HTC has announced that you can now purchase its blockchain-powered Exodus 1 smartphone using your hard earned cash. Until now, the HTC Exodus 1 could only be bought using cryptocurrency but now it can be bought with U.S. dollars and other fiat currencies.
The HTC Exodus 1 made its debut last year as “the world’s first phone dedicated to decentralized applications and security”. The blockchain-powered Android smartphone supports Bitcoin and Ethereum, among others, courtesy of its universal wallet and decentralized apps (or dApps).
The firm announced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) that from March you will be able to pay for the handset with “traditional” money. If you are in the US at least since at the moment HTC hasn’t yet laid down plans of selling it worldwide. Even so, when it starts selling in the US, it will be exclusively sold online as HTC hasnt yet reached a deal with any US carrier. When it begins selling in the US, it will be going for $699.
Why fiat currencies now
The strategy of selling the Exodus 1 in cryptocurrencies was obviously not paying off as much as HTC expected that’s why it’s abandoning it. For most people, cryptocurrencies are assets whose value can skyrocket at any time. So they wouldn’t want to buy a phone with a cryptocurrency as they fear losing out on the appreciation of its value- instead, they prefer buying with a fiat currency whose value doesn’t sharply appreciate in value like cryptocurrencies. This may have been contributing to the sluggish uptake of the Exodus 1. I’m fairly sure that selling their crypto-phone with fiat currency will increase its sales as the device will now be visible to many people who do not yet have cryptocurrencies through mass-marketing.
More and new reasons to buy the HTC Exodus 1
At Mobile World Congress, HTC announced some new crypto features for the Exodus, with support for several new or dApps, including a native web browser courtesy of Opera. The Opera browser will enable Exodus 1 users to make direct micropayments to websites that support the functionality. ‘Numbers’ is another new dApp supported by HTC Exodus 1 that puts users in direct contact with companies looking to buy their activity tracking data- users can choose what to info share and get paid for the privilege.
To protect users’ cryptocurrencies, the phone has a “kind of walled-off area,” typically known as a “trusted execution environment”. This so-called trusted environment is not cold storage, as users can connect the wallet to the internet. However, the phone’s operating system cannot interact with the wallet, giving it some protection from malware able to compromise the phone itself. Furthermore, HTC has developed a ‘Social Recovery Tool’ that allows users to nominate contacts to hold a piece of a unique security key in case their phone gets lost or stolen.
Image Credit: Boy Genius Report
