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- [00:00]
Raoul Pal
Today's video is sponsored by Figure Markets, the largest non bank mortgage lender in the US with over 15 billion unlocked on their lending platform. They've just lowered rates on their Bitcoin and ETH backed loans even more to 8.91% which is 9.999% APR, improving their already industry low fixed rate 50% LTV loans. They keep building as well having also just launched decentralized MPC custody, the only place to get that amongst the major loan providers and REM interest deferral fees entirely. What is MPC decentralized custody, you might ask? Well, it's a Bitcoin or eth on chain wallet with multiple key shards to protect you from a single entity custody failure. You can always see your crypto ownership in a segregated wallet and verify your collateral hasn't moved. Whether you're funding a major purchase like a down payment on a home, investing in new opportunities or even buying more bitcoin Figure makes us straightforward and transparent. Visit that app or click my link below to take out a Bitcoin backed loan with Figure to More people are paying attention to crypto right now than ever before, so it's important to get your information from the sources you trust. That's why I want to give a big thanks to Bitwise for sponsoring today's episode. Bitwise manages over $10 billion across more than 30 crypto strategies and they've been doing this since 2017. But here's what really sets them apart. They give back too. Bitwise actually donates part of the profits from its Bitcoin and Ethereum investments to open source developers, the people building and maintaining the networks that we rely on. So when you work with Bitwise, you're not just getting professional crypto exposure, you're helping fund the future of crypto itself. Check them out@bitwiseinvestments.com or email jamesitwiseinvestments.com and tell them Raoul sent you. Thanks. Hey everyone. As you know on this podcast, I bring the best guests in the world at that nexus of understanding of macro crypto in the exponential age of technology. If you're enjoying the show, a quick five star rating goes a long way. It helps us grow and keep these conversations coming with the best guests in the world. Thanks a lot. Hi, I'm Raoul Pal and welcome to my show the Journeyman where I travel to that nexus of understanding between macro crypto and the exponential age of technology. One of the things that really interests me is is how to create network effects. Network effects is core to the understanding of the exponential age and core to the understanding of cryptocurrencies. It's how network value is driven and that's driven by something called Metcalfe's law. And Metcalfe's law is basically the number of nodes on the network and the total value transacted on that network as well. These are really important things to understand. And once you crack that, you crack the understanding of what drives value and what drives price in this exponential age. Now there's really interesting ways that people build network value and I think what Solana have been doing with the mobile phone is super interesting. At first you might think, why a phone? This is a stupid idea. But actually it's much more nuanced than that. In fact, it's a very, very clever way of creating network effects. And I wanted to bring on Emmett, who actually runs the side, the mobile phone side, for Solana to talk about the new seeker phone, what they're doing and why it really matters. And I think it's going to be an eye opening conversation for everybody. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. Join me, Raoul pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes. In the Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together. Emmett, fabulous to have you on Real Vision.
- [04:01]
Emmett Hollier
Thank you for having me. Yeah, I'm super excited.
- [04:04]
Raoul Pal
So just give us a little bit of who you are and what we do and then we'll go as ever tell your story because there's always something in the story of how you got here and then we'll talk about what you're really up to.
- [04:14]
Emmett Hollier
I'm Emmett Hollier, I'm the general manager of Solana Mobile. Solana Mobile is a subsidiary of Solana Labs. So we've been incubated and running within Solana Labs for a little over the last. We kicked things off right at the start of 2022, which is right when I joined. I was the second team member and we were just out to solve the growing problem of a big world of crypto users and builders who were struggling to really build the next great apps and find the easiest ways to use them on the existing mobile platforms. So we've been working our way towards solving that problem for the last three and a half years.
- [04:47]
Raoul Pal
Amazing. So what is your crypto journey? How did you end up in the ridiculously difficult idea of trying to build a mobile phone for web3 network?
- [04:57]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, I was not actually super deep in crypto at the start of this, I was at Google before I was here. And before that I did a consulting gig where I was building primarily mobile apps for a lot of the big Fortune 500 companies. Right in the mid teens there was this moment of realization where every big company realized, oh, our mobile, our mobile strategy is terrible. We have terrible apps, nobody wants to use them. Terrible mobile websites. And so I really kind of built a love for the mobile space first, you know, how can we build great apps that people want to use no matter where they are? And then as I entered Google really was primarily focused on AI. So it was this concept of, you know, there's an emerging technology that's maybe not quite ready for mass adoption yet, but what can we do with it? And so that love of mobility and that love of cutting edge tech that maybe is still trying to find its way to mainstream led me to this opportunity with Solana Mobile. And so I had a colleague who had been at Google for a time and he made the intro, who pitched
- [05:58]
Raoul Pal
you the idea of, hey, come to a Web3 network, which you probably didn't know of, that had gone through the wars, and said, oh, look, I've got a really good job for you, Emmett, why don't you come and build a mobile? Help build a mobile for this. I want to hear that pitch.
- [06:14]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah. So the way it started was the person who I knew at Google who was running payments at Solana Labs at the time, he said, hey, you get emerging tech, you get mobile. The team is doing something that's totally crazy, totally ambitious. Hear them out. And I was a little skeptical. I did know Solana, I did know crypto and you know, I held like I had a portfolio, but I really wasn't like actively using apps and trading all the time. But I said, sure, I'll take the call. Like, I trust you. And so I met with a few of the early team members. There was basically one full time hire, this guy Steven, who is effectively the founding engineer, who was hired by Anatoly to, to kind of get this off the ground. And then there were a few other Solana Labs folks who were supporting. They weren't full time mobile people, they were kind of doing other Solana stuff. And I just picked their brains. I wanted to learn more about what they were doing and why. And they each gave their own sort of earnest version of the pitch. But to be totally honest with you, I'm not sure everybody really knew what we were doing and why back then. So there was no concise version of the pitch. I was mostly reading the opportunity space. The one thing they were all super clear on was like, hey, crypto is going somewhere and it can't get there without being successful on mobile. Like they all totally had that vision down and they were just really smart. I could see that there was a big opportunity space and doing something from zero to one, including building a phone, seemed like too good of an opportunity pass up and I'm very grateful I took the opportunity.
- [07:41]
Raoul Pal
So now you've been working on it for a while, what's the vision? What are you trying to do?
- [07:49]
Emmett Hollier
Long term, we want to build a new type of mobile platform. If you look at what's been built so far by Apple and by Google, it's a kind of known model, right? They build a bunch of software and some tools and they say, hey developers, hey users, why don't you guys come together, we'll introduce you. We're going to take 30% of the action and we're going to set the rules of engagement.
- [08:11]
Raoul Pal
But.
- [08:11]
Emmett Hollier
But we'll get to build a whole bunch of hardware. In the Apple's case or in Google's case, we'll build some hardware, but we'll also license the hardware to some other people or the software to some other people. And it's been primarily in service of other revenue for them, other services revenue, other hardware revenue for us. We don't see a world that crypto fits neatly into that model. The idea of giving up 30% of peer to peer transactions or no middleman transactions, it just doesn't work. A lot of the tooling that's been built to support really seamless, really easy web2 transactions like Apple Pay or Google Pay, there's not really a web3 equivalent
- [08:49]
Raoul Pal
of those technologies because they're not incentivized to do it, really.
- [08:52]
Emmett Hollier
No, they're not incentivized to do it. It doesn't work with their business models. They wouldn't want to start eating their own opportunities. And so really what we're out to do is build a new type of platform, one that's open, one that's crypto, native crypto first, but actually services mobile users. And so our path to that has been through building our own phones, which sucks. It's like very expensive and very hard. But it's been great. We've got the opportunity to learn a lot, we get to connect directly with customers. But long term, we think of ourselves very much as a platform provider and so we'll always sell our own phones, but we want to bring this to as many phones as possible, not just the ones that have our brand on the back.
- [09:29]
Raoul Pal
And so if we were to look forward five years, what does that ecosystem look like? What is the phone at that point? What is it? Because we don't even know what phone is going to be in the future because of AI anyway. I mean, there's a lot changing. But what's in your head? Is this the marketplace for Solana? Is this the marketplace for Web3 and the tooling for the overall eco. You know, what. What is your. Where do you think we are in five years?
- [09:55]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, we're Solana first. We think Solana Mobile. Well, we think Solana is going to be the place where mobile is successful. It's. It's fast, it's cheap, it scales. These are all things that really matter in the mobile context. So I inevitably think this will be like the nexus of Solana activity, you know, in five years. I can't imagine a startup launching on Solana and not having an associated application available on our platform. I think as users move more and more towards mobile and their expectations grow higher and higher, you know, historically it's been build a desktop app first. That's where traders sit all day, and maybe eventually we'll build a mobile version of the thing that kind of works. I think that'll be totally flipped in five years.
- [10:36]
Raoul Pal
It probably creates network effects by having your own platform.
- [10:39]
Emmett Hollier
100%. Yeah. And we get to. We're starting to see more competition. Right. Like in the early days, we really had to muscle it. We had to, like, chase the teams down who were part of the ecosystem and say, hey, guys, we're doing this thing. It's really important. Here's the vision, like, please believe in it and build something with us. And now that's kind of reversed, where we have a lot of teams who say, oh, our competitors are in there. We're. We're a trading platform. Like, we can't be the last trading platform. We have to be the first one and we have to offer better features. And so a lot of the benefits of building a platform that you don't really start to see until you reach that little critical mass of flywheel adoption, we're, like, just now crossing into. With 150,000 seekers being shipped out, that's enough of an addressable market to get most of the ecosystem teams who see the opportunity in and building with us.
- [11:25]
Raoul Pal
Yeah, that's actually. It's actually very clever because what it. It coalesces attention into one place because if not it's the Internet. And so Then there's all the other thing, you know, all the other apps and everything else. But if you coalesce attention to one place in, in a delightful piece of hardware that has a good UX experience, then suddenly it creates network effects. And as you said, what, at 150, if you're trying to get 150,000 users, that's what, 10% of the daily active users, 5% of the daily active users. And that's a big enough bootstrapping of a network to create network effects.
- [11:59]
Emmett Hollier
Totally. Yeah, it's absolutely enough. And not only is it a reasonable enough audience, it's a growing audience and it's a high spend audience. One of the things we saw when we launched our first device saga was the initial adoption was really light. Right. We didn't sell as many devices as we were hoping to and eventually our fortunes changed. The market shifted and people saw an opportunity to buy the phone. But the one thing we did see was the people who bought the phone used it constantly, they were constantly trading, they were constantly buying things, selling. And so that activity story of this is where the whales of Solana are going to land. This is where some of you know, the growing user base is going to be, is really compelling for builders. And so if they get some consistent technologies to make the experience super delightful for their users, they don't have to worry about the hard stuff. They don't have to worry about the wallet infrastructure and trying to make it work great on a mobile device and overcoming some of the built in restrictions that phones have. They can just build a great app and give users a great secure signing experience. We're pretty confident that they'll just continue to innovate and try new stuff and we're already seeing that. So I think it'll continue to be a focal point for the growing Solana ecosystem and potentially additional ecosystems in the future.
- [13:11]
Raoul Pal
And what percentage you think of the Solana daily actives? Let's assume daily actives are the most engaged cohort. What percentage do their activity on mobile like? I generally don't because I just have the fear of having things on mobile and getting hacked and all of this stuff. Right. So you just, but you know, I know you're building in a lot of security. We'll talk about that stuff. But yeah, but what percentage do you think of the, of the, of those daily active users are mobile first? Is it very high because of.
- [13:42]
Emmett Hollier
I, I don't think it's that high yet. Right. So I think the, so the exchanges certainly contribute volume and I think you know, one thing I've seen is as I've onboarded friends to Salon over the last couple of years, the first thing they do is they go to the Apple App Store, the Google App Store, and download a wallet. Right? Like that just is a really interesting and easy entry point for users. So whether it's some meme, coin craze or whatever, they see it on Twitter, they go download Phantom or Soul Flare, and all of a sudden they're trading tokens. And that is a much easier entry point than trying to explain to them that they need to download a Chrome extension and then, you know, write down their seed phrase and go through this whole backup flow. So while I think a lot of the traditional trading volume and the people who have kind of been in the space for a long time still default to desktop, I think the new audience, the growing audience will be predominantly mobile. And one of the things we've seen from our research is just like in the early days of mobile, people would browse on their phones, they'd go to Amazon, they'd check stuff out, but then they'd go to their computer to check out. We see a similar pattern for crypto adoption, which is people use their phones, they research, they're on Twitter, they're on Discord, they're checking things out, but then they go execute on desktop. Eventually people started buying stuff on their phones on Amazon. Right. They sort of got over that mental hurdle. They stopped thinking about the mobile device as a browse only device and eventually it became the place where they took action. And so I think we'll continue to see that adoption curve as well, where people will start to do their higher intense stuff from phones as they get more comfortable, as they get more confident, as security continues to improve.
- [15:11]
Raoul Pal
And if user behavior is to flip between the two, then you just need to make sure that the app developers understand that. So they develop seamless experiences that when move back to your desktop, it's exactly as you've just left on your mobile.
- [15:24]
Emmett Hollier
Totally, yeah. There's a ton to do on the UX front. Right. Like I think the maturity of the space as it relates to UX is there's still a lot of room to grow. Right. Even, even the best desktop apps still have areas for improvement. Same is true of the best mobile apps. Trying to tie those two surfaces together. I think it'll take time, but we're excited to be like working with these teams on a regular basis, helping them think through that and helping them think through their own growth.
- [15:49]
Raoul Pal
And the other thing that we saw with the first Solana Mobile that people didn't understand immediately but then understood is that the behavioral incentives in Web3, that is having access to tokens of new projects who are basically marketing to you for your retention means that your mobile is a self funding device if the ecosystem's thriving. Right. And that becomes very interesting because you're basically using the old PayPal strategy of paying for distribution, but you don't have to pay for it yourself because you're the partners are paying for it to get access.
- [16:22]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, perfectly said. Yeah, we've seen that. You know, we saw it on Saga. The reason we sold out of Saga was because of what you just outlined there were.
- [16:31]
Raoul Pal
Yeah, because at first nobody really understood it and then suddenly they went, oh shit, the airdrops are worth a fortune.
- [16:36]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, totally. And we don't shy away from that. Right. That, that is the story, that's what happened. And it gave us an opportunity to learn from Saga and go for it again with Seeker. As we looked towards Seeker, one of the things that we really wanted to lean into kind of take that narrative and break it apart a little bit. Right. Our community, in addition to loving the opportunity to basically have their device pay for itself and continue to return on the investment over time, also just love being a part of something exclusive. They loved having access to stuff that other people didn't. And so as we launched Seeker, one of the big campaigns we're going to be running starting in September is Seeker Season, where we'll basically have for one week through the end of the year, each week a team who's offering something you can only get on Solana Mobile, whether that is financial, it's a reward of some sort, whether it's an exclusive app, something that's launching exclusively to our store, whether it's an exclusive set of features, boosts, you name it. Taking that idea of users want to feel rewarded, they want to feel like they're worth more and therefore they have access to exclusive things and better rewards and, and basically blowing that out and working with the ecosystem who are already doing it organically and giving them a little extra help on the co marketing front was kind of a core go to market strategy here once we started to get devices out.
- [17:55]
Raoul Pal
And also listen, the core ethos of Web3 at the broadest level is that you should be in control of your retention and be able to monetize it in the way you see fit. Right. That's the basic. One of the key things is the read, write, own, it's the own part yeah. And here you are owning your own attention. So you decide to use the mobile, somebody's marketing to you and you're getting instant value from that exchange. As opposed to Google taking money from the ad.
- [18:22]
Emmett Hollier
Right, Exactly. It works. It works well for us. We're sort of happy for these dynamics to flourish on our platform, but it brings users and developers just much closer together. There's less like nonsense between them, there's less people trying to take their cut. This is just build an app, make it great and then capture the attention of this growing audience who is eager to spend money and spend funds through whatever you think is going to be most attractive. Right. And so we're seeing that continue to evolve. One of the things we heard from developers with Saga was a lot of them want to run customer acquisition strategies. Right. They want to come up with clever ways to seed their tokens to a community or get people to download an app or whatever it is. But the truth is spinning up a software wallet is pretty, pretty easy. And so they just get boded to hell. Right. They just get like tons of fake accounts coming to a website, registering themselves over and over and over and over. A phone gives you not infinite civil resistance, but at least there's enough where somebody came to our website, they paid $500, they had it shipped to a physical address, and then when a transaction was signed, they double tap the power button and they laid their fingerprint on it. And so that, that just that little bit of additional resistance and certain, you know, and certainty is the wrong word, but like confidence that you're dealing with a human makes them more likely to open up those types of programs that they maybe just wouldn't do on the desktop web. Yeah.
- [19:46]
Raoul Pal
And also any form of biometrics is going to help input proof of humanhood, which yes, is good for marketers. Right. It's really important to know you're not wasting your money on bots. So this is a really decent way of proving that. But then at scale for Web three, you can end up with a nice passport, a digital ID passport that can be some sort of zero knowledge element, but is proof that you are human at least and can offer some of your credentials to say you can have a social profile from that phone.
- [20:20]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, that's something that we're working on on our roadmap is sort of blowing that out right now. It's pretty binary, right? It's this is probably a person or this is probably not a person is sort of the context that we're thinking about this in. But like if you think about all this stuff that your phone is capable of doing, there's so much information on there that can prove yourself to potential developers. Your location. Right. Like, are you allowed to take part in this thing based on where you're based? You could give, you know, you could give additional information for things like Deepin apps. Right. Back in the day, Stepn had some serious bot problems because people were just spoofing their location. Because we've built the phone, because we have privileged access, we'll know if someone's spoofing their location. So if we can build in these attestation mechanisms so that a user can say, this is my verified location. But I'm only offering it up to apps that I think it's worth it for me to offer it up, then they have control of that. Right. They're not just handing it over to Google or Apple to build trace data into their maps, they're in full control of it. And so we want to keep that ownership alive. And so if you want to monetize your activity or you want to monetize your phone's location or the sensor data, you'll be able to. And we're just focused on building the systems to basically make that type of transaction opportunity possible in the first place. Yeah.
- [21:38]
Raoul Pal
And also, you know, as you said, a, it takes a lot of middlemen out the middle, but the quality of dollars spent in marketing budgets becomes so much better when you know who you're marketing to in a way that's authentic and is approved. And this kind of gets around that whole process. So yeah, I think that's a really clever idea. Now how do people use this? Is it there? I mean, because the issue is, is most people have an iPhone in our industry.
- [22:08]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah.
- [22:09]
Raoul Pal
And what do you think that people are going to have two. That we sit around and we do our web three stuff or one phone. We think of it as a secure environment, much like we might do stuff in our ledger environments.
- [22:20]
Emmett Hollier
It I think it's gonna.
- [22:20]
Raoul Pal
And then some people just use it
- [22:21]
Emmett Hollier
all day and others it's gonna be mixed. Right. So we've already shipped out tens of thousands of phones and so we have some very preliminary.
- [22:29]
Raoul Pal
I'm still waiting for mine to arrive. It's not right.
- [22:31]
Emmett Hollier
We've got. I'll get yours this after this call, make sure it's on the way.
- [22:34]
Raoul Pal
It's on its way. Apparently.
- [22:35]
Emmett Hollier
That's good. Okay. So it's very market dependent. Right. Like when I came into this, I sort of had the same knowledge, not Knowledge gap. But like, I kept running my head into the idea, are we sure that people use this? And the truth of the matter is, outside of the US and maybe some other more affluent Western European markets, people use Android phones all day, every day. They don't need imessage, they don't need iphoto. And so we see much more regular usage habits outside of the United States, where people are using it as their daily devices. They're activating SIM cards, they're getting it onto their carrier. And so for those users, they're thinking about it as their everyday device and it's got great crypto features. For everybody else who maybe doesn't want to leave their iPhone or they don't want to leave whatever Android device, device they have, they want this to be their secondary device, that's great too. You know, one of the things that we really set out to do this time we wanted to make it smaller, we wanted to make it lighter, we wanted to make it more portable. So for users who do think of it as a secondary device, it doesn't feel like you're lugging a brick around with you everywhere. So I expect we'll see a lot of people who treat it that way. Right. It might not be the full cold storage, you know, a ledger in a safe, but it's going to be maybe a slightly warmer solution that is more usable. There's apps, there's things you can do, the trading is super simple. And so I expect there'll be a good mix. I think I'll be excited to see how that shakes out, depending on region.
- [24:03]
Raoul Pal
And the other thing, when you think outside of our bubble in the US and around, is when you've got a hardware device like this, think what it means for stablecoin payments when you can tap.
- [24:19]
Emmett Hollier
Totally.
- [24:20]
Raoul Pal
You know, so, yeah, you know, then suddenly, yeah, it becomes a very easy process.
- [24:26]
Emmett Hollier
Totally. Yeah. Payments is a. Is a really critical, critical, critical opportunity for us. Right. When you look again, I think you framed it well. Kind of take yourself out of the US For a second. As people come online in certain parts of the world, they're doing it through mobile devices. Right. These are people who are maybe new to the Internet. They're doing it through mobile, inexpensive mobile devices that they primarily get through their carrier. And not only that, they actually. The relationship that they have with the carrier and with their phone is also a bank. They're also using it to pay for stuff. They're using it at point of sales terminals. And so mobile in so many parts of the world became Synonymous not only with the Internet but also with global payments infrastructure. And so take that really powerful idea and infuse everything that's great about crypto as it relates to payments. You have a really compelling package. And so that's, you know, payments is something we're really working to make sure that we're solving user needs around the world with by default we're launching with Seed Vault Wallet. And so it does, it handles a lot of the core Solana pay infrastructure stuff on an as needed basis. But connecting it to that real world physical card, that's not something that we've natively integrated, it's something we're thinking about. But obviously there are loads of great card providers who can give you means to spend your USDC or your other SPL tokens. So I expect to see that to continue to take off.
- [25:48]
Raoul Pal
Yeah, you know, just in my head because I've spent a lot of time traveling around the world in various countries is like, it's a, there's such a nice UX you can do. Let's say I'm in India, the Philippines, wherever I want and I can just flick you five bucks.
- [26:02]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, totally.
- [26:03]
Raoul Pal
And it goes to your phone. Right. That experience is gorgeous. User experience. The Indian Stablecoin. Not Stablecoin, whatever it is, the government sponsored one. That's the UX that they've got. So you get a picture of a 5 rupee note or 10 rupee note and you just flick it at the person as if you're giving it to them. I'm like, that's genius because it makes it even less technical and so kind of visceral. It's like, here, I'm giving you money. It's like stuff like that you can do with the mobile, you cannot do otherwise.
- [26:33]
Emmett Hollier
Not only that, like that is one awesome use case. Like that's just great. Every time I travel I'm always curious to know how people are paying their friends. Right. Like in the US it feels like Venmo and the Cash app have kind of won. You go to somewhere that doesn't have the banking infrastructure we have or a government that's quite as trustworthy and they can't really rely on it to the same degree and they're, they're a little bit confused. So I love that use case. But also too, it's going to be really important to get security right. If people start using their phones to self custody assets as opposed to relying on a third party to custody them, there's going to be like some natural anxiety about oh okay, I've got like real, what feels like real money in this phone. It changes people's model, the mental model they have. Right. As opposed to thinking of your phone as, oh, this is how I sign into my bank, but this isn't my bank, this isn't, this doesn't hold my money, it's just how I get there the moment that changes and it is more reflective of you self custodying those funds. You've got to make sure you give customers a really secure device because the moment somebody flicks that five rupee note to a friend and then it gets lost on the way, or somebody steals it or your friend's phone gets hacked, you're not going to do it again. You're just going to go back to whatever you were doing before that might not be as easy to use, it might not have the same experience, it might be more expensive, but at least it's safe. And so that's something we're really dedicated to solving, is make sure you're giving self custody users the best possible experience they can have on any mobile device.
- [28:02]
Raoul Pal
But that's also another mental roadblock you'll get over time as people build larger balances on their in self custody, they don't fully understand it, so they kind of think it's in their phone. Like people think it's in a ledger device.
- [28:17]
Emmett Hollier
You're right, right, right.
- [28:18]
Raoul Pal
It's a USB and it's got all my thing and if I lose my usb, which is not. It's all about the seed phrase and all of this.
- [28:24]
Emmett Hollier
Yep.
- [28:24]
Raoul Pal
You have to kind of. This industry overall has to get rid of this issue of seed phrases, how it's done, write it down on a bit of paper. You know, it's like, this is just not going to work.
- [28:38]
Emmett Hollier
It's really tough. And we're still sort of, we're still in the constraints of what the ecosystem has given us so far. So like we ship the phone and we, we do ship the seed phrase cards and it hurts. Like when I see unboxing videos and I see people take out the seed phrase cards, I'm like, oh, I wish we didn't have to give you that. But we still do. There are, there's a lot of interesting work being done on that front. Like I think to your earlier question about next five years, I think that will be a solved problem. I think we can still give users self custody. They don't have to rely on us or some third party to custody their funds. But they're also not mired in this world of like write it down on a piece of paper and hope you don't lose it. I think we'll get there, but in the interim, yeah, like people are gonna have to overcome this hurdle of feeling like the funds are actually in the device even though they're not. Or well, if I carry my phone with me and I lose it, I can just lock it, you know, with my iPhone I can just lock it and wipe it and I have a backup of it. So I'll just, you know, have all my logins again. How does that work with, with a seed? If it's, you know, if I've got a seed on the phone, how does that work? We get these questions to support all the time. The truth is it's just like your ledger or your other hardware wallet. It's not perfect, but it's not lost forever. You know, it's just a matter of backing it up somewhere else. And so there's a ton of these UX hurdles that we'll commit to trying to solve in the next couple years. But we're, we're trying to take it one step at a time.
- [29:59]
Raoul Pal
And the other big one is obviously the, the prevalence of sim swaps and hacking and you know, mobile phones are quite an attack vector. They're not perfect. I mean nothing's perfect in this space. So there is an vector that's quite known which is, you know, the sim swaps and stuff like that and that, you know, if you're just using it for day to day transactions and then you send it off to your ledger or more secure environment, your multi sig, if not, you're, you still run that risk and it's quite scary because you don't know it happens until it happens. And it's happened to so many amazing people in our industry and they're like, oh, I've just been drained.
- [30:34]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, yeah, that's you know, one of the reasons like we could have taken a different approach with Seeker, right. We could have had people go through a social login on the way in or we could really be pushing like the embedded wallet infrastructure onto partners but ultimately like it just doesn't, we don't feel as in control of that at this point. I think things will change with time. But right now, self custody, you onboard, you generated fresh seed new accounts and you use that as your source of funding. That's the most in control version of this we have. And then on a per app basis when they want to connect and transact, you still have that secure signing ui. You still have this app that's running totally separate from the rest of the phone. It's the same way that these phones protect biometrics and protect other sensitive information. We've just extended its capabilities. We think that as things stand right now, the surest way to not get stuck by sim swapping or somebody hacking your email and also then losing your self custody funds is to generate a new wallet, have it backed by the hardware of seed vaults and use that as your primary account when you're transacting across the web.
- [31:42]
Raoul Pal
The other thing that I think is going to be very interesting as this rolls out and you know, let's see how many actives out of the 150,000. But let's assume over time it grows is like soon people will start doing things like wellness, wellness apps that have behavioral incentives because it's easier when it's in a place that does that, you know, as opposed to find it and then the app store doesn't allow you to download it and all of this shit. Right. So you know, wellness apps, you know, the sleep act. I mean why eight sleep doesn't have a reward system, a tokenized why peloton never did. It's beyond me. But these are huge case of web3 and gaming as well that once you get people using this stuff in one place, it's all seamless.
- [32:23]
Emmett Hollier
That's. We're already seeing it. We've, we've got sleep apps, we've got mobility apps. There are, there are apps in the store who are already tackling this problem and it's super exciting like it. I really think that this is going to be where things break through. I one of the things we need frankly for this to be successful is we need some like can't live without apps to show up in our store. Right. Like first time around we saw some great apps, we saw some interesting apps. There are some teams who signed up to give incentives that obviously helped us move the sales needle. But they're like, I can't live without this app. I use this app every single day. It's such a critical part of my day to day life. We hadn't quite gotten there yet and so it's still early days. I don't want to say with certainty that, that anything we've got right now will cross the line. But we're getting like many new apps a day, like way more than we thought we'd get. We were hiring to help us like work through the backlog of new apps. And so I think developers are getting more like they're getting just more clever. They're coming up with new use cases that I think everyone had kind of closed their minds to. Like if you were a crypto builder, you thought desktop first and so you wouldn't naturally do something that was movement oriented because people aren't taking their desktops on the go. There's no like fitness data on your desktop. Or sleep is another great example. Even some of the deep end stuff. Now that developers are starting to think mobile first, they're just exploring new business models, new products. So I think we're going to see some really interesting innovation. We've already got a bunch of IT in the store, so a quick break
- [33:47]
Raoul Pal
in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible and this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. So one of my mental frameworks for crypto at large is this is a whole new world we're building and we're basically, we've got these frontier countries that are emerging, right? Bitcoin was the first. It's like the Switzerland of the space. Then let's say whoever is the United States, whatever. But we got the Ethereum economy, the Solana economy and we'll have a few other really large scale economies and then other small vibrant ones. How do you get around the fact that and this happened in mobile? So this is no different back in the day that your mobile only works in England and you take it to the US and it's worthless and you have to get some bloody SIM at the airport and something else. But that's the issue with just building for Solana, right? I mean, I know a lot of the wallets like Phantom, you can use a bunch of different assets and stuff like that. But that's my fear is what do I need three or four every time I travel to the other economy? If I happen to go and do some defi and ethics, you know, am I going to have to get a whole nother phone for eth.
- [35:05]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, yeah. No, you know what I mean? And it's like, yeah, I do.
- [35:08]
Raoul Pal
I don't think you need to tackle it all in one go. But that's what's in my head. It's like, no, this is a new world.
- [35:13]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, yeah, you're right. And that, that makes like the journey into crypto even like more frustrating and confusing. It's not a thing you have to explain in Web2 context, necessarily. It's not a thing we're solving right now, but it's a thing we've left the door open to. Right. Everything we've built so far has been out in the open. All of our stuff is open source. We've had questions before from teams building in other ecosystems, whether it's Ethereum or otherwise. And we keep saying everything we've built, you could contribute, you could fork it, you can do what you want. And so sometimes that rings hollow. I know, for us to say, oh yeah, you figure it out. But the truth is like, we have such a huge problem space, like keeping ourselves constrained to thinking Solana first right now actually just helps us move more quickly. It's not about being anti competitive or it's not even about just like the belief that Solana will win, although I think a lot of our team feel that way. It just helps us keep moving forward. I think some of our core technologies, like the wallet connection standards and seed vaults can easily be adopted to support other ecosystems. And I would love if our platform, this layer that we're building that can live on other devices, proliferated in every direction all at once. So that if you were a crypto user, you didn't have to like make a decision, you just knew that all your crypto stuff was there. I would love to be the outcome.
- [36:36]
Raoul Pal
That is the big game. Right. Because then you've got 600 million wallets worldwide that are monthly active. Okay. And if, if, then everybody can do their stuff in one place now, but people have got to go back and remember Coinbase, which now we think of as like, like the gatekeeper of which most people can enter, only did bitcoin to start with.
- [36:59]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, Right.
- [37:00]
Raoul Pal
And so they built a bitcoin world, solved that very nicely and it helped
- [37:05]
Emmett Hollier
them move quickly, it helped them move fast, solve problems and become a market leader. And then they started to proliferate and grow in every direction.
- [37:12]
Raoul Pal
That's right. And if you think of the hardware as the same kind of thing, you start doing one thing brilliantly. The Solana ecosystem's vibrant, it's fast, it's efficient, you know, it's a perfect place. And then saying, hey, listen guys, if you want to come with us on this journey, and then nobody has to build another piece of hardware and fine, you get the benefits of having got there first, but that feels like that's a really big thing because then it becomes difficult for Apple, it becomes difficult for Google.
- [37:45]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, totally. We, and we've, we've left the Door open. You know, I, I suspect we'll start to get more apps into the store this year that are not Solana first and we'll let them. Right. We're excited to have apps of all types. Will they work quite as seamlessly as the Solana based apps? Probably not. Right. Like our wallet is going to be Solana first in its support and even the other Solana wallets that are in our store are Solana first. But that doesn't mean it'll be that way forever and it'll continue to, to grow and kind of open. What's most important is that everybody who has been a part of this so far and will be a part of it in the future is crypto first in their principles. And so we're not, there's no adversarial who's saying, oh, no, no, no, crypto. We're going to take, you know, all these huge fees. We're not going to let you in. You've got to scrub all of your marketing. You can't say the word nft, that's a curse word. Like, it's, it's not that it is open. It is very crypto friendly. We want to build a fertile ground for that. And so whether you're a Solana team or not, it's not really the point. The point is those existing mobile ecosystems are just, they just don't support this whole industry. We're building this whole new Internet that we're building.
- [38:57]
Raoul Pal
And one of the things that has always been very attractive to Solana, one of the things that attracted me to the ecosystem is totally is very crypto forward. He's not just Team Solana. He's like, no, we're in competition. We're going to all go out and build the best things we can. And good luck, everybody. It's a very refreshing way versus the fixed pie approach that has been a dominant narrative in the space. And, and by doing what you're doing now and saying, listen, over time we'll let everybody come in and do stuff. It's the right way.
- [39:26]
Emmett Hollier
Because that's that, that like, mentality that totally brings. Sometimes it's so frustrating to be like on the team, to be meeting with him. And I'm like, hey, these other guys, they're doing this thing, ah, what should we do? What should we do? And it's always the same answer. It's just build a better product, right? Like, like build a thing that people want to use. And sometimes it's so frustrating when you kind of look to him and He. He came up with Solana and Solana Mobile and kind of kicked this off and gave me this opportunity to now run this thing. And his sage advice always boils down to build the thing that people want to use and win because your product is better. And I think he's right. And so we take that approach very seriously. We want to build the best hardware, the best software, the best wallet, the best developer tools, and then we'll see what happens. And if somebody shows up in our store and they've built a 10x better wallet than we have and all of our users switch to it, okay, they beat us. Like, they built a better wallet. If somebody came across and built a better alternative app store and everybody went there like, all we can do is try and win with what we've got so far, and hardware is expensive enough and annoying enough that we have a pretty good head start doing this in the first place. But there's still plenty of work to be done, right?
- [40:38]
Raoul Pal
Yeah, exactly. So the success of this, as you said, the next phase of the success of this is going to be a breakout app. And the weird thing about breakout apps, you have no clue what it's going to be or how.
- [40:52]
Emmett Hollier
I get asked all the time, what is going to be the app? Like, what's going to be the breakout app? What are you guys building this for? And it's like, I don't did. If you asked the Apple team in 2007 what was going to be the breakout app for the first year of the App Store, they wouldn't have been like, well, here it is. It looks like a pint of beer and you hold it up and it looks like you're drinking the beer. Like, nobody would have guessed that, right? And even from there, like, flashlight apps and ultimately then, right, it felt kind of silly. In the early days, developers were sort of treating it as a sandbox, but then it created new types of businesses. It created. You could hail a taxi digitally, you could. It just created, like, totally new businesses. And I think for us, I have no idea what the breakout app is going to be. I have ideas, right? If I weren't running Salon Mobile and instead were on the other side and trying to build apps, like, there are things that I would have more conviction about. But we don't know, right? We don't know until people build and start to acquire users and all of a sudden people love it.
- [41:51]
Raoul Pal
Yeah, it's always an interesting problem. And all you can do is just really, the platform itself, the ecosystem itself, just has to have enough Bets on a broad enough spread. It's like a VC portfolio and something will hit over time.
- [42:06]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah. And that's why we're taking a lot of different paths towards making the platform and the ecosystem a little bit more rich. Right. On the one front, we're working really closely with the existing ecosystem teams. Right. The teams that everybody knows and loves and uses on their desktop. Maybe they've already got an app in the App Store or the Google Play Store. We're working really closely with those guys. It's a totally different type of relationship. Some of these teams have millions of users elsewhere trying to get them to see the vision of 150,000 users is, is a different type of conversation. But they've all engaged, they, they understand the importance of this and they, they're taking it seriously just like we are. But then on the other end, we're doing things like we just ran our first hackathon where we had hundreds of teams who had never raised a dollar before, having the first product that they build be a mobile product that is crypto based. And that's the type of spaghetti on the wall that you're talking about, where there's inevitably going to be a pretty good amount of variance in the submissions here, but there are going to be some that are just like we, we could have locked ourselves in a room for six weeks and not come up with the idea that some random developer in some random part of the world came up with and built over the course of a month. So we'll just continue to kind of feed the ecosystem, give them the tools they need, the support they need, the funds that they need to try and launch the next interesting breakout app.
- [43:26]
Raoul Pal
It also gives the Solana Biz dev team opportunities to go to existing web 2 acts. Like sleep 8 is a classic example, because sleep is the thing right now, right. That whole idea of, well, why don't you incentivize people? And we can just build a map and you know, on phone experience, you could beta test it with this. 150, 000 people of which maybe 5,000 have a bed. What a great environment to beta test a product. Totally tested behavioral incentive system.
- [43:56]
Emmett Hollier
We have like the earliest of testers, we have alpha testers. We have people who are willing to use barely usable apps and they'll use them every day and tell you what's good and what's bad about them. So it's a really fertile ground. We're constantly at conferences or events where teams, you know, Web2 teams are kind of starting to come back In. Right. It felt this way a little bit in 2000, in 2022 when there was a bunch of like traditional consumer product teams or whatever, traditional Web two companies, whatever you want to call them. And they were showing up these events and they were asking questions and then things like went a little south for a bit there and they were Google
- [44:33]
Raoul Pal
Web3 team and I presented to them a few times.
- [44:35]
Emmett Hollier
Okay, I've not.
- [44:36]
Raoul Pal
And then they all got nuked, as did the Instagram team at Meta. They all got nuked.
- [44:41]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, it all went up to smoke. Yeah. But like, but like teams are starting to come back, right? I have not met with, with Sleep eight but like you can imagine there's a lot of teams who have existing mobile products who are like coming back in and asking some questions and, and they're not going to be convinced overnight, but we're sort of happy to be there and supporting them. And the good news for me is like most of my team built a lot of Web2 mobile products before they switched over to Web3. And so we know the existing development paradigms, we know how the sausage gets made, we know how you get through app on Google. We kind of know all that stuff helping them see the light of what's great about crypto and the types of programs they can build to acquire users and get early feedback and alpha tests. Like it's, it's kind of a no brainer. I think we'll start to get some teams across the fence. But to date, you know, a lot of our adoption has been existing crypto idealists for the most part.
- [45:35]
Raoul Pal
And how much do you have to now then keep reiterating or iterating on the hardware? Because you're not really in the mobile phone game, right. You're in the hardware, device or concentrated eyeballs game and before you know it you're into I need this many pixels and this AI on the thing. I mean how do you deal with that? Because it's not really your game. I mean is a mobile phone the right form factor or was there an ability to create a new form factor?
- [46:04]
Emmett Hollier
The I. So it's fun but it is very hard to be in the actual hardware game. Our team is primarily software, right. Like we have crypto people, marketing people, software people. We've been fortunate enough to work with hardware partners who know their stuff and so they take a lot of the hardest parts off of our plate and we're left with some of the more like public facing decision points like branding and the industrial design of the device and we've set some of the requirements. I suspect we'll be in the hardware business for a while. I think every couple of years you can expect a Solana Mobile kind of flagship device, for lack of a better phrase, kind of like the one that comes straight from us. You buy it straight from us. It represents the most ideal version of this software experience on any device. But we're spending a lot of time right now focused on where else you can experience this. And so in the short term that's primarily looking at other phones, specifically in markets that we weren't really able to support all that well with this phone either because it was too expensive or we couldn't certify it. But you can imagine a world where in some of those emerging markets where they're buying $50 devices if we can bring the core of our stack to those phones so users can self custody funds in a way that's secure and have access to this growing portfolio of apps in our store who are offering rewards and offering exclusives, that's a huge win. And then we don't need to be building those phones and selling those phones and understanding those markets. We can work with somebody else who knows those and is just looking for some type of differentiation and to service where their customers are already headed, which is towards crypto. That'll be in the sort of medium term of like phone centric world. But the good news is we're packaging things up in such a way where if there is another type of device that doesn't look like a phone, maybe it works a little bit differently. We'll be ready. Right? The underlying components of seed vaults. We have a new architecture that we call TPIN which basically lets all types of devices, phones or otherwise, verify themselves on the network and say, hey, I'm a legit device. I'm carrying this unmodified software, you can trust me. And they'll basically have a zero knowledge proof handoff and get registered on the network. That could be a phone or it could be something totally different, we don't know. But we're building with this sort of uncertain future of mobility in mind.
- [48:31]
Raoul Pal
It's interesting. Obviously I followed the SWE ecosystem very closely and they've gone the idea down. The idea of testing out the handheld gain. The SWEE play device. Yeah, the play which again makes sense because it's just a different form factor of aggregated attention. It's unlikely to be the same kind of use case because you're not doing your trading and other stuff there. It's like the gaming thing and I think we'll see more people attempt this strategy to figure out, you know, what can we do with hardware and software? Because it feels like it's a really
- [49:01]
Emmett Hollier
interesting space and we're very excited to see where people go, like maybe someday we'll do a non traditional phone device. I don't know, like it's kind of what we know right now. What about a laptop? Just go, go fully. Yeah. 180.
- [49:17]
Raoul Pal
I mean look, if everybody's using laptops still, it feels that a Solana laptop, it's pretty much the same thing. Right. There's a standard operating system of which you then build the extra component parts that are required and you've got a secure laptop and a secure phone and. Okay, that's where everybody lives.
- [49:33]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, that's, that's a super interesting idea. I also think foldables might become sort of like a, a, a halfway tablet laptop. I don't know. But as, as teams keep coming up with these new hardware bets, we want to work with them and say, hey look, we're excited. We want you guys to build something great. We want you to figure out what your differentiators are. But we've already done a lot of the hard stuff. We've, we've figured out security, we've figured out a seamless signing experience, we've got app distribution. And so it makes sense for you to at least kind of take these base components of this platform and then you build on top of and around that some additional differentiation so they don't have to also do those hard parts from zero.
- [50:16]
Raoul Pal
I'm just thinking through the laptop idea and I actually think it's actually quite, it's actually quite a good idea considering most people do that and to, to mirror them. Like I mirror my iPhone with my, you know, Mac laptop.
- [50:30]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah.
- [50:30]
Raoul Pal
And you think, huh, do you? Then that's a entire nice ecosystem that.
- [50:36]
Emmett Hollier
But so here's a, so here's a question. Would, would you like when you'd get like a one time passcode. I'm assuming that primarily goes to your phone. Right. And you're kind of like signing back on your desktop. Would you ever be open to a world where your desktop transactions. Your phone was the, the signer of those things. Like if there were a way to connect your desktop state to your phone state so that, oh, I have a transaction to sign. I'm going to use my biometrics on my phone and I already sort of trust, I already sort of have this mental model that it's like how I Access my funds. I don't need to connect stuff, I don't need to plug stuff in. There's just this like tether between those two. Yeah.
- [51:17]
Raoul Pal
I mean if, if, if it's provably secure, then yeah, why not?
- [51:22]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah.
- [51:23]
Raoul Pal
And then if you can stop, you know the two factor authentication that comes by mobile, you just do it. Yeah. With the Authenticator app. Okay. We use the Authenticator app when I'm on my desktop or my laptop, I go to my phone, look at the Authenticator app. App, type in the number.
- [51:35]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, we're pretty. Yeah. And well, yeah. And one of the things that we've seen like in research, people do all sorts of like crazy stuff. Research is always like just insanely enlightening to watch other people go through their day to day habits. But a lot of people's desktop browser extensions and their phone wallets are either perfectly in sync or perfectly out of sync, where it's like, whatever. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, yeah, okay, great. Yeah, we, we see plenty of people who do that. He's like, I have my, my phone wallets and my desktop wallets. And then other people are like, I import my seed phrase to my phone whenever I get a new phone. And like they're totally connected. And so we're really trying to interrogate that. Like, what is the thing? Like what. Why would you choose to have them be perfectly in line or perfectly out of line? I know for me, like my phone is just everything. I don't, I don't, like when I go to the bodega around the corner, I don't bring my wallet. Like, I just tap my phone and pay. Like, I don't, I just, I use it for everything. And having it be an extension, it's like super personal thing. It's always in my pocket, it's always near my hands. Like having that help you navigate the world, whether you're on your computer or some other type of device, to me makes sense. I don't know that it makes sense to everybody. And so, yeah, whether we build a laptop or whether we just make it easier to bring your salon mobile devices into desktop state or whatever, I think we're kind of open to all, all paths. Yeah.
- [53:00]
Raoul Pal
Because then you get into the realms of can you create an operating system for Web3? Okay, that's a very interesting idea. Now it's a big idea. But it's super interesting because then it just stops the monopoly, which is, you know, Tolly's talked about this a lot about the monopoly on apps, but if you, the monopoly on the operating system is actually the problem.
- [53:21]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, so the operating system bit is the hardest part. So our phone runs Android, but not only that, it runs what's called the GMS sort of version of Android, which means it has the Google Play store, it has the Google apps. We've had a lot of customers say like, I don't want these on here. Can I just get like the, the version of Android that's open source that like, I'm not worried about Google meddling with. And the short answer is, yeah, we could do it, but I think people would be pretty hard pressed to lose like the traditional app store that Google Play offers and things like Google Pay. You're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. At least Apple owns it, right? Apple's like, this is our hardware, this is our software. Like you get what you get. Yet Google kind of plays it both ways where they're like, oh, Android, it's open source, but if you want it on your phone and you want your users to actually have a good time, you've got to work with us and get the officially blessed Google GMS version of it. And so I think in the future, like a web three centric operating system, in theory, the direction we're building could support that. Right? Like that new architecture I was mentioning. It's all about this idea that if a hardware manufacturer can verifiably prove during the boot up that they're the ones who built the phone, they're the ones who provisioned the phone, there's this whole secure boot loop process that happens at the jump. If that all looks good and they're part of some on chain registry of approved OEMs and the device has not been tampered with, then they can just get access to everything to the security of the seed vault, to the apps in the store, to the various incentive and reward programs, you can scale that out pretty quickly. Every device, device can look and feel different and the software might look and feel different, but they all sort of join the same network and are part of the same attention economy. Whatever type of operating system that is built on is like sort of irrelevant to the underlying tech that we've built. But certainly there's plenty of problems that could be solved by actually tackling the OS problem.
- [55:19]
Raoul Pal
So what is the, what's the rollout? It's, it's live, people can buy it. Solana mobile.com yeah, Seeker, I'm guessing.
- [55:29]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, slash Seeker or store.solanamobile.com will take you like basically straight to the checkout page. So we pre sold 150,000 of them. They started shipping a few weeks ago. It's a hell of an undertaking to ship 150,000 devices to 50 plus countries. So they've not all been delivered yet, but we're pretty close. Things have really started to accelerate in the last few weeks. If you haven't ordered one yet, like, don't worry that you're going to get boxed out. If you order one today, it will be in your hands very shortly, like early September. So don't hesitate. We will continue to ship phones. We've got to get through this pre order backlog. But then as people place new orders, we'll ship those out as well. And then kind of next for us is we have seeker season starting in September where we're going to be working with a whole bunch of great partners and kind of walking through exclusives. And then sometime after that is when that new platform architecture goes live. Hopefully we've got some new OEMs to announce. And we're also launching our token SKR which is going to help kind of serve as the central economic unit on this growing platform and give us a way to align everyone's incentives, whether you're a builder or a user or a hardware manufacturer in the future.
- [56:43]
Raoul Pal
And so explain that a bit more to people so they understand it.
- [56:47]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah, yeah. So sometime in the future, I don't know exactly when we'll be launching skr, which is our token. And the best way to think about it is as we grow this platform and we have it on not only our devices, but additional devices. We want to grow and decentralize it so that the process to join the network as a hardware manufacturer doesn't mean call Emmett, make the case, figure out some partnership agreement and hope we can come to terms. But rather it's permissionless. You can come be a part of this growing Solana mobile network so long as your devices kind of support the core software. In order to accomplish that, that and accommodate this growth and decentralization, we need some mechanism to coordinate it. And so if things like which devices are allowed on the network are managed on chain, which apps are allowed in, the App Store is managed on chain. We'll need a network of people who are sort of help help coordinating that. And those people will be guardians and they'll receive SKR as stake. And so in the future you can imagine building sort of additional economic loops with that token that help keep users and builders and hardware manufacturers and guardians on the same page and kind of growing the future of the platform together.
- [58:01]
Raoul Pal
Super interesting. So, final two questions. What was the coolest thing that you built on this, that you went, you know what, that's pretty good. I'm quite proud of this.
- [58:10]
Emmett Hollier
Seed Vault Wallet is definitely the thing that I'm most proud of. So with Saga, we launched Seed Vault, which was an underlying technology. It was more of a protocol than a product. It provided a more secure way, way to store keys with this phone. With Seeker, we took that a step further and we built Seed Vault Wallet. And our prompt in our heads the whole time was Seed Vault on Saga was good, but it was too cumbersome. What if we made the Apple Pay equivalent of for. For crypto, where connecting to apps and signing transactions felt like Apple Pay? What would that look like? And that was the prompt. And now I have a phone in hand and I can connect to an app and trade and stake and it is like Apple Pay. I get a bottom sheet, I see the transaction, I double tap my power button, it takes my biometrics and the transaction is signed. I think to set such an ambitious prompt 18 months ago and now have it working in my hand is truly a feat of engineering and design expertise.
- [59:14]
Raoul Pal
So the opposite question was, what was the thing that you thought was going to be easy and ended up being a total pain to build? Because there's always something, you're like, yeah, that'll be fine. And then it's like, like, this is hard.
- [59:25]
Emmett Hollier
A smaller phone. When we set out to build this, we said we want it to be smaller, which I thought would be easy to accomplish. And it was actually the total opposite. If you want to make a big Android phone, it could not be easier. There are so many screen manufacturers all around the world who are happy to sell you a 7 inch screen for like no money. There are very few small screens out in display because outside of the U.S. like, people just love their big phones. And not only that, the moment you make the phone smaller, the screen gets more expensive, but there's less room for stuff like you can't, you gotta make the battery smaller. You have to like really, really thoughtfully place your camera array well in your
- [60:05]
Raoul Pal
head, your mind, your mental model is, smaller phone equals cheaper, easier.
- [60:10]
Emmett Hollier
Nope, nope, exact opposite. It became so much harder. So I came in and I was like, this is going to be great. We'll make a smaller phone. It'll be so much easier. And it became so hard. It was so hard. It was fun. It was really fun. Fun problem to solve. We have some great hardware partners, but that was definitely not what I had expected.
- [60:27]
Raoul Pal
Emmett, thanks so much. Look, really excited. I thought it was a great conversation.
- [60:30]
Emmett Hollier
Just.
- [60:31]
Raoul Pal
Yeah, I just love where this is potentially going, what you're trying to do. It's just really interesting for the space. So, look, best of luck with everything. I think it's great.
- [60:39]
Emmett Hollier
Yeah. Thank you for having me. Great, great conversation. I'm happy to come back on whenever you want.
- [60:43]
Raoul Pal
Absolutely, absolutely. So you can see from this conversation that this idea of using a phone is really about aggregating attention to create network effects around Solana and its ecosystem. It's a really, really clever idea. Now, it's a high stakes idea, but the idea is if you can find a place where everyone can discover anything in the Solana ecosystem, you can create flywheel effects and value creation and that creates value on the network. And I think how they're thinking about it is really quite groundbreaking. And I think we'll think we'll see other people trying to discover ways of doing something similar. Anyway, I'll see you next time. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com forward/join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha great investment ideas and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now. Go to realvision.com forward/join.
- [61:49]
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