Solana phone sells out in US as traders spot arbitrage with bonk's skyrocketing price

On Dec. 5, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko was lamenting the lack of sales of the firm’s Saga phones on the Unchained podcast .

Today, the Saga phone has completely sold out in the US, with only a few phones left in Europe, according to its official X account . The company is now limiting new orders to one per household.

However, the sudden rush to buy the phones has not been primarily due to a desire to own the phone itself.

"They’re gonna buy out the Solana phone because the BONK +98.45% allocation will soon be worth more than the phone," posted The Block's Director of Research Steven Zheng on X yesterday, as a semi-joke, referring to the amount of bonk tokens that come with the purchase of each Solana phone.

He wasn't wrong. Over the last 24 hours, the price of bonk increased from $0.000014 to a peak of $0.000033, up 135%, according to The Block's Bonk Price Page . The token has gone parabolic recently, up 600% from the start of December to its current price.

Each Solana phone comes with 30 million bonk tokens. While that was only a few dollars when the phone first came out, that amount of tokens was worth $990 at its recent all-time high. That's compared to just $599 for the phone.

That said, it's a risky move. The phones will need to physically arrive for recipients to be able to get their tokens and sell them. If the price of bonk drops further from its current price, this could leave recipients at a loss, excluding the value of the phone.