South Korean tech giant Samsung is reportedly planning to introduce blockchain capabilities into multiple models of its Galaxy line of smartphones.
The company announced some of these plans on May 14, 2019, with company executives claiming, “We will lower barriers to new experiences by gradually expanding the number of Galaxy models that support blockchain functions.” The specific functions that Samsung plans to add include expanded usage of crypto wallet functionality and digital identity authentication.
These expansions follow some of Samsung’s earlier forays into the blockchain space this year. In February 2019, the company’s new flagship phone, the Galaxy S10, was introduced with baked-in features to support hardware cryptocurrency wallets. Curiously enough, user experimentationwith these features has revealed that these baked-in wallets support ERC-20 tokens and ether but not bitcoin. And it is currently unknown when or if Samsung will include these features in its own phones in the future, as the announcement for wider blockchain support does not directly mention Bitcoin.
Still, the Galaxy S10 did mark an ongoing interest from the company in distributed ledger technology. In April 2019, for example, Samsung continued its foray into the space by investing millions into Ledger, a French crypto wallet manufacturer. This investment came shortly after the revelation that Samsung was also planning to launch its own digital asset based on the Ethereum network.
Samsung is not the only major manufacturer of smartphones to begin supporting the world of cryptocurrency, however. After smaller companies have experimented with blockchain-enabled phone technologies, HTC has come up to bat with its own Exodus 1 smartphone earlier in May, offering more blockchain- and Bitcoin-specific features than Samsung’s Galaxy S10. Containing the full Bitcoin blockchain, HTC’s official press boasted that the device would be the first smartphone to have full node capabilities.
Samsung’s timetable for releasing both of these phones, and other features such as a native asset, could greatly influence the potential competition between smartphone manufacturing giants in the blockchain space. Efforts such as this should be watched closely in the future, especially if any other major developers release their own models.
