Author: Ramendra Kishore
HTC, the electronics giant from Taiwan, has recently announced at the Magical Crypto Conference in New York about a new feature on its new web 3.0 blockchain smartphone Exodus 1. Early news in last October, reported that HTC’s early access Exodus 1 would be available for pre-order at a price of 0.15 bitcoins or 4.78 Ethereum tokens, which at the time would be around $960. Right now, though, the price has dropped until $699 and they are available to ship since last April. This is a part of HTC’s efforts to reach out to its millennial customers who would need complete cryptocurrency integration into their smartphones.
Crypto Meets Smartphone
The new smartphone belongs to the new breed of devices that are said to be part of web 3.0 offerings. It would allow the users to carry out cryptocurrency transactions, manage their crypto accounts from their phones, and also view the status of transactions and balances. Another important element in crypto trading and exchange is the private key of the traders. This phone would allow users to maintain ownership of their keys and also manage other collectibles.
Meanwhile, the range of transactions possible from this smartphone also includes the swapping of over 60 major crypto tokens compatible with ERC20. The list includes major names like Basic Attention Token (BAT), Stablecoin (DAI), Kyber Network (KNC), and others. This exchange of tokens will be possible directly on HTC’s new smartphone and won’t need a terminal.
This would also do away with the need for traders of cryptocurrency to take the help of third-party exchanges to exchange crypto tokens. Users of this phone model can send Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and other tokens from ERC20 and ERC-721. Opera has a dedicated crypto browser, and this phone can also allow users to access the crypto exchange applications on this crypto browser.
Smart Storehouse for Blockchain
Over the last several years, smartphones have already become very commonly used devices for regular payments in financial currencies. So, it was only a matter of time before cryptocurrency blockchains could also be held on a smartphone.
Elaborating on this aspect, the decentralized chief officer of HTC, Phil Chen, speaking on the occasion said that bitcoin blockchain holds a large memory of around 200 GB and it is growing at a fast pace. And it’s time to integrate this with smartphones.
This move will help HTC to make crypto trading much more accessible to the common man.
The Brave New World for HTC
With this announcement, HTC has secured its place in the list of selected manufacturers globally who have developed the expertise of storing cryptocurrency. The Exodus 1 and Exodus 2 will join the others in the race, like Samsung Galaxy S10 (only supports Ethereum), M1 from Electroneum, Finney from Sirin Labs, and Wings WX from Wing Mobile. It will be a remarkable step forward for a company which began operations a little more than two decades back.
Last year, HTC reported $761.4 million (TWD 23.7 billion) in revenue. But just a year prior to that, things were not as rosy. The year 2017 saw them having to offload a team of their top engineers to Google, in exchange for a cash infusion of $1.1 billion. The same year, they reported a net loss of $337 million in a particular quarter due to adverse market competitions and stiff competition. But it also continued to make steady progress in emerging technologies and emerged stronger within a year.
As the announcement by HTC showed, it is now firmly on the path to embracing the cutting-edge technologies like IoT, VR, AR, and of course blockchain and cryptocurrency.
