HTC’s Blockchain-Focused Phone Now Ready For Pre-order
Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has announced that its blockchain phone Exodus is now available for pre-order.
The early-access version of the phone, Dubbed Exodus 1, can only be bought using bitcoin or ethereum, and will start shipping by December. The device will sell for 0.15 BTC ($959 USD) or 4.78 ETH ($965 USD). It will be available in 34 countries and regions, including the US, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, the UK, Austria, Norway, and other parts of Europe.
First announced at the CoinDesk Consensus conference in May of this year, Exodus 1 is an attempt by the Taiwanese smartphone maker to build a device optimized for the decentralized web. HTC said the phone combines “blockchain technology and software necessary to create a smartphone experience fit for a modern user and the new Internet age.”
Exodus 1 will feature crypto-linked functions such as a cold storage crypto wallet, secure exchange access, encrypted communications and a peer to peer (P2P) resource sharing ecosystem for payment and apps. It also comes with a secure enclave that will store a user’s cryptocurrency keys and is kept protected from the Android operating system.
Phil Chen, HTC’s decentralized chief officer, said that the benefit of keeping this area of the phone separate from Android was that Google’s OS is “fundamentally insecure with a centralized system,” and therefore storing cryptocurrency using Android would make a user’s funds more vulnerable to a hack.
“Think of it as a micro OS that runs in parallel with Android,” said Chen. “It basically is a wallet, but the wallet, what it does is hold your private keys.”
Chen added that HTC will soon release APIs so developers can use its blockchain smartphone to protect keys and sign transactions.
“The goal is to start with the blockchain community and get their assistance in making our wallet and the technology even more secure, in essence testing it out and providing feedback and suggestions [and] solutions,” said Chen. “Recent figures show that there are around 35 million wallets out there at the moment. The HTC Exodus 1 is about getting the consumer used to owning their own keys and going from there to develop the Exodus into a device that can be for the broader market.”
