The dog-themed memecoin Bonk (BONK) caused a surge in sales of Solana‘s smartphone, Saga. Before the peak of the Bonk craze, Saga was seen as a failed venture, but the situation changed with the Bonk AirDrop conducted through the phone. Thanks to the AirDrop, the price of the previously unremarkable Saga rose from $599 to as high as $5,000.
It was discovered that several Saga phones were sold on the eBay online marketplace for prices over $2,000. Most of these phones, listed as “boxed and unopened,” were sold by sellers from the USA. Additionally, it was seen that a Saga phone found a buyer on eBay for a quite high price of $5,000.
The increase in sales of Solana’s Saga phone over the past week has been linked to some arbitrage investors chasing the AirDrop of 30 million BONK tokens given to each phone owner. The value of the AirDrop from the smartphone, which was sold at a price of $599, exceeded $700 last week.
The memecoin BONK began to rapidly gain popularity among market participants at the beginning of November and then made a remarkable jump with increases of over 100% on different days. The memecoin’s gains over the past 30 days are now over 700%.
The BONK craze seems to have changed the fate of Saga, which had disappointing sales and an uncertain future. Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana, said in an interview at the time, “We haven’t seen a convincing signal for 50,000 units to be sold. I think a sale between 25,000 and 50,000 would have been enough to give developers a sense that there’s a solid user base that would get them excited about submitting applications.” Saga was initially launched with a price tag of $1,000. After low interest, the price was reduced to $599 in August.