's kind of sucks but it's it's it's fun but it's hard uh we learned a lot with secret with saga saga was really a very premium device in some ways with respect to the decisions made for fit and finish and its weight, it's like hefty and it's big and the screen is big.
But what we learned from our users is they just want something that feels easy to bring with them.
And so with Seeker, we really took a step back and tried to build something that felt more portable, more mobile, for lack of a better word.
And, you know, when Saga went out, we had a lot of anxiety about the review cycle and that was tough, admittedly.
When Seeker went back around, we had that same anxiety.
Like, would we get all of the decisions we made to build a phone right?
And fortunately, as the community has responded and reviewers have responded, I think we got a lot of those changes right.
It feels easy to hold.
It feels premium, but it's half the price of its predecessor.
So really, we wanted to keep that sort of premium aesthetic and make it feel light and bright and easy to take with you.
So I would say hardware is kind of like first and foremost, the thing we had to change.
But there are some software changes as well.
You know, we carry over Seed Vault, which is that secure self-custody layer I mentioned.
But this time we built a wallet that sits on top of that.
So for users, it all feels like one cohesive package.
They don't have to think about which wallets do I have to download that work with Seed Vault.
And we reduced that strain to make the software experience really seamless.
And I think users have really responded positively.
And we see tons of active usage and frankly, lots of assets being stored on their seekers.
Gotcha.
Okay, cool.
So I'm curious about surprises because I think something that's common in the history of technology and software is that people will design these products and put them out, but users will use them in ways that people have never thought of before.
And you'll see dApp categories explode that you wouldn't have expected.
Have you seen anything like that that has been sort of surprising to you or the Solana mobile team?
The thing that has been least surprising is that DeFi and trading continues to be a driver.
So I'll put that out of the way.
I think it's unsurprising that people want to have The beauty of crypto is the markets are always on.
There's no on-off switch.
So you kind of need to be able to trade if you care about trading wherever you are, whenever.
So that's one of the beautiful things, one of the patterns we've definitely seen.
But in terms of surprises, I think games has been a really interesting unlock.
I think when you look back over the course of the storied history of gaming and crypto trying to find a path forward together, there's obviously been plenty of ups and downs.
kind of the last 10 to 15 years where games have been successful broadly, it's on mobile devices, right?
Like Candy Crush and all these games that people addictively are playing on trains and on buses and wherever they are.
That's because of mobile phones.
And to date, a lot of the innovation happening on crypto-based gaming has not been mobile first.
But now that we've made secure self-custody on phones easy, now that we have an app store that is free.
of some of the draconian terms that apple and google put onto developers we've been able to see a lot of like the promise of games and crypto come together gotcha i want to talk more about the the app store versus the dap store uh soon but um i'm curious about the outlook for the onboarding process, right?
There's been a lot of people in Web3 and in crypto who have been trying to find what is the way to bring millions of users into Web3.
And I'm curious about this strategy from Solana with Solana Mobile.
I think one of the big, honestly, pieces of friction is it's hard to get somebody to move from their comfortable, familiar web to mobile device, like the Apple products, Google products, et cetera, to one of these things.
What is your outlook on that?
Do you think that now that you've got things right with Seeker, you're more likely to bring in more people or do you still think there's friction there?
What's the outlook there for you?
Seeker and Saga have been really targeted at what I would consider the more pro audience, people who care enough.
to buy a crypto phone from a crypto company right so that onboarding wave that you're talking about that hasn't been how we've thought about our users historically with that said we've learned a lot from that audience like these are the people who are willing to kind of take early reps at products that are still trying to figure themselves out and we now feel like we're at a point where we actually know what crypto should look like on a phone and so Our next step, what is kind of the future for this company, this initiative, is to grow through other hardware devices.
I mentioned there's that subset of people who are going to buy a crypto phone from a crypto company.
But everybody else out there, the billions of people who own mobile phones, they have a really kind of personal set of decisions or a personal set of factors that they use when they buy a new phone.
For some of them, for people who have maybe opened a centralized exchange account or have...
tried a self-custody wallet, but just found it to be too confusing and too disconnected from Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Building our tech stack directly, natively into the phones that they would already be buying, give us a much better opportunity to bring those people on chain.
If it feels native to the phone, if it feels like it lives alongside something like a Google Pay.
I think that's the biggest opportunity to onboard people is meet them where they are, meet them where they're already doing money stuff on their phones and accessing the internet on their phones.
Don't make them go find it and learn things on their own.
I want to come back to that point because I think you guys are working in that direction with a lot of these partnerships you're working on.
But first I want to ask about the SKR token.
Solana launched and airdropped a token called SKR back in January of 2026.
Tell me about the decision to launch this token specifically for the Solana mobile DApp store and this ecosystem as opposed to just using Solana itself.
And just how is that playing out so far?
Playing out pretty interestingly.
It's very early days, I will say.
We wanted to get a head start on these broader ambitions as quickly as possible because we knew phones had just reached the hands of our users and developers were coming on board and that was the right time to capture the momentum.
In terms of why we decided to launch SKR, The truth is we have this massively growing community of users and developers and hopefully more hardware manufacturers in the future.
And trying to keep all of these parties aligned when they have totally different sets of interests and incentives and needs is really hard.
One of the things that crypto does beautifully is provide coordination mechanisms, find a way to build economic systems built on top of assets so that a bunch of different people who maybe want different things can find some commonality and all push towards the same path.
If I walked into the Google Play leadership meeting or the Apple App Store leadership meeting and proposed a token to help everybody who participates in making the App Store great capture a portion of its upside and be more aligned, I think heads would explode.
But it's something that we're in the unique position to do.
And the other question, with respect to why not just tie it to Sol?
Sol stands to...
support the security of the whole of the Solana network.
It is a big set of protocols and products and developers and validators.
And while it's a really critical asset, it is something that we are somewhat adjacent to.
In the same way that England moving to the moving off of the euro at brexit that kind of like do we belong to this bigger thing or are we our own thing i think we wanted to avoid a world where we're trying to build our own economic system in two to three years from now we're having this crisis of confidence like we attached ourselves to this this bigger thing that we don't have as much control over let's try to bring an asset in that we can coordinate around independently from how everything else is going.
And as we continue to mature and evolve, we'll find the right ways to plug into that broader momentum.
I think we tried to get ahead of that type of kind of crisis, like I said.
And that's the reason we didn't ultimately attach ourselves to Sol as part of this project.
Okay, gotcha.
So it's a way to try to align the players specifically in this ecosystem of the Solana mobile ecosystem.
But I'm curious if you could tell me a little bit more because it's still, like you said, very early days for SKR.
Where does SKR and Solana Where's their overlap?
Do they support each other in any specific ways?
Is that still being figured out?
Talk to me a little bit about the nature of that relationship as you see it right now.
Yeah.
SKR is a Solana-based asset.
It's an SPL token.
It lives on the Solana blockchain.
All of the apps, the developers, the wallet, all of our core infrastructure is Solana-based.
With respect to the broader ecosystem, we are as much an ecosystem team as anybody who's building a DeFi protocol or any type of consumer app on top of the blockchain.
The difference is we're trying to build a platform on top of Solana as opposed to just a single product or a single protocol.
But the token, as we move forward, the token gives us a lot of really interesting opportunities to experiment with new types of economics and new types of...
governance and enforcement in a new economy.
So when you think about right now, we have a lot of users who hold a lot of assets, who do a lot of trading.
There are revenue streams that come off of that.
They might not be the 30% that Apple and Google choose to take from developers, but there are still revenue sources, very real revenue sources.
Rather than us just trying to fill our pockets and take taxes and take tolls, we want to...
play as minimal a role as possible in this growing ecosystem and give everybody else reason to step up and take more ownership and so we can use those revenue streams to support the value of the token to go back to the people who hold the token and as more revenue streams pop up as more apps are launched as more services launch that gives us that many more opportunities to continue to incentivize people to build apps, use apps, try things, provide signals to the community as to what to try, secure the network, all these jobs that are a part of running something like a Google Play that we're not just going to hire 100,000 people to run.
How do you have the community step up and fill those roles?
That's what we're thinking about.
Gotcha.
Okay.
So it's all in Solana.
It's all on Solana and it brings more users, innovation, economic energy to Solana.
So there's alignment there.
I didn't want people to come away from this conversation thinking, you know, It's a breakaway kingdom or something.
To put a very fine point on it as well, we are Solana Mobile.
It's in the name.
We are a part of Solana Labs, the company who originally launched the Solana Validator Network.
To us, Solana, in addition to being where we're from, we also feel really strongly that for mobile to succeed, you need to build on top of things that are fast.
that have super high capacity, that are inexpensive.
One of the things that made mobile take off traditionally, like in Web2 land, was cloud infrastructure got super cheap.
The phone in your pocket could do enough, and then the cloud could do everything else.
In the same way, Solana, the network, can support cheap transactions.
It can support lots of transactions.
And so really it's like, obviously the home, if crypto and mobile are going to live together, it has to happen on Solana.
Gotcha.
I appreciate you being very clear about all of that.
I want to ask some more questions about something you touched on a little bit, which is how this SKR token sort of aligns this economic model in the DApp Store element of the Solana mobile ecosystem and sort of aligns incentives between, like you said, users, developers, and just all the other participants and how this is distinct from app stores, from Apple, Google, other major Web2 players.
Talk to us a little bit about that and how that economic model aligns incentives.
What might be a helpful starting point is to be a little bit more crisp about like how the current app store model works which is as a developer i submit an app and then somebody at apple or google maybe reviews it and they maybe approve it they maybe don't they interpret their rules in a specific way they maybe email me i have to figure out what i did wrong i resubmit and then once i get submitted i gotta hope my app is found there's all these steps that are super opaque and totally controlled by one party.
That is like exactly where crypto, those are the types of problems that our whole industry should be trying to solve.
And so we're trying to build a system that enables developers to build, developers to publish, and for users to discover those experiences without relying on one party sitting in the middle saying, This app is okay.
This app is not okay.
Hey users, you should check out this app.
Hey users, you shouldn't have to worry about this app.
And so we're working to slowly decentralize all that.
And the token gives us the opportunity to enable decentralized approvals of apps into the store, decentralized curation of apps featured in the store.
All of the things that a community can do if they work together and are on the same page, but historically haven't because they've been wholly owned by either Apple or Google.
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Okay, so now as this ecosystem grows, as you get more dApps, more users, etc., how do you envision the evolution of SKR as a token, and does its role expand beyond just the dApp store?
Talk to me about that roadmap for what the future might look like for this token.
Absolutely.
Yeah, the Dapp Store is a very kind of easy to grok starting point.
It's like there's currently a closed ecosystem thing happening on Apple and Google.
What if we opened it up?
How do we align?
That tends to make a lot of sense to people.
Our bigger ambition, our bigger vision is growing to other hardware partners, like I mentioned.
What does it mean for the Solana mobile stack to run on the billions of Android devices that are sold every single year that are not our own?
To make that happen, you need to ensure security and trust.
in a device.
Right now, the people who come to us who buy the phone, they say, we trust that Solana Mobile built the thing.
But the moment we start handing it over and we start encouraging other OEMs, other hardware manufacturers to implement it, we need ways to sort of control that implementation, make sure that devices are verifiable, are trustworthy.
And so the token is going to play a really critical role in that as well, because as devices, new devices come onto the network.
they're going to need to attest to being trustworthy.
They're going to need to say, hey, I've got the Solana mobile stack.
It's doing what it's supposed to do.
Here's a bunch of proofs.
Here's a bunch of checks.
Please confirm.
And then in a decentralized fashion, there's going to be an opportunity for the network to say, yep, that device is trustworthy.
We're going to give it back an okay.
And then it basically gets a pass to be a part of the network, get access to the Dapp store, get access to all these things.
And SKR as a token represents...
one sliver of the rights to say, yes, that device is legit or no, it is not.
And so that is very much our broader ambition is really swim upstream to the very early part of a phone booting up so that phones can prove themselves as trustworthy.
And I think the token is going to play a very critical role in that as we go beyond just governance of our store.
Okay, yeah, and that makes a lot of sense because as you expand beyond things that are already vetted and in the system, it helps continue to expand that security and trust as the ecosystem grows.
Emmett, you've alluded to this a couple times, but I want to read this into the record and ask some questions about this because this is kind of big news here.
A few months ago, Solana Mobile announced a partnership with MediaTek to integrate the Solana Mobile stack directly into MediaTek's chipset environment.
You're going to have to explain what all this means to me in a minute.
But this chipset environment powers 46% of Android devices globally.
Explain to us what this partnership does, what this unlocks for Solana Mobile, and just in simple terms that people can understand what this actually practically means.
Yes, okay.
I'll go out and I'll slowly zoom in.
So we are targeting Android phones as our...
as the area we want to hit.
First off, Android is still the dominant operating system in the world.
Sometimes when you live in North America or developed countries, it's easy to forget because of the dominance of iOS.
But globally, it's still really critical.
And similarly, when you look at the adoption of crypto, it is really taking off in some more developing markets.
And so there's obvious synergy there.
Also, Apple is doing its own thing.
They've filed a few patents for self-custody of digital assets.
So they're clearly thinking about it.
Samsung's clearly thinking about it.
But we're at a point where we can work with hardware manufacturers who are not Apple and who are not Samsung and who don't have that R&D to bring really great crypto experiences to their users.
But to do that, we have to work with companies who don't have infinite R&D budgets.
We can't just walk into them and be like, hey guys, good luck, figure this out.
We have to bring them something that's really simple and really turnkey.
And that's where working with MediaTek and Trasonic and all these established names really helps because these are vendors that the big Android phone makers are already working with.
They've already got chips in their phones.
They've already got secure elements in their phones.
They do everything that your phone needs to do from your biometrics to holding your credit cards for Google Pay.
All we're doing is extending the tech that's already there.
And the best way to do that is to work with these partners directly rather than doing a custom bespoke.
implementation every time we work with a new hardware partner because we've done the custom thing ourselves twice.
It's hard.
We want to make it as easy as possible to be on as many devices as possible and not have OEMs have to become crypto experts, which it's going to be a long shot for that to happen.
Okay, so just in terms of practical understanding of what this means, though, does this mean that if I have an Android phone, that it can become a Solana phone?
Or does it just mean that I can get access to the Solana dApp Store?
What does that look like from a user's side once this integration starts to roll out and brings all these Android phones into the potential set of users here?
Unfortunately, this isn't something that will work retroactively.
What we're trying to do does require the trust and security and verifiability that you and I were just talking about, where...
In order for a device to be a part of this growing economy, you have to know that users can trust it, that it's going to follow all the rules.
And the only way to do that is to be implemented below the operating system.
And so anytime you talk about going below the operating system, that's not something you can just download from an app store.
That's not something you can just download from the website.
That has to be a part of the bring up of the phone, like literally from the time it is manufactured to the first software is flashed on it.
make a switch so that every phone already in the market could become a Solana mobile device.
The truth is we have to do it in a way that's really trustworthy and secure.
And the best way to do that is to work with phone manufacturers so that their future devices can support our tech, our stack, all the software experiences.
And so my vision is not to capture all the devices that have already been sold, but to rather be an increasing portion of future Android devices that are sold.
Do you think that this is going to compete with the sale of your own phones, or do you not care about the tradeoff there?
It's worth it.
How do you think about that competing with yourself aspect of this?
Yeah, the truth is, if other Android manufacturers do as good a job of implementing our stack so that the core of our power users determine...
Actually, this phone meets my needs 100%.
I don't need to buy this on a mobile phone.
I think we're actually okay with that.
Hardware is like a very hard and ugly business.
And we've been doing it because we have to.
But in the future, if other hardware manufacturers do a good enough job of serving the users that we've served historically, then we can just pour all of our efforts on making the software great.
Because at the end of the day, we are software experts, right?
We're crypto software experts who know systems really well and know how to implement on a phone.
But we've done the hardware stuff because we've had to.
And while it's been fun, it's mostly been hard.
So we're not too worried about competing with ourselves.
In an ideal world, we don't have to make hardware.
It's not to say we won't.
If there is a need from our community, if the other hardware manufacturers don't give exactly what the core of our audience needs, we will absolutely be open to making more devices in the future.
But for now, I think there's a pretty good chance that with all of the great Android phones out there, if we can get the right partners on board, we can give people Lots of choice, lots of entry points in a way that we can't as a standalone phone builder.
What does the timeline look like for getting this rolled out to the point where it is in all of the new Android devices that are sold or could be?
What is the delay between where we are now and when that's a reality?
It's long.
It takes time.
We're in a bunch of really encouraging conversations right now.
I don't have any announcements to make in terms of specific names or exactly how far along we are, but we're making really good progress.
We went to the world's biggest mobile conference back in March and met with, I think, eight or nine different big global phone manufacturers, and those conversations are ongoing.
So I'm feeling really encouraged, but the truth is phones get...
feature defined and kind of locked down pretty far in advance at a lot of these companies.
And so the time it'll take to make sure that they understand crypto fully and that we're on the same page about what the implementation looks like and actually getting it slotted into their phones.
You know, I would be shocked if there were devices in market in 2026.
But I do think 2027 is within reach.
Okay, so let's talk about sort of like the fully realized vision of what you see happening here.
Like, you know, 2027 comes, or let's say five years from now, you have a lot of this rolled out, you have this sort of open mobile ecosystem that's got Web3 capacities enabled.
Where does the Solana mobile team sit in that?
What role do you play?
And what do you see that ecosystem looking like?
Like, what's that vision once this rolls out fully?
Yeah, I think our team will always focus on building great experiences, great platform experiences in the same way that the team at Android within Google focuses on the platform tools.
They focus on the Google Play Store and Google Pay and sort of all the connective tissue, but don't build every app.
Same is true of Apple, right?
Like Apple doesn't build the hundreds of thousands of apps that are in their store.
They build a really great app store.
They build really great tools and services for developers, and they build really great connective experiences for users so that Apple Pay works the same in an app or on a website or on your computer.
It just all feels very cohesive.
Our role at Solana Mobile will be the same.
How do you build all of the connective tissue, all of the platform stuff so that all of the other developers who build apps and do things well for users and make sure that users have a great wallet experience and make sure that users have security and make sure that OEMs implement that properly.
So we'll always sort of be that focus on that connective layer.
But in terms of what it looks like in five years, you know, my hunch is that we're really serving the audience of people who maybe been interested in buying some crypto assets, maybe been interested in trying some of these things.
or maybe have already kind of gone off the deep end and have self custody and have hardware wallets, what want better access to it.
I think there's a pretty broad spectrum there that we can service in terms of kind of thinking about finance and assets.
But the other piece that I feel really excited about is payments, which anytime we're talking to these hardware manufacturers, they know that their customers right now are very dependent on their phones to get to receive and send money.
But on pretty...
untrustworthy networks, depending on what part of the country they're in.
They have to spend a lot to go pick it up at a counter somewhere.
There's just all this inefficiency that I think crypto is really well suited to service.
But those people don't have computers.
Those people don't have laptops.
They're not going to download Chrome extensions.
They're not going to buy hardware wallets and plug them in.
That's not their level of internet connectivity.
They have a phone.
They have a basic smartphone or a basic feature phone.
That is their connection to the world.
And so I think in addition to serving the growing world of people who want access to new types of assets and new ways to hold and manage their money, there's also this growing world of people who use their phones to pay and be paid that I think our tech can help service for millions or billions of people around the world.
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yeah and i want to ask about that as it relates to the the development of solana overall because i think that there's been sort of this story that solana has been sort of like a retail focused um not like a meme casino exactly but there's been a lot of retail focus let's say that um but then the solana is now evolving and trying to you know focus on things like tokenization of real world assets and offering payment solutions where do you see this fitting into that overall strategy and you talked about it a little bit but what does that look like for you know your your role solana mobile's role in the overall solana strategy and growth of solana yeah i think the two things are pretty aligned.
We sit separately from the Solana Foundation, who is sort of responsible for the broader strategic thinking of the network and adoption of it.
But we think in a lot of the same terms, fortunately.
And so on the one hand, we've been very keen to support the use cases that have really battle-tested the network, whether that's been the meme coin hysteria, whether that was NFTs.
Our focus has been, okay, there's this core of users.
This is a thing that they care about.
Let's make sure our technology meets their needs.
We'll be able to learn from this.
We'll be able to build goodwill with this community.
But as we look forward, we know that those swings don't last forever, that those trends don't last forever, that they're hot and cold, and that the stickier, longer-term things, whether it's institutional and finance and payments oriented or something else, that is where we onboard millions of people.
And that's where we stick around and we're more than just a fad.
Kind of meet the users where they are right now, learn from it as quickly as we can, but don't lose sight of the bigger opportunity that crypto can solve.
I'm curious your thoughts on competition and how you're building a moat around this, because it's clear that Solana, for most like the Web3 space anyway, or crypto native space, is one of the most committed ecosystems towards trying to do things related to mobile development and dApp stores.
But there's also a lot of major incumbents in Web2 who, as you kind of alluded to, have filed some patents and maybe making some plans.
You know, there's Meta, Apple, Google, you know, go down the list.
How do you think about the moat here and what makes the Solana mobile offering different, unique and defensible going forward in the landscape of the marketplace here?
Yeah, so for, you know, when you compare what we're building to something like just a standalone self-custody mobile wallet.
If we can consider that as a first comparison point, we are building cross-device platform-level experiences that an app you download from a store can never accomplish.
It's never going to get the privileges needed.
It's never going to be able to modify system software.
It's never going to get access to the secure element.
There's all these things that you just don't get when you're an app downloaded from the store.
So for users with a very basic set of needs where...
Buying some tokens on a centralized exchange or holding a few meme coins in a self-custody wallet is all they're trying to do.
We may not have a moat versus those experiences.
But for users who want to have more meaningful assets held on their phone where security is important or who want to try multiple apps and not just go to web pages within an embedded browser, we have a significant moat because we're at the system level.
So I feel very confident there.
When you compare our moat to an Apple or a Samsung, if they are serious and will continue to invest, Samsung has already invested.
Apple has just kind of hinted that it's investing.
We will be in competition, frankly.
But the truth is they sort of stand alone as titans of consumer electronics with respect to their R&D budgets and how much they can spend.
The long tail of phone manufacturers not named Apple and not named Samsung.
can't afford to invest in that type of innovation.
They're on razor-thin margins.
They're selling commodities, right?
RAM is super expensive right now, so their phones are becoming more expensive.
They need help.
And so I think our strategic moat there is we can service multiple hardware partners who are still delivering hundreds of millions of phones around the world each year and sit alongside Apple and Samsung knowing that there's lots of phones to be sold around the world each year.
That's a really helpful answer and kind of paints that picture well.
And I can see where you're going with that.
I want to end with a question here that you're free to punt on if you don't want to.
But we have a lot of big fans of Solana in our community.
And they would kill me if I didn't ask you this.
So I'm really curious your prediction on Solana for 2026 or Sol for 2026.
Right now, the price is below $85.
Solana has been one of the most resilient projects and resilient assets in all of crypto.
But right now, it's facing a lot of headwinds and just general market downtrend.
What do you think happens for Solana for the rest of 2026?
Are you bullish here?
Do you think we keep chopping?
What's your price prediction for Sol?
You know, if I were to make a price prediction, my legal team would probably break in here.
A SWAT team would show up.
I always try to get people in trouble at least once.
Here's what I will say.
Here's what I will give you.
I've been a part of Solana Labs for four years now.
I joined Solana Labs literally four years ago.
I was part of this fledgling phone project.
We had our kickoff event with SPF on stage.
And then I was at Breakpoint a few months later when everything went totally upside down.
I've ridden things back up.
I've ridden them back down.
I've been through a few of these cycles.
What I'm seeing now that gives me a ton of optimism versus previous downturns is the developer community is really, really, really showing up.
Our app store count went from...
25 when we launched Saga to 50 apps when it sold out.
And then 100 apps when we launched Seeker.
We're now over 800 apps.
There is this very real momentum of builders who still see the opportunity and are getting closer and closer to product market fit each day.
And so I can't control the macro conditions.
I can't read those maybe perfectly.
But what I can read, the signals I can read is real developers building real products, finding real product market fit and users who love to use those things.
The more kind of dependence each of those parties builds on the network, the more optimistic you have to be about the future of it.
Emmett, you are going to not get in trouble with your legal team, but if the job at Solana Mobile doesn't work out, you can always get a backup job as a hopium dealer.
That was great.
Very good answer.
Thank you so much for being on the Mill Crow Show.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Yeah, solanomobile.com.
If you don't have a seeker, you should buy one.
They're very cool.
I love mine.
But in all seriousness, it's a really interesting, I think, experiment on what building a crypto-first mobile platform looks like.
And so if you care enough to be listening to the show, even if you're not a Solana Maxi, it's worth seeing what mobile experiences can look like if you care about crypto.
So SolanaMobile.com, you can buy one.
If you're a developer, if you build apps, you can also head to SolanaMobile.com.
We've got great documentations and resources so you can launch your app in our store.
Like I said, we're over 800 apps.
That is a lot versus where we've been, but it's nothing compared to the bigger app stores.
So you get tons of exposure to a really high value audience.
We'd love to have you in our store.
So yeah, head to SolanaMobile.com.
Emmett Hollier, Solana Mobile.
Thank you so much for being on the Mill Crow Show.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Yeah, of course.
Thanks, John.
Thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something.
Until next time, as I always say, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of the Mill Crow Show.
Thanks, everyone.
Bye.
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