HTC unveils a smartphone for the blockchain. Here is what the new product of the Taiwanese company consists of.
HTC, one of the best known Asian mobile device manufacturers, said it had developed its own cryptocurrency wallet, Zion, to be integrated into its Exodus 1 smartphone, equipped with a secure enclave - a secluded area on the phone chip kept separate from the Android OS (OS) on which it runs - which uses the technology created by Softbank to keep the criptovaluta of customers.
"Imagine as a kind of micro OS that works in parallel with Android," said Phil Chen, general manager of HTC, at CNBC, by telephone. Chen said the advantage of keeping this area of the phone separated from Android is that Google's operating system is "fundamentally insecure with a centralized system", and therefore the storage of the criptovaluta using Android would make the funds of a user more vulnerable to a hacker attack.
The top manager also said that the importance of integrating the blockchain technology in the phone it is that this choice can strengthen the security and privacy of a user's assets, and that in the future it will also help protect all data and identity. The blockchain can therefore be imagined as a tamper-proof digital register, which records cryptocurrency transactions and other data through a distributed network, without a central authority supervising it.
"The dominant companies in our world today are Google and Facebook, and in China, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, because they basically own all our data," Chen said. "And the reason why you do a blockchain phone is initially just to have your own keys. It all starts there. When you start owning your own keys, then you can start owning your digital identity, and then you can start owning the data. "
HTC's new phone will run decentralized applications, digital programs that operate on the blockchain. It is also equipped with a "Social Key Recovery“, Which allows the user to regain access to their funds in case of loss of the private key through a selected number of trusted contacts.
In addition to its features of blockchain, the Exodus 1 also includes a dual main 16 megapixel camera and a dual front camera from 8MP with 4K video, a six-inch display with quad-HD + resolution, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor, 6 gigabyte of RAM and 128GB of memory .
