Solana has the drip.
The Solana store created by the Solana Foundation, a non-profit company with a mission to build the Solana community, just opened yesterday. The store will be a permanent retail space that will sell all things Solana based which one could assume will also be the Saga phone when it is ready for release.
The shop is located in Manhattan, New York at the Hudson Yards. The Hudson Yards is a more upscale type of shopping venue than the normal malls you may find around the city.
Solana is going hard despite a bear market and the massive drop in value of their native token $SOL. The company has revealed plans for a Solana Mobile Stack operating system for Android and their very own flagship mobile device that is meant to bring the blockchain and web3 to a potential billion more customers.
The store is designed to be more upscale and high class with hints of an Apple Store aesthetic and a Degenerate Ape Academy Gallery on one wall..The store also allows for payment using Solana Pay, a payment system that allows for quick payments to be made using the cryptocurrency.
The store has many interactive installations including one that can visualize the events taking place on the Solana blockchain including NFT mints and other transactions. There is a private booth for those that want to set up a Phantom wallet, a tutorial on the exercise-to-earn DApp STEPN, a Magic Eden station for NFT sales and even a station to get a preview of the Solana Saga mobile phone.
The store also has a lot of merchandise, or drip as the new generation likes to call it. There are shirts, hats, sweats and more all with the Solana logo or catchphrases uttered in the crypto community like “WAGMI” , “Not Financial advice”,”probably noting” or “degen”.
The goal of the store could probably be said to be the same as the goal for creating a mobile phone- onboarding. Teaching newcomers about crypto and bringing more heads to the Solana space is one of the main goals of the team at Solana Labs- the creators of the Solana blockchain. Solana spaces CEO Vibhu Norby stated the shop is an “experiment that a lot of people will love.”
The rent for a shop like this in a place like Hudson Yards is not a small price and though the team has stated that this is a shop that is permanent it will take time to see if this was a wise decision or not. Again this shop is not opened by Solana Labs so that cushion of the funds from the main company are not there. The potential is there and time will tell if the “experiment” pays off.