Solana Saga phones were being resold for as high as $5,000 on eBay as traders rushed to snap up a free airdrop of a memecoin called Bonk.
This is genius.
Nobody wants to buy your crypto phone? Your warehouses are full and bills starts piling? Just create some monopoly money and give it to who buys that phone.
So now crypto is not only wasting the electricity for the most inefficient payment method ever created (for Bitcoin it takes a whole day to verify a number of transactions that Visa/Mastercard can do in less than a second) but also producing and shipping a phone all around the world, just for getting that monopoly money, then immediately trash the phone
Solana (a company that created a crypto coin) created a $700 smartphone dedicated to crypto and other shitcoins. It was a massive failure. Nobody bought it. Until they created a new coin from thin air, and gave that for free to phone owners. Suddenly everyone wanted to buy the phone as you could get $900 by getting buying the phone, getting the free coins, immediately sell them, throw the phone.
That's not quite the order of events. The phone always came with the shitcoin, but the price recently surged which caused people to realise that they could sell the coins for more than the phone was worth. The surge in price is probably just a reflection of idiots pumping crypto again because Tether manipulated the price of bitcoin back up to 40k.
This is all just a brief window for whales to cash out, and it's very likely that this memecoin will crater leaving anyone who bought these phones at a markup holding the bag.
Ah yes tether, the "we're 1:1 backed by dollars, pinky promise don't worry coin" that's printing money at a rate that makes the Argentina central bank chief an amateur