Steven Laver - Solana Mobile Engineering Lead, Ep. 5

Steven Laver (Solana Mobile Engineering Lead) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss how Solana Mobile Stack and the Saga phone will enable the user experiences and rich ecosystem that we need for the future of Web3.

Show Notes

00:05 - Intro
00:45 - Background
01:27 - Before Solana
02:24 - Why mobile and SMS?
04:12 - What is SMS ?
06:15 - Seed Vault
08:39 - ARM TrustZone
10:06 - Security with Seed Vault
11:44 - Restrictions with Seed Vault
12:46 - Importing and exporting keys
15:02 - Mobile wallet adapter
21:39 - Plans for deep linking
23:27 - The dApp store
27:31 - Plans for Solana pay
31:18 - Saga
33:16 - Expanding SMS to other devices and blockchains
38:54 - Working with TJ from Mountain Pay
40:18 - Where to connect with Steven and SMS
41:14 - Outro

Transcript

Brian (00:06):

Hey, everyone. And welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers, and designers who are pushing the Web 3.0 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom, and I'm super excited to introduce my guest Steven Labor. Stephen is the lead software engineer for a suite of new Solana developer tools known as SMS. The Solana mobile stack. SMS was unveiled recently at NFT NYC alongside a flagship smartphone that will be powered by this new suite of technologies. Stephen, welcome to the show.

Steven (00:37):

Thanks Brian. Excited to be here.

Brian (00:39):

Thanks for coming on. We have a lot of ground to cover today. Couple really great announcements that you guys just released, but before we dive into all that, could you give us a brief background of who you are and how you became involved with building mobile software for so Solana?

Steven (00:52):

Sure. So I have been doing professional engineering now for round about 20 years, but about 15 of those have been spent working on phones in one fashion or another. Right after college, I kind of fell backwards into a job. I just crossed the road rom my university and started working for research in motion and back then worked on Blackberries back when they were cool. And since then I've had a long career building, all kinds of phones and software for phones. Few forays out into some other areas of consumer electronics, but I keep seeming to be dragged back into phones. So I must love it.

Brian (01:28):

Right before Solana. What were some of the companies you were just working at?

Steven (01:31):

When, when I took the call from Anatoly for this cool new, exciting opportunity for Solana mobile, I was sitting in a beige conference room at a very large company that likes to make very monochromatic products. And when he started selling me on what Solana labs was building here and the what the vision for the SAGA device was at the time under a very cool code name, but I was pretty quickly sold on that. And previous to that, I spent a few years working at Google, working on the Android products there. So like I said, long background, lots of different smartphones and phone software in there, but this is the most excited I've been about a phone project in a long, long time.

Brian (02:09):

Oh, that's awesome to hear. Most people who interact with crypto today do so on a desktop from a browser extension. Maybe they're signing with a ledger, maybe they're signing with a web wallet like Phantom. And on Solana specifically, mobile wallets only launched a little over six months ago. Why is the time right now for push into mobile and why SMS specifically?

Steven (02:29):

So this is actually exactly what the problem statement that convinced me that I should join Solana labs and help build this awesome product. Our phones are everything to us. They're our web browsers. They are cameras. We watch TV on them. We play games on them. They're the first place we go to for everything, they're even our alarm clocks now. And the fact that the Web 3.0 ecosystem just isn't present on our phones the same way it is on our desktops. That to me, is what really gets me excited and got me interested in building this. We're really at the square one here, as far as building for a rich ecosystem for Web 3.0 and for Solana on mobile devices. And we get to use this at use SAGA and use SMS. This is our stake in the ground.

Steven (03:13):

This is us saying, this is how we should be building for mobile devices. These are the user experiences we need to offer. These are the technologies we need to offer. And being on the ground floor of that, getting to build these fundamental building blocks and then giving them to the community. So the community can then go build all the great, amazing ideas that are honestly, things I would never have thought of. But when I look back at them, I'm like, wow. We have such a rich and exciting community of builders for Solana. That's what I'm most excited about for building SAGA and building the Solana mobile stack.

Brian (03:45):

That's awesome. Yeah. From Phantoms side, we've seen just in the last six months that even though that foundation for building mobile apps, isn't really there today, SMS hopefully will be able to lay this great foundation. Like you said, we've seen that mobile has been our fastest growing segment by far. So we're super excited for this as well. SMS covers a lot of new developer features here. It's kind of this umbrella term for this whole suite of products that you guys are building in your own words, what is SMS and how should developers be thinking about this new suite of tools?

Steven (04:17):

I think of it from two angles. So first of all, let me talk about it just briefly from a consumer angle. Or Web 3.0 ecosystem for consumers. Many of us are very in the know about what that means, but for some others, they may be a little less so. They're new to the space, they're still learning it. There's a lot of words and phrases and sayings and memes that are very unique to this ecosystem that people take a little while to get onboarded with. From a consumer perspective, SMS really allows them to understand what a phone offers in terms of its capabilities with Solana. And so it's really by participating in an ecosystem or on a device that has the SMS technologies on it, to a certain extent, they know what they're going to get there. They know they're going to get a device that is going to work well and is they're going to be able to fully participate in the Solana ecosystem.

Steven (05:06):

For developers, SMS is a collection of technologies, the big ones being, we have Seed Vault for secure key custody. We have mobile wallet adapter for connecting adapts to wallets. We have deeper richer integrations with the OS for Solana Pay, and then the Solana DAP store, which people are really, really excited about.

Steven (05:25):

And so from the developer perspective, we have this collection of tools which will continue to grow over time. We're going to put more libraries in there. We're going to have more samples for developers, and we're going to keep expanding on this initial set of technologies. And I'm happy to talk about each of those in detail, but as far as SMS for developers, we've got an SDK out now and we're going to be continuing to enhance that. And each of those technology offerings within SMS has value to offer to a different slice or a different segment of our developer ecosystem.

Brian (05:55):

That's awesome. They're very complimentary as well. Let's dive into each of them. So you mentioned four of those there. We have the Seed Vault. We have the mobile wallet adapter, the DAP store that you guys are launching and then better integrations around Solana Pay, which you guys recently unveiled earlier this year. Let's start with the Seed Vault. I feel like this is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Can you describe a little bit of more, like, what is the Seed Vault? Is it related to what a secure enclave is on iOS or a key store? How should people be thinking about this new term?

Steven (06:25):

So there's a pretty big gap between the level of security that a hardware wallet offers. Something like a device like a ledger or a treasure. Those are great devices, they're purpose built hardware, and they offer the maximum level of security for users. I think they do a fantastic job with that, but ultimately they are a little bit limited by the fact that they're a separate device. It needs to be connected to your wallet. It's got a very limited user interface in terms of LCD displays or buttons, et cetera. Whereas on the other end of the spectrum, we have the software wallets running on Android or iOS devices, like Phantom for example. User experience is top notch, but the environment that they're running in the Android or iOS high level operating systems, they are general purpose operating systems. They're connected to the network. They run other user code on them.

Steven (07:15):

And so while they can offer that great user experience because of the environment they operate in, they don't have that quite that same level of security as a hardware wallet would. Seed Vault allows us to bring a lot of those benefits that a hardware wallet is able to, in terms of custody of keys, in terms of taking advantage of extremely secure hardware on mobile phones. And bring those to the software wallets. And so I think that's actually an important point for Seed Vault. We aren't actually building any new or novel hardware into phones to bring this technology up to wallets. Instead, we're taking advantage of the very high secure elements that already exist on phones. And we're integrating those into the system layer and we're integrating Solana blockchain operations into the system to support these functionalities. So as a concrete example, when your seeds are sort of the root of all your secrets on the Solana blockchain, all your wallet accounts, all your private keys, everything is derived from those seeds.

Steven (08:13):

We use a secure element on SAGA to secure your seeds in a way that's very protected, even down to the level of forensic attacks. Those are the kind of attacks that would go on in like a lab. And they take your device apart and use all kinds of equipment to try to extract your secrets from that device. So we use the secure element, specialized hardware, very similar to the secure enclave that you would hear about on an iOS device, for example. And then we combine that with a very secure operating environment that is available on most Android devices. So it's called Arm Trust Zone, and it's an environment that is running below the level of Android. So everything the user sees and is used to seeing in terms of the Android operating system, there's actually another operating system running below that on the device, it's a very specialized environment.

Steven (09:02):

It's very secure and it's called Arm trust zone. We run a trusted application within that environment that cooperates with the secure element to do all of your signing operations. So all of your key derivations from that initial seed and all of the secure signing operations, based on that. Design transactions on behalf of the wallets that are running in the Android OS. We make use of a bunch of specialized secure technologies, such as secure input and secure display. So if you have a password associated with your seed, when you type in that password, you're actually not even typing that into Android. You're typing that into a specialized OS, highly secure. It actually takes over the display temporarily. And so that when you enter your password, it's only going into environment that is secure and ready to accept it. And then once we sign a transaction on behalf of the user, we hand that back to the wallet, for example, Phantom running in the Android operating system, and then Phantom takes that and is able to submit it to the Solana blockchain for processing.

Brian (10:04):

That's a great overview. Thanks for that. So is it safe to say from like an end user's perspective, is this a Seed Vault, essentially bringing the same security guarantees or even more than a traditional hardware wallet would, but with kind of an added ease of use component being that it's directly embedded into your phone.

Steven (10:21):

So the hardware wallets are designed from the ground up to be the most secure wallets possible. And so certain design choices that they've made such as not having network connectivity on them, their air gap devices and being designed with very, very optimized hardware specifically for security means that those are pretty much the perfect devices for the security of seed storage. But as we all know, the trade off comes in terms of the user experience.

Steven (10:48):

Seed Vault gets us most of the way there. We get to take advantage of secure elements for seed encryption and specialized processing environments. It's still running inside a general purpose device, which does have network connectivity, although the secure environments themselves on the device, don't. So cold storage wallets are definitely going to still have a place in the ecosystem for very, very secure storage of high value assets, high value wallets, for example, but Seed Vault gets us a substantial distance closer to that on phones. And it also does it in a way that remains readily available and easy for users to use. So this is Seed Vault is very much a day to day technology that will allow the users to bring a huge amount of security to their seeds and their keys while still maintaining all the usability of an Android device.

Brian (11:37):

That's fantastic. I think anyone who's been around in crypto long enough deeply understands that problem between security and ease of use trade off. Can this Seed Vault handle all types of signing or is it restricted in any way as to what types of transactions or messages this can sign?

Steven (11:53):

For the initial launch we're focused on the Solana chain. All the operations that are built into Seed Vault are all designed, are all the cryptographic operations that are necessary for key generation, key storage, and transaction signing on. That said, like I said before, we're not building any new hardware into phones to support this. We're making use of hardware, very, very secure hardware that was already present. This is a systems integration problem. And so we're building this really, really secure and specialized system deep into the OS below the level of Android so that users can have a secure Solana experience. But there's nothing that would stop us in the future from expanding this as well. So what I would say to users is, go to Solanamobile.com. We have a wait list there, but you can also leave comments as well. So please, if other chains are an area you have an interest in, that would be a great place to let us know about it.

Brian (12:45):

That's fantastic. And one final point on the Seed Vault, is it possible to import or export your keys to another phone or is this sea fault tied to essentially one device?

Steven (12:56):

So the Seed Vault will support the standard BIT 39 seed phrases. So those 12 or 24 word seed phrases that we're all intimately familiar with. A big part of key custody is understanding the importance of protecting your own keys. And so for users who... We strongly believe in self custody of keys and secrets with the SAGA device. And so when you first set up the device, the user will be guided through a process to either create a new seed or to import an existing seed. As part of that process, we'll be guiding the user to back up, write down in some, for example, a reference card, all of the words in their seed phrase. And store that somewhere safe and secure. That seed phrase can be used to recover your seed later. If you were to get another SAGA device, it could be used to import your seed into that other device.

Steven (13:47):

Or if you do already have wallets elsewhere, you can use that seed to import those other wallets into the SAGA. There is a security caveat that comes with that, which is that your seed is only as secure as the least secure place you've ever stored it. So our recommendation will be for users to go and create a brand new seed when they get the SAGA device. We've built this great Seed Vault, super high secure storage capabilities. And we would really like for users to add, to create new seeds. But we also understand that users may already have many accounts set up and they may want to add existing seeds into their Seed Vault to facilitate the transfer of their assets, to a brand new seed for the device. And so we will support both importing and exporting seeds on the SAGA device.

Brian (14:30):

So I think that does a really great job of laying the foundation for the Seed Vault. You mentioned SAGA, the flagship phone upon all this is built. There's three other technologies though that you guys have also bringing the market here as part of SMS.

Brian (14:43):

One of the next ones which I want to cover is the mobile wallet adapter. I think anyone who's used Solana both from a development perspective, or if they're just an end user is very familiar with the wallet adapter that we have on web. Does a great job of normalizing all the different wallets on Solana, making it really easy to just click and you see a drop down menu and it's easy to connect to your favorite wallet. What is the mobile wallet adapter? How do you say it differs from the web wallet adapter and what can users expect to be seeing when they interact with one of these?

Steven (15:12):

First of all, mobile wallet adapter is actually the one technology in all of SMS that I'm personally most excited about. It's the least flashy. It's something that users will hopefully never even know exists because it's such a fundamental and basic thing that users will assume that this is just how things are supposed to work. Mobile wallet adapter is an analog of the wallet adapter on the web that we all have come to know and love. It's the communication fabric by which we're going to bind dApps and wallets on mobile devices together. So on the web, you're used to visiting some DAP, clicking that connect wallet button, seeing a popup of the available wallets that you have installed in your browser. And just picking one and just getting this seamless transaction signing experience. Unfortunately, the same thing doesn't exist today on mobile devices, either on Android or on iOS devices for the Solana chain.

Steven (16:04):

And that I think is the number one thing that is holding back broad mobile adoption for Solana and for Web 3.0 on mobile devices. So just like we built a protocol and a plug-in interface for wallet adapter on the web. We're building something very similar on mobile devices. We're going to have a web socket based communication protocol that allows for dApps to connect to wallets wherever they are for signing transaction purposes. And that wherever they are, I think is the big key difference between transaction signing on mobile devices versus transaction signing on laptops or desktops. With the traditional wallet adapter, there's one environment that everything operates in, the web browser. And it's a great sandbox. It's a super rich set of tools. But on mobile devices, the ecosystem is a little bit broader there. We have dApps that will run in your web browser.

Steven (16:57):

Any mobile friendly dApps should be able to work on your mobile Chrome, just like they would work in desktop Chrome. You've got native applications that have run on the device as well, whether those are written in Kotlin or Java on an Android device, or a cross platform framework like Darden fluter or like react native. And then you also, a natural extension from there is saying, well, we've built this great wallet on these SMS devices with Seed Vault. Why can't this be my only wallet? Why do I even need to have a different wallet on every platform that I want to use dApps on? And so part of what we're building with mobile wallet adapter is the concept of remote signing as well. We got this phone, you've got a wallet on there. It has network connectivity. It is a great user interface.

Steven (17:42):

This should be able to act as a remote wallet for dApps that are running on other nearby mobile devices, or even on your nearby laptops and desktops. So mobile wallet adapter is a protocol and it's a fabric that's going to bind all of these things together with the initial release of SMS. We have a reference implementation that we've built for Android, but this is an area we see expanding beyond Android as well. So the mobile wallet adapter protocol was designed to be agnostic to the platform on which it's running. Any platform that has some of these standard web technologies like web sockets, for example, would be able to participate in the mobile wallet, adapter protocol.

Brian (18:19):

Yeah, that's fantastic. That's super exciting for us. You hit on a couple of things there. One of which I think I could sense your excitement over, was the ability to do this remote signing on your phone. You're interacting with a web app, either on another mobile device or potentially on your laptop. Is this similar to what wallet connect is on Ethereum? I know we haven't really had wallet connect yet on Solana on a major DAP. How is this essentially handling this connection? Is there some middle man server involved? How are you guys thinking about that?

Steven (18:49):

In principle, it is similar to the functionality provided by wallet connect. Though, I think, we've definitely made some design decisions in the mobile wallet adapter space to make it very suitable for operation on mobile devices. We've really optimized it for local use cases. And as part of that, one of the design decisions we've made is that we shouldn't have to reach out to an intermediate server during the signing process, if the operations that you're performing are those that can be done entirely locally on the device. And so let's just to give a concrete example, you have the Phantom wallet installed on the device. Let's say you wanted to use magic Eden through your Chrome web browser on that same device, because they're both running locally, there's no reason we should have to reach out to an intermediate server to make that connection between those two parties.

Steven (19:38):

And so we've split up the process into two phases. The first of which we call association, which answers the question of, well, how does the magic Eden running in the browser, how does it even know what wallets are available on the device? How does it start up the wallet so that it's in front of the user and the user has context of what's happening. And then how does it create an encrypted channel through which communications can happen? And so on Android, we've done that through an intent based scheme and then a Diffy helmet key exchange, but we've built the protocol in a flexible way so that we can add additional types of association in the future.

Steven (20:13):

For example, we have the ability to use QR codes for association. You can imagine scanning a QR code from your mobile phone, and that would encode all the information necessary to inform the two parties of each other. Or alternatively there're other standards we want to explore like web Bluetooth, which gives you a great way to only connect to devices that are in proximity with you.

Steven (20:35):

So in terms of security, it means that you can have a connection that also has a locality element to it, which would be really interesting when it comes to making use of very highly secure operations, like signing with your private keys for your wallet accounts.

Steven (20:50):

The second half of the protocol is connections, and we use web sockets. We create an encrypted channel, and then all of the operations that a user would make use of through wallet adapter today, authorizing adapt, signing transactions, sending transactions across the network. All of that has been created in the mobile wallet adapter protocol as well. And so that said, all together, whole bunch of technology running, hopefully invisibly to the user. And we're even building a plugin for regular wallet adapter, so that dApps are able to get support from mobile wallet adapter with just extremely, extremely small amount of work. Rebuild, select the right plugins for wallet adapter, make sure your DAP is mobile web friendly, and you'll be ready to go on day one.

Brian (21:34):

That's great. That's very elegant too, getting rid of the middleman server in that using just the local network. Personally having been at Phantom for a while. We've sensed the frustration in the mobile scene. A little bit, a lot of wallets today are kind of forced to have these in-app browsers, just given the state of mobile phones and given the state of the mobile phone industry. One thing that Phantom has done to get around this in particular, in interacting with native dApps is deep linking. Does mobile wallet DAP have any plans for deep linking? How are you guys thinking about handling those deep linking protocols?

Steven (22:07):

Yep. So I think number one, I think the deep linking protocols are a very elegant solution to getting over this problem of how do we break out of the world of browsers inside of wallets? I think that the browsers inside of wallets, I believe is a very expedient solution, but I believe it's a stepping stone on the way to having dApps in wallets, as full participants on a mobile device, using the user experience, paradigms and patterns that users are used to. So standalone native applications that are able to directly communicate with each other.

Steven (22:41):

The deep linking protocols, I think do a great job. They're very straightforward and do a great job for the use cases local to the device. And so I view those as a complimentary to mobile wallet adapter. Mobile wallet adapter is designed to handle both those use cases as well, but also the broader use cases of on and off device. And so I think that is where mobile wallet adapter can take the ecosystem even one more step forward is through separation of the transport layer from the association layer. We're able to design for use cases that extend beyond the device and extend beyond what the deep linking protocols are currently able to accomplish today.

Brian (23:21):

That's great. So we hit a lot here with the mobile wallet adapter that will be impacting how dApps and wallets interact with one another. You guys are also releasing another initiative that'll be impacting dApps. You guys are dubbing at the DAP store. The big takeaway here is that there won't be these rent extracting fees of 30% of all commerce in apps from some of the big players that we all know and love. Can you touch a little more on what this DAP store is? What some of the plans are for this and how current DAP developers should be thinking about this DAP store?

Steven (23:53):

Sure. So I have received more questions on the DAP store. It just goes to show how excited developers are for this. We're all very, very intimately familiar with some of the difficulties that are posed by the current app store ecosystems for mobile devices, Google Play store for Android and the App Store for apple. And they primarily fall into two categories. There is the policies aspect, what am I allowed to do? What am I not allowed to do? Is my app going to be approved for the store? Or am I going to be rejected for what often feels like an arbitrary reason? And then the second part of it is the economic angle. A 30% cut of fees is a pretty hard pill to swallow. And especially when we come to some of the use cases like purchases of digital goods, 30% fee pretty much is a nail in the coffin of trying to do, for example, an NFT like an auction house or a marketplace on a device like an iPhone, for example.

Steven (24:51):

And the Solana DAP store... This is our opportunity to change that. Our north star on this is that once DAP is installed the any further interactions between that DAP and the user are a matter between that DAP and the user, we're not going to be getting involved with like ongoing fees or anything of that nature. And in fact, we're making our DAP store no fee. So there won't be transaction fees in the store if users want to purchase apps or applications from the store. And like I said, once it's installed any further relationships are between the DAP and the user. We're very much building this in the model of a permissionless Web 3.0 experience.

Steven (25:32):

Now that said, I do want to touch on one really important area, which is the curation of the catalog. In my background, I did work for a couple years on an app store for mobile devices when I was at Microsoft. And I was a young, slightly naive engineer at that point. And I didn't really think that the curation problem would be that substantial. And I think that in fact, the trust and safety aspect of app stores is probably the single most important topic to look into. So at the beginning, we are going to be curating the contents of the app store, and we're going to be doing that to make sure that the contents are both useful to users, but also there's a huge amount of trust that goes into users when they use an app store into, who is the publisher and what are they doing to protect me.

Steven (26:21):

And so Solana labs will be curating the contents at the initial release, but we do have aspirations to involve the community in the curation of this app catalog. The community's involvement is always a huge area for Web 3.0 in areas like DAOs, for example, and we have the same aspirations for the Solana mobile and the Solana mobile DAP store.

Brian (26:45):

That's great. I think that's really important that you emphasize that from the start, setting expectations like that. In our experience, crypto can be really exciting. It's this new world, but also it's very permissionless and that is a sword that cuts both ways. We've seen that firsthand being a wallet. We actually now run, I believe the biggest block list of all spam NFTs and essentially scam domains on Solana. It's a huge, huge issue. It really is important to kind of nip that in the bud, especially for new users when they're just getting acquainted with this ecosystem. And we found in our experience we turned that block list, open source. We get community contributions from that, especially every day now. And I think whenever you're able to kind of leverage the power of the end users here, the community that's using this every day, that's a really great way to handle it.

Brian (27:33):

So we hit on a lot here. We just covered the DAP store. We also went over the Seed Vault, which leads the foundation for SMS, and then the mobile wallet adapter, which you're super excited about. We're super excited about that as well. There's one final component to this, which is Solana Pay. I think most people are familiar with Solana Pay at this point. It was unveiled earlier in Q2, I believe of 2022. There's a couple great use cases, around this around making point of sale, a lot easier, using SPL tokens on Solana, getting rid of middleman fees once again.

Brian (28:04):

But I also think Solana Pay might at this point, be a bit of a misnomer. I've seen some really great use cases leveraging Solana Pay with NFT ticketing. I know the mountain pay guys have built this great photo booth where you can snap a photo and then scan with your Phantom wallet and it mints into an NFT right on your phone. And that's all running on Solana Pay behind the scenes. What do you guys have planned for Solana Pay as it relates to mobile and SMS? What can you tell us about that today?

Steven (28:32):

Mobile devices, we carry them everywhere with us and they've in the last few years, people have really, really started to use mobile payment technologies. You've got, on Android devices you have Google Pay for example. And so we have these perfect devices that you carry with you and people are already used to interacting with in the real world to effectuate payments. And that's really what we're looking at for SMS and Solana Pay. We're actually not making any protocol changes at all to Solana Pay with the SMS stack. Instead, what we're doing is providing guidance on how wallet should integrate Solana Pay into the Android system. For many wallets, there's actually almost nothing to do here. Wallets like Phantom, do a great job of already integrating some of these best practices into Android devices. But by providing a set of best practices, we can really make sure that there's a standardized way by which users can expect their phone to work with Solana Pay. In terms of snapping QR codes, in terms of tapping your phone on NFC readers or in terms of interacting with Solana Pay links that are generated from within the mobile web browser.

Steven (29:40):

And so, by providing that set of best practices and providing samples on how to integrate Solana Pay, those best practices will give us a foundation by which we can expect that all of these real world Solana Pay interactions that users are going to be using with their phones will be consistent across devices. And by making it consistent, we give to the other side of the equation, those who are working on merchant terminals, for example, we give them an understanding or a base, if you will, on which they know that if they develop some of these Solana Pay technologies, for example, QR codes or NFCS in merchant terminals. They know that there's a base of devices that can take advantage of those.

Steven (30:21):

And so, so much of the Solana Pay is going to be building out this whole network of providers, software providers, both on the merchant side, as well as on mobile devices to make sure that users can pay with Solana Pay in the real world. Just like they're used to paying with say their credit cards using Google Pay. And quick note, Google pay will also be supported on the SAGA device. And so users should expect that their SAGA device will be their mechanism by which they can effectuate real world payments, whether it's through Solana Pay or through traditional payment networks.

Brian (30:56):

That's super exciting. So I think this is a great kind of overview we just did of SMS, the whole suite of developer tools that you guys are unveiling. You've hit on this a couple times though, though, there is a flagship phone that you guys are releasing, SAGA. This is separate from SMS, but it will be powered entirely by SMS, as well as traditional things you would expect from Android devices like Google Pay, which you mentioned.

Brian (31:20):

Let's talk a little bit more about SAGA. What is it like? I saw Anatoli up there on stage flashing it to the crowd. It looked pretty sleek. Would you say this is something that's purely for crypto natives, can ordinary people continue to use this for their favorite apps, say like TikTok or Instagram without noticing much of a difference. How would you characterize this phone broadly?

Steven (31:40):

We've designed the phone for crypto natives in mind, but it is a standard Android device in every other way. And so it's going to be a full GMS device, meaning it has Chrome. It has Gmail, it has the Google Play store. It has everything that users expect an Android device to do with the SMS stack added on top. And so there's a huge amount of value here that we're going to be able to give to the Sal Solana ecosystem to degens who live and breathe their Web 3.0 in crypto. But it's also going to be a flagship Android device. It's got 12 gigs of RAM five, 12 gigs of flash. It's got the latest and greatest Qualcomm snap drag and chip set, beautiful 6.67 inch O led display everything about this looks and feels like a flagship phone.

Steven (32:31):

We got that device in just before the event. And so he was able to hand it around a little bit, show some people, let them touch and feel it in person. And it's an impressive device. We have a great partner in Awesome in helping us build this device. And I am thrilled. I think that I don't know that there's any other hardware partner other than Awesome, who could have helped us realize this vision the way we've been able to realize it for the SAGA device. I've had the good fortune to have a prototype. I've been working on that for the last few months and I am thrilled for when people are able to get this device and hold it in their hands. It really does feel like a super, super premium, top end device

Brian (33:13):

Jealous. You're one of the lucky few that has the actual incarnation of this right now in their hand. What is the plan to expand SMS to additional devices though? We have SAGA, I saw, there's actually a huge backlog of pre-orders on this thing. But I'm sure a lot of people are kind of thinking themselves, well, I already have this Android phone, maybe a Google Pixel or Samsung device. Or maybe there're others who there's a lot of folks probably listening to this who are on iOS devices. What is that timeline like? Is this something you think could be running on iOS one day? How are you guys thinking about rolling this out kind of across broadly across the smartphone market?

Steven (33:50):

So we started our conversation on SMS talking about the collection of technologies. And that's, I think is really the point to hit on here, is that SMS isn't just one technology. It's a whole series of them. And each of them have slightly different applications and slightly different system needs in terms of integrating them. So all the way at one end of the spectrum, we have Seed Vault. For example, Seed Vault really needs the phone manufacturer to be directly involved in the systems integration process. It needs access to the secure element. It needs a trusted application that can run within the secure execution environment, arm trust zone, for example. And then it needs UI baked right into the system image, privileged UI that's able to make use of those lower layers that in the secure execution environments of the device.

Steven (34:40):

On the other end of the spectrum, we have technologies like mobile wallet, adapter and mobile wallet adapter actually doesn't have any hardware requirements at all. It's purely a protocol system between wallets and dApps for binding them together. And so mobile wallet adapter, the specification is currently in draft for that one. We're working with our wallet and DAP partners to finalize that, make sure we can take all of the ecosystem feedback so that when we do release it, it serves as broad a set of use cases as possible.

Steven (35:10):

But mobile wallet adapter will actually be available and ready to use before the SAGA launches. And so over time, what it means to be an SMS device really comes down to how many of these SMS technologies are integrated into that particular device. As I was saying, some of them do need deep integration. We would have to work directly with hardware manufacturers, the Seed Vault being the primary one of those. So it's a little bit hard to from a user standpoint, SMS has a certain branding associated with it, but from a technology standpoint, there's a whole spectrum of what an SMS device could look like.

Steven (35:45):

In terms of specific devices, I can't comment on that other than the fact that Awesome is an amazing partner. And we just view SAGA as the first step in many steps towards bringing all of SMS to mobile users. So that Web 3.0, really has a home with the Solana ecosystem on mobile devices. And then I just did also want to hit quickly on iOS. iOS is not as open a platform as Android is. And so some of these technologies, we just don't have the capability to independently build those into an iOS device.

Steven (36:18):

But we do also know how much consumers love iOS devices. And there's many people who we'd have to pry their fingers apart to get their iPhones out of their hands. And so technologies like mobile wallet adapter, we're designing them to make sure that they're not Android specific. There's things in there that we can do to make sure that becomes the fabric by which dApps and wallets communicate wherever they are, including on iOS devices. And so we're not forgetting about iOS and we want to make sure that as much of SMS as possible works on as many devices as possible, whether those are Android devices or iOS devices.

Brian (36:53):

Well, as speaking as somebody who's had a death grip on their iOS device for probably the last decade, I have to say, I am pre-ordering one. You guys have done a great job of convincing me. So I'm going team Android just for this. I'm super excited about it.

Steven (37:07):

That is great news. I want to hear your entire audience find me on Twitter and tell me the exact same thing. You'll make my week.

Brian (37:13):

That's great. So you hit a lot here about the plan for rolling SMS. Each of the four components broadly out across the smartphone market. You did a couple times though in our conversation hint at the idea that even though this is called SMS Solana mobile stack, really this could be applicable to a broad number of blockchains across the Web 3.0 ecosystem. How are you guys thinking about that problem? Are you guys going to be focused on Solana, is your core team focused on Solana for the time being, and you're inviting others in because it's open source? Is that the general framing of that? How are you guys thinking about unveiling this to Ethereum and potentially Bitcoin one day and more broadly across the Web 3.0 space?

Steven (37:52):

So we have a literal mountain of work to do to deliver the best Solana experience that we can on mobile devices. And so the Solana ecosystem remains firmly our goal right now. That said, I think I'll answer your question in two ways. This is an open phone and we would never try to prevent another chain for example, from being installed on this device. So while we are focusing on Solana, this is an Android device, everything that works on Android would work here. And we would never try to stop any of the other chains from participating on this device in all the normal ways.

Steven (38:26):

And then the other thing I would say there is, we're always interested to hear from the community. And so I think I mentioned it earlier in the podcast, but if you do have an interest, you can always go to Solanamobile.com, please while you're there place a pre-order, that would be awesome. But you can also register your interest in other things you would like to see on this device, whether those be features for the Solana chain or if you have interest in other chains, we'd love to hear about it.

Brian (38:50):

That's great. And one closing question, I think this is a good segue that we always ask to our guests, given your guys' focus on the Solana ecosystem, who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem?

Steven (39:02):

Oh, that's a good one. So there's someone that I've had an opportunity to work with TJ from Mountain Pay and he has been contributing to the Solana Pay side of the ecosystem. And as crazy as it seems some days when I wake up and say, oh, all we're doing is taking on the mobile phone industry by building SAGA. I think of what TJ is doing. He's just looked around and he looks at all the incumbents in the payment space and says, yeah, I think I want to go head on in this space.

Steven (39:30):

So he's a great guy. Every time I've had the opportunity to chat with him, I've always left thinking like, wow, I didn't even think about that. And he's like... So I really admire him that both for the work he's doing and as well as for the guts to take on the space that he's taking on.

Brian (39:48):

Yeah. I couldn't agree more. His energy is pretty electric. I don't know how he does it. He's around at all the hacker houses at Mountain Dow, he's in the crowd and then he's got his headphones on banging away on his laptop and still shipping code. But yeah, he's got a great infectious energy and I think there's no one better to be taking on the Stripes and the PayPals and the big payments giants of the world. He's someone I would want to have in my corner for sure.

Brian (40:13):

Well, Steven, this has been a really great conversation. Thank you for going deep on SMS. I'm super excited about it. I'm ready to pre-order my SAGA right now. Where can people go to learn more, both about SMS and yourself? You mentioned your Twitter. I want to make sure that people can find you and ping you with their stories of how you're prying their iOSs out of their hands right here.

Steven (40:35):

To find out more about the SAGA and about SMS hit up Solanamobile.com. We've got links in there to the Solana mobile Twitter, our discord community, discord.gg/solanamobile, as well as you can find a link to the mobile stack SDK, which is all in the open on GitHub. So I would say those are the best places to go to learn more about SMS and SAGA. Please join us in discord. We're a friendly community. I'm there. I hang out there. I answer questions there. Lots of people from my team as well. So looking forward to seeing all kinds of people from your audience, join our discord and help us build a really cool community around SMS and SAGA.

Brian (41:16):

I can't wait. Steven Laver. Thank you for your time. This has been great.

Steven (41:20):

Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me.