Over 100,000 people have placed their order for the Solana Saga Chapter Two.
At $450 a pop, that means SolanaLabs has now racked up over $45 million in funding.
It sounds good, it's a round number, it's an eight-figure number.
But is it enough?
I remember when a well-known car brand sold 77 units of an ultra-expensive, limited-edition supercar for $1 million per unit.
And I thought it was brilliant. I thought, "wow. That's $77 million in the bank."
At which point, my mentor and friend told me, "exactly. That's nothing for an automaker." And he was right.
It's true. While $45 million does sound like a nice number, it is nowhere near enough to develop a smartphone (nearly) from scratch.
Apple and Samsung probably spend $45 million a year in stationery. Or toilet paper for their HQ. Or napkins for the cafeteria.
Or maybe $45 million is what they spend in a quarter, or a month, on that stuff.
The point is, when it comes to building things like smartphones, the actual physical product costs peanuts. It's the engineering, R&D, patents, etc - These are the things that cost a lot.
When you buy an iPhone, for example, you're not paying for the metal, glass, copper, lithium, silica and cobalt.
You're paying for the patents, engineering and R&D behind features such as AirDrop or iCloud or the way FaceTime works and so on.
And it's exactly the same for other brands, the only difference being, Apple obviously has a much higher markup.
The Saga is slightly different, because most of it is outsourced and 'recycled'. Under the surface of Web3 and dApps, it is essentially just another Android-based phone, of which there are many.
Still, $45 million is nothing.
The good news, if you wanna call it that, is this is just the start. In the next phase, the pre-order will cost $600 (my prediction). And finally, for the last phase, it will cost $1,000 (also by prediction).
It will get made, I'm fairly sure of that, but I just find it a bit funny that several crypto news outlets covered this and made it sound like $45 million is a lot. When it comes to stuff like this, it really isn't.
