Sirin Labs is famous for its $16,000 Solarin smartphone, the ridiculously priced phone was the first attempt at building a blockchain smartphone and although the phone had issues-price being the very major one- the makers have been at it again. This time promising that it will be cheaper-$999- and more practical than the first one, this latest attempt has been called “Finney.”
The device is expected to support all inherent blockchain applications like crypto wallets, encrypted communication, and the in-house SRN token that will be used to share p2p payments.
However, ahead of its launch in November, the company is already making major shifts over its partners. According to reports, Sirin Labs has chosen to work with a private Ethereum blockchain over the initially proposed IOTA’s Tangle distributed ledger suggested previously.
IOTA Prices Sink Following The Announcement
The announcement to shift from IOTA to Ethereum was first floated by Sirin Labs CEO, Moshe Hogeg, stating;
“We’re not with iota, we looked into it and decided to go a different route.”
This statement was later backed by the company’s chief marketing officer, Nimrod May, who stated;
“At launch, we are going to use the Ethereum blockchain. The Finney Phone will work through complete nodes that are hosted on Sirin Labs,”
According to the company’s white paper, the SRN token and Sirin Labs ecosystem is scheduled for a move to a next-generation blockchain which means that regardless of which company it works with now, they will only be a temporary home.
For now, it seems that this temporary home will not be IOTA and crypto has paid a hefty price. Following the announcement, IOTA prices dropped by 18.1% over the next 24 hours, a new bottom since November 24, 2017.
Last week IOTA was enjoying a price hike that saw it jump from 0.78 to 0.96 on Thursday following the announcement that the company’s IOTA Hub, a new gRPC API-based solution that is designed to help third parties to integrate IOTA with their system. This price surge would, however, be short-lived as the market turned towards the rather Sirin Labs’ negative announcement.
Following the drop, IOTA has become one of the worst performing cryptocurrencies for the day. It remains unclear why Sirin Labs has chosen Ethereum over IOTA but, some might say that it’s because Ethereum is much more mainstream than IOTA. It might also have something to do with a Tweet sent out by Moshe Hogeg on the same day he announced they will no longer work with IOTA;
“Sometimes, very rarely, you have a real solid breakthrough. @SIRINLABS just had it. Never been more excited about a project in my life. Things will never be the same again. Can’t wait for the launch. #disruption #SRN,”
As one would expect, Ethereum prices have not moved following the announcement which goes to show that the market reacts far more easily to bad news than good news.
