Bonk Frenzy Boosts Sales of Solana’s Saga Phones to Eight Times its Retail Cost: Details

The month of December proved to be quite lucrative for the overall crypto market, but it brought in expansive business into one particular ecosystem; Solana's. From Solana's native cryptocurrency SOL trading on the upper side of the price ladder the past few days and Solana-based NFTs seeing sell outs, the Solana ecosystem was already showing signs of recovery when a comparatively new member of its ecosystem bounced to popularity. This new member is named Bonk, and it is a memecoin based on the Solana blockchain.

In a new development, Solana's Saga smartphones seem to be selling at hefty prices on online marketplaces in international markets.

Over the weekend, a Solana device sold for $5,000 (roughly Rs. 4.14 lakh) -- which is approximately eight times its original launch price of $600 (roughly Rs. 49,795) on eBay. Another unit of the Saga was up for grabs at $3,316 (roughly Rs. 2.75 lakh) and many others were traded for over $2,000 (roughly Rs. 1.65 lakh), a report by CoinTelegraph said.

Notably, each Saga smartphone entails a free airdrop of 30 million Bonk tokens, which is being reported among top reasons why the Saga devices are selling like hot cakes.

In the last few days, Bonk surpassed recent memecoin star Pepecoin, in terms of its market cap. In the previous 30 days, the price of the Bonk token rose from $0.0000028 (roughly Rs. 0.00023) to $0.000012 (roughly Rs. 0.0010) and touched a valuation of $762 million (roughly Rs. 6,353 crores).

As per the official X handle of Solana Mobile, the Saga was sold out on December 16.

Buyers of this handset automatically get 30 million Bonk tokens, the value of which as per the current rate of the token, would amount to $638 (roughly Rs. 52,977). Saga buyers are also seemingly betting big on Bonk price to escalate even further, which needs to spike by at least 620 percent for them to see any real profit.

With the Saga phone now becoming a frenzy in itself, some unrelated crypto projects are also lining up airdrops for these phones.

Memecoin project called Samoyed Coin, for instance, has announced an airdrop for Saga in the weeks to come. GenesysGo, a decentralised storage provider is also set to let its native Shadow (SHDW) be mined via an app on the Saga phone.

Solana's Saga smartphone was launched in April 2022 and was touted as the advent of the world's first-generation of crypto and Web3-centric smartphones. Along with a Solana Pay crypto pay app, a ‘seed vault' is also pre-installed on the Saga phone to safely store all the private keys linked to the handset, according to the company.