Solana Seeker is finally here. It’s been about 20 months since “Chapter Two” was unveiled after the Saga sold out, and the Solana faithful have been yearning to get their thumbs on the new device and grow the $SKR pie.

But while some were expecting a simple reskin of the Saga, Solana Mobile blew our expectations out of the water. Instead of pushing an updated device with a better camera and nicer screen with some vague verbiage around maybe getting some perks, Solana Mobile has developed an entire circular economy and decentralized tech stack. 

If you’re a Seeker owner, congrats, you’re now a part of one of the most compelling and ambitious experiments the crypto industry has ever attempted.

Before getting into the weeds, let’s clarify a few things. I am not your typical phone reviewer, and this is not our typical phone. If you’re hoping for iPhone camera comparisons and benchmark tests tracking processing power for AAA mobile games, you’re in the wrong place. 

If you’re someone who lives and breathes Solana, and you’re an onchain addict who can’t go a day without tracking your $SOL staking rewards or trading some kind of digital slop onchain, this is for you.

“Wen Seeker?” - Today. 

Solana Seeker: First Impressions

After tearing off the spacey, silver packaging and sliding the Seeker out of its iridescent black box, the first thing that sprang to mind was: “Wow, this looks and feels… premium”

The Solana Seeker is an elegant and sturdy device. It’s handsomely finished, feels good in the hand, and the little Solana ‘S’ details go a long way towards giving you the impression that this phone was designed for you.

Turning it on and setting it up will be second nature to anyone who’s owned a phone before. After Google’s done its thing, it’s time to dive into what makes Seeker truly special and set up the Seed Vault.

Fortunately, setting up the crypto-native elements of the Seeker was extremely easy. A few taps and helpful explanations later, my Seed Vault is set up, Genesis token minted, and my seed phrase safely logged on the provided card.

Time to play around.

A Mobile, Crypto-Native Experience: The Way it Should Be

Solana Seeker offers a UX that would’ve made onboarding normies back in the day one thousand times easier. While this makes perfect sense for a crypto phone, I have to throw flowers for the UX team at Solana Mobile. 

Every token swap, transfer, or staking transaction is executed with Web2-esque simplicity, with the added peace of mind that comes from knowing that the wallet is protected by the Seed Vault. 

Perhaps the biggest UX feature is the approval window that slides up from the bottom of the screen whenever you execute a transaction onchain. After hitting “Approve”, Seeker asks for your thumbprint to confirm the transaction, ensuring that you, and only you, can approve transactions from the Seed Vault. 

This simplistic confirmation window is to Seeker what Face ID is to Apple Pay, and I admit that going back to doing onchain activity on my “normal” phone feels clumsy and sluggish by comparison.

Unlike iPhone and Android devices, every aspect of the Seeker’s user experience is optimized for crypto native users. In the past, the onchain mobile experience demanded users go through the clunky process of accessing dApps through the browser of third-party wallets, or rely on wallet connectors that could expose your keys to the depths and malice of the World Wide Web. 

Seeker has abstracted away that entire process, removing considerable points of friction and helping you get onchain faster, and more safely. Mobile is indisputably the future of the internet, and Solana Seeker has provided a secure, crypto-first way of navigating that future.

Here’s What I’m Most Excited About

Seamless UX aside, the Solana Seeker introduces a wealth of unique features that make the Solana Mobile ecosystem one of the most ambitious projects in crypto. Chief among these is the $SKR economy, a compelling flywheel that will theoretically reward and inspire users and developers on either side of the phone.

At this early stage, details on the precise mechanics of the $SKR economy are light and outside the scope of this review. Speaking previously with SolanaFloor, Solana Mobile CEO Emmett Hollyer insinuated that the $SKR economy will incentivize users, support builders, and ultimately decentralize ownership and governance of the Solana Mobile ecosystem.

The $SKR economy is underpinned by Solana Mobile’s TEEPIN stack, which essentially unifies the ecosystem to create an authentic, high-value user base. TEEPIN provides a tamper-resistant framework for onchain verifications, powered by Seeker Guardians, who govern the integrity of the Seeker stack.

Seed Vault Wallet App 

What immediately stood out to me about the Seeker Wallet was its simplicity and ease of use. It’s elegant, albeit basic, but serves all the essential functions that one would expect from a wallet app.

Seeker Wallet leans into the maturing state of Solana DeFi, putting TradFi assets like tokenized stocks and the S&P 500 index into the mix of shortlisted tokens like $PUMP, $PENGU, and $JTO.

Beyond showing a consolidated token portfolio and NFT gallery, the Seeker Wallet app also lets you stake your $SOL to earn rewards and secure the network. The Seeker validator is highlighted as the path of least resistance, but a simple search will bring up your validator of choice. No gatekeeping and no walled gardens here, which is great to see.

However, it’s worth mentioning that Seeker Wallet’s swap fees aren’t particularly obvious. This wasn’t necessarily an issue for me, because I typically expect wallets to charge swap fees, but the unassuming user could feel scandalized if they weren’t properly informed. Solana Mobile has since confirmed with SolanaFloor that the app takes 0.8% on swaps and zero fees on staking rewards, which also include MEV tips.

The Seeker Wallet also comes complete with your own unique Seeker ID, or .skr. The Seeker ID can be used interchangeably with your long-form wallet address, helping to humanize and simplify your account and serve as your passport to Solana. Each Seeker ID marks a wallet as a high-value, authentic user. By tracking activity from .skr addresses, developers can separate genuine activity from artificially generated sybil spamming and filter for more valuable user behavior.

Security

While Solana Seeker’s smooth-as-butter UX is the star of the show, the device’s underlying security features are what make it so appealing to crypto power users. 

The crypto mobile experience is heinously insecure. The internet is plagued by malicious phishing links, and the prevalence and ease with which people connect to public WiFi networks is an exploit waiting to happen. Access and permissions between crypto apps and mobile hardware are vague at the best of times, prompting the more careful crypto users to avoid mobile wallets entirely.

The Seed Vault goes a long way to resolving this. Developed by SolFlare, the Seeker Seed Vault protects your private keys with encryption and biometrics, offering an unprecedented level of security for mobile devices. Its secure hardware is an impermeable layer of protection, ensuring that neither the Android operating system nor any of your apps ever have access to your keys.

Genesis Token

The Genesis token is, arguably, what many buyers would consider the best reason to dip their toes into the Solana Mobile ecosystem. Each Seeker gets its own unique Genesis token, which is soulbound to the device, meaning it can’t be transferred.

At first glance, the Genesis token is a niche collectible with a mesmerizing perpetual-motion image. Dig a layer deeper, and you’ll realize that the Genesis token is your ticket to Solana’s VIP Room.

Holding a Seeker Genesis token makes your wallet eligible for dozens of exclusive benefits, gifts, and experiences. As seen with both the Solana Saga and the Chapter Two token, these perks offer everything from token airdrops and NFT whitelists to points boosts in your favorite dApps.

Solana dApp Store

The Solana dApp Store is the beating heart of the Solana Mobile ecosystem. Like the App Stores of the Mobile Duopoly, there’s truly something for crypto users across the entire spectrum.

Whether you’re in the memecoin trenches looking for the next moonshot or catching clout in SocialFi, exchanging unused internet or mobile storage to a DePIN, or you want to sell off your unused subscription services for $SOL, the Solana dApp store can make it happen.

For developers, builders, and founders, getting into the Solana dApp Store means instant distribution to over 150,000 qualified, high-signal Solana power users.

Let’s Talk Hardware

Amidst all the excitement of what makes the Solana Seeker unique, it’s easy to overlook what makes the world’s most popular crypto phone, a phone. The Seeker does all the things you’d expect a phone to do, and does them sufficiently well to keep up with the modern age.

Solana dApp Store games run smoothly, call quality is crisp and clear, and the screen is vibrant and colourful without oversaturating images. While the camera is unlikely to win any awards or shoot Chris Nolan’s next cinematic masterpiece, image quality and audio recording are in line with what you’d expect from a mid-range Android phone.

Things I Didn’t Love

Of course, nothing is perfect. While the Solana Seeker exceeded my expectations and made navigating the onchain world from a mobile handset a far more pleasurable experience, there are still a handful of pain points that need to be solved.

I communicated my concerns to Solana Mobile. To their credit, the Seeker developers are well aware of some of the potential issues users might have in the opening weeks of the Seeker era and have several resolutions already in the works.

Not All Solana Apps Have Integrated Support - Integrations with some of Solana’s most popular dApps are lacking. The Seeker Wallet requires that apps support its Mobile Wallet Adaptor, and when they don’t, these apps become unusable. 

If I wanted to lend or borrow some of the $SPYx I purchased earlier on Kamino, I’d need to go through a third-party wallet provider. Fortunately, Solana Mobile has communicated that integrating the MWA is an extremely simple process and teams are rapidly adopting it, so I would expect Solana Apps will remedy this oversight pretty quickly.

“Teams across the Solana ecosystem are adopting the Mobile Wallet Adaptor to streamline onboarding their dApp to Solana Mobile. The pace of adoption is really picking up now that the device is almost in people’s hands, and we expect that most dApps in the Solana ecosystem will follow those that already have. Implementing the MWA itself is a very easy process — it can take as little as 30 minutes — and the Solana Mobile devs are available to help along the way.” - Solana Mobile

More Quality dApps Please - There are reportedly over 100 apps in the Solana dApp Store, but in an age of digital mobile abundance, it doesn’t feel like much. Additionally, many of these function as shortcuts to the app’s webpage, which doesn’t particularly feel like a curated experience. 

That being said, it’s still early days for the Solana dApp Store. The first of many Solana Mobile hackathons has just come to a close, so we can expect to see the dApp Store inundated with a number of creative apps looking to show off Seeker’s unique properties. 

With over 150,000 genuine users eager to explore what Seeker has to offer, it seems like a no-brainer for ambitious founders to push for a dApp store listing and get their product in front of Solana’s power users.

“September will be a very big month for dApps on Solana Mobile, and there’s a lot more news on that front coming out as soon as Seekers start to arrive. The first-ever Solana Mobile Hackathon closes this week with almost 1000 signups and hundreds of submissions. The quality and ingenuity we’ve seen from the global community of developers has us really excited. It will take a few weeks for winners to be announced, but that wave of dApps will be hitting the Solana dApp Store soon as well.” - Solana Mobile

Tackling the Duopoly - Let’s not forget, the Solana Seeker is a ludicrously ambitious attempt to bring down the iPhone x Google duopoly and threaten the Big Tech status quo. 

Is it really reasonable to do that from an Android device? I can appreciate that Android is an excellent product, and adding a crypto layer to an existing OS is an efficient way to cut down years of development time and get to market sooner, but it does seem like a philosophical shortcut. 

At the same time, Solana Mobile’s feeless dApp store is already a remarkable challenge to the Duopoly’s extractive policies. The TEEPIN stack can also be implemented on a far wider range of hardware devices, which, when powered by a decentralized economy, could encourage third-party teams to build new operating systems and proliferate the ecosystem beyond its existing boundaries.

“Solana Mobile’s longer horizon roadmap is towards an open, decentralized mobile platform. That said, we’re not necessarily trying to replace Android, which is an open-source OS. We're building a decentralized layer on top of mobile operating systems that fundamentally changes who's in control. Our approach to this is called TEEPIN, which leverages the secure hardware already built into modern smartphones to create parallel infrastructure where the community controls app distribution, economic models, and platform policies. As more manufacturers adopt this architecture, we're essentially creating a federation of devices that operate under community governance rather than corporate control.” - Solana Mobile

Next Stop: Seeker September

Despite a few addressable hiccups, the Solana Seeker is a triumphant step towards improving the way people interact with crypto. For perhaps the first time ever, the mobile-first crypto experience feels intuitive and secure, and that barely scratches the surface of what Solana Mobile has planned for the $SKR economy and TEEPIN framework.

As the last few Seeker devices get loaded into delivery vans and shipped across the world, your favorite Solana projects are actively gearing up for what could be one of the most unique metas crypto has ever witnessed. 

September is Seeker Season, and Genesis Token holders are going to have their hands full trying to keep up with activations, rewards, and perks as apps across the ecosystem clamor for the attention of over 150,000 Seeker users.

Seeker is, in the humble opinion of this Solana degen-turned-phone-reviewer, the breath of fresh air we didn’t know we needed. It’s a proof-of-concept that the mobile experience doesn’t need to be an opsec minefield, but an ecosystem that actively rewards genuine participation. 

Naturally, there’s more work to do, but like Solana itself, Seeker has taken the first step towards reinventing the norms and providing an experience so good you’ll struggle to settle for less.

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