Why Solana Built a Smartphone (And Why it Might Work)

26:16So 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. That's great. That's genius because it makes it even less technical and so visceral. It's like, here, I'm giving you money. Stuff like that you can do with a mobile you cannot do otherwise. Not only that, that is one awesome use case. 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 a little bit confused.

26:55So 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 some natural anxiety about, oh, okay, I've got 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 doesn't hold my money. It's just how I get there. The moment that changes in it is more reflective of you self-custaining those funds.

27:29You'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, you know, your friend's phone gets hacked. You're not going to do it again. Like 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 like, make sure you're giving self-custody users the best possible experience they can have on any mobile device.

28:01But that's also another mental robot you'll get over time as people build larger balances 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. Right, right, right. 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. yep you have to kind of this industry overall has to get rid of this fucking issue of seed phrases how it's done write it down on a bit of paper it's like this is just not going to work 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 seat brake cars, I'm like, oh, I wish we didn't have to give you that.

28:55But 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 going to have to overcome this hurdle of feeling like the funds are actually in the device, even though they're not.

29:24Or, 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 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. um 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 will commit to trying to solve in the next couple years but we're trying to take it one step at a time 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 attack 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 a more secure environment your multi-sig um 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 shit i've just been drained yeah yeah that's you know one of the reasons like we could have taken a different approach with seeker right we could have uh had people go through a social login on the way in or we could really be pushing like the embedded wallet infrastructure onto partners.

30:47But ultimately, 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 a 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.

31:23We 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-custodied funds is to generate a new wallet, have it backed by the hardware of Seed Vault, and use that as your primary account when you're transacting across the web. 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 150 ,000, but let's assume over time it grows is like soon people will start doing things like 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?

32:05So, 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 cases of web free and gaming as well, that once you get people using this stuff in one place, it's all seamless. That's we're already seeing it. We've got sleep apps. We've got mobility apps. There are apps in the store who are already tackling this problem. And it's super exciting. Like, I really think that this is going to be where things break through. 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?

32:42Like, 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 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.

33:11And 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.

33:43We've already got a bunch of it in the store. So a quick break 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 defiant eth you know am i gonna have to get a whole nother phone for eth yeah yeah no you know what i mean it's like yeah i do 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 yeah as yeah you're right um 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 web two context necessarily um 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 is open source um we've had questions before from teams building in alternate you know in other ecosystems whether it's ethereum or otherwise and we keep saying you know like 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, right, for us to say like, oh, yeah, you figure it out.

35:54But 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 make a decision.

36:32You just knew that all your crypto stuff was there. I would love for that to be the outcome. That is the big game, right? Because then you've got 600 million wallets worldwide that are monthly active. 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 the, the, the, the gatekeeper of which we, most people can enter only did Bitcoin to start with. Yeah. Right. And so they built a Bitcoin world, solve that very nicely. And it helped them move quickly. It helped them move fast, solve problems and become a market leader.

37:08And then they started to proliferate and grow in every direction. 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 is 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. Yeah, totally.

37:46And we've left the door open. 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 grow and kind of open. I think 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.

38:25And 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 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. And one of the things that has always been very attractive to Solana, one of the things that attracted me to the ecosystem, is Tully is very crypto forward.

39:05He'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 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. because that's well and that that like mentality that totally brings sometimes it's so frustrating to be like on the team to be meeting with him 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.

39:53And 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. 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.

40:26And 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? 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 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.

41:20Developers 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 Immobile 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. Yeah. It's, it's always an interesting problem.

41:53And all you can do is just really the platform itself, the, 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. 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. On the one front, we're working really closely with the existing ecosystem teams. 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.

42:29You know, some of these teams have millions of users elsewhere. Trying to get them to see the vision of 150 ,000 users is a different type of conversation. But they've all engaged. They understand the importance of this and 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.

43:05But there are going to be some that are just like, 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. it also gives the solana biz dev team opportunities to go to existing web 2x like sleep 8 is a classic example because sleep is the thing right now right um 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 of products totally 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 uh so it's a really fertile ground we're constantly at uh conferences or events where teams you know web2 teams are kind of starting to come back in right there they felt it this way a little bit in 2000 in 2022 when there was a bunch of like traditional consumer product teams or uh whatever traditional web 2 companies whatever you want to call them and they were showing up these events they were asking questions and then things like went a little south for a bit there and they got scared away google web 3 team and i presented to them a few times okay i've met and then they all got nuked as did the instagram team at meta they all got nuked 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 it's 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 web two mobile products before they switched over to web three 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 uh 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 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 yeah 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 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 uh 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 um like public facing decision points like branding and the industrial design of the device.

46:33And we've set some of the requirements. Um, 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.

47:30And 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 T-Pin, which basically lets all types of devices, phones or otherwise, verify themselves on the network and say, hey, I'm a legit device.

48:12I'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 uh mobility in mind it's interesting um obviously i've followed the sui ecosystem very closely and they've gone the idea down the idea of testing out the handle game the sui 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 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 it's kind of what we know right What about a laptop?

49:13Just go fully, yeah, 180 degrees. 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. Yeah, that's a super interesting idea. I also think foldables might become sort of like a halfway tablet laptop. I don't know. But 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.

49:51We want you to figure out what your differentiators are. But we've already done a lot of the hard stuff. 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 and provide some additional differentiation so they don't have to also do those hard parts from zero i'm just thinking through the laptop idea and i actually think it's actually quite a good idea considering most people do that and to to mirror them like i mirror my iphone with my um you know mac laptop yeah and you think huh if you then that's a entire nice ecosystem that so so here's a so here's a question would you would you um 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 yeah i have a transaction to sign i'm going to use my biometrics on my phone and i already sort of trust it 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 i mean if it's provably secure then yeah why not yeah 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 on my laptop i go to my phone look at the authenticator app type in the number 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 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 I don't like when I go to the bodega around the corner, I don't bring my wallet.

52:27Like I just tap my phone and pay. Like I don't, uh, 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 then you you get into the realms of can you create an operating system for web 3 okay that's a very interesting idea yeah 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 the monopoly on apps but if you the monopoly on the operating system is actually the problem them.

53:21Yeah. So the, the operating system bit is, is the hardest part. So our phone runs Android, but not only that it runs, uh, what's called the GMS certified 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, where you're kind of damned if you do damned, if you don't, at least Apple owns it, right?

53:58Apple's like, this is our hardware. This is our software. Like you get what you get. 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 Web3 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.

54:41If 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 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 so what is the what's the rollout it's it's live people can buy it solanomobile.com yeah or slash seeker i'm guessing yeah slash seeker or store.solanomobile.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.

55:39It'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, 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.

56:20And 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. And so explain that a bit more to people so they understand it. 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.

57:01We 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 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 coordinating that.

57:42And 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 super interesting so final two questions what was the coolest thing that you built on this you went you know well that's pretty good i'm quite proud of this uh 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 to store keys.

58:24With 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 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.

59:01I 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. So the opposite question was, what was the thing that you thought was going to be easy and end 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, this is hard. 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.

59:38There are so many screen manufacturers all around the world who are happy to sell you a seven 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 uh the screen gets more expensive but there's less room for stuff like you can't you got to make the battery smaller you have to like really really thoughtfully place your camera array well in your head your mind your mental model is smaller phone equals cheaper easier right nope nope exact opposite it became so much harder.

1:00:12So 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. Emmett, thanks so much. Look, really excited. I think it was a great conversation. I just love where this is potentially going, what you're trying to do. It's just really interesting for the space. So best of luck with everything. I think it's great. Yeah, thank you for having me. Great, great conversation. I'm happy to come back on whenever you want.

1:00:43Absolutely. 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.

1:01:28But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com forward slash 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 slash join.