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After months of expectations and one of the five most important ICOs of 2017, on 29 November Sirin Labs launched Finney, the world's first blockchain smartphone. Yet, even with the support of football legend Lionel Messi and a sale of 157.8 million tokens behind it, the $ 999 device entered an unexplored territory, where its cold memory wallet and The DApp ecosystem will have to deal with the dominance of Apple and Samsung – as well as the Exodus 1, a smartphone blockchain competitor of HTC.
Features
Most of Finney's main features had already been announced before Thursday's launch: the smartphone has a built-in cold storage portfolio physically separated from the main hardware; its Sirin operating system is a "certified by Google" mod of the Android operating system; boasts detection based on AI and cyber threat; and allows the direct exchange of selected cryptocurrencies (Ethereum, Bitcoin and Sirin Labs Token) without the need to use a centralized exchange.
But at its launch event in Barcelona, Sirin Labs provided more concrete details about its wider goals and expectations for Finney, revealing that the smartphone is just the beginning of its plans to bring blockchain technology to devices furnishings.
Above all, the Israeli company used the launch event to highlight how Finney is a smartphone that makes blockchain technology more accessible to a mainstream public and that provides irreducible encryption enthusiasts with a more practical way to safely manage their own coins.
"This is the most important computer of our generation: the smartphone."
"The Finney phone is a one-stop shop," said co-founder and co-CEO of Sirin Labs, Moshe Hogeg, during his presentation. "Before Finney, you needed a ledger, you needed a computer, you needed a wallet software and then you had to go in an exchange, and then you could convert." Finney does all this in one phone. "
Having a refrigerator wallet, a token conversion service and crypto-exchange applications on a single device, Hogeg said that Finney will "take a giant step forward in bridging the gap between the blockchain economy and the consumer market", making the world of crypts more accessible to an audience that does not necessarily have the time or the desire to enroll in Kraken or Coinbase on their PC and then buy a Ledger or Trezor wallet.
Image source: Sirin Labs
Another more predictable aspect of Sirin Labs' plan to attract a mass market is that Finney has all the features and functionality expected of a 2018 smartphone. The phone has a 12MP (megapixel) rear camera, a camera 8 MP selfie, plus a 6-inch touchscreen, 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. This puts it at least in the same league of the iPhone XS of this year, which also has a 12-megapixel rear camera (even if double), but in reality a smaller 5.5-inch screen, 4 GB of RAM and a 7-megapixel selfie camera.
The fact of boasting superior performance in different departments here would help make the phone desirable to someone who might have thought of buying a separate hardware wallet and an iPhone XS (or Samsung Galaxy S9) – and equally important, too. with which you can use its main features (the hardware portfolio and DApp store).
The transaction process is quick and painless, involves the physical opening of the wallet (which is scrolled up from the top of the phone) and some touches of its touchscreen, as well as some touches on the smartphone display ( for example to choose what type of transaction you want to do). An interesting feature is that Finney allows the user to easily compare the addresses and transaction amounts shown on both the wallet screen and the phone, which ensures that they do not end up sending coins to the wrong recipient as a result of a hack or bug.
Yet, Sirin Labs is focusing on Finney to make cryptocurrency more accessible and popular in many other ways. First, the company has recruited Lionel Messi as the ambassador of the Finney brand in 2017, hoping that "the GOAT" and "a hacker in the field", according to Hogel, would be the best person to make Finney – and cryptic – much more visible to a market mass.
"I think security and privacy are the number one priority right now, it's important for everyone because we have all our content, all our lives on mobile phones […] Privacy is very important now more than ever, because at the moment there are many hackers and people can steal your identity or your money ".
Lionel Messi
DAFF Store
Added to Messi's enviable reputation, Sirin Labs revealed that Finney will make Crypto more accessible via the smartphone's dCENTER. This feature not only provides users with a DApp store for decentralized and encrypted applications, but actually rewards them with SRN tokens to engage and spend time with the apps it offers. In addition, Hogeg claimed that owners can recover about $ 300 of the price requested by the phone by engaging with all the apps available at launch.
The company refers to this program as "Earn and learn" and in conjunction with the concept stores focused on outreach open in December in London and Tokyo, shows how Sirin Labs hopes that the smartphone will serve as a champion for the broader cryptocurrency industry, and not just Sirin Labs itself.
"Our whole concept is to bridge the gap," explained Sirin Labs Chief Commercial Officer at Cointelegraph Erin Brazilay. "And as such, we will open concept stores in London, Tokyo and other places. Our stores will be a sort of academy for the blockchain community, all staff will be trained at the highest level, so people in the community can come and ask questions. [about blockchain and cryptocurrency]. So that even someone who is a first-comer can come and get a full understanding of how technology works. And there is nothing similar in the market. "
Operating system focused on the Blockchain
The company is also releasing its blockchain-centered operating system, Sirin OS, to Finney, which ambitiously aims to go beyond its hardware. "We decided to develop Finney, the first blockchain phone that runs the Sirin operating system, but this is only the beginning of the execution of our vision Our vision is that every device based on Android will run Sirin OS. in another OEM [original equipment manufacturers] adopt the Sirin operating system and join us in the blockchain revolution ".
In other words, Sirin Labs does not simply want to create blockchain phones, but to produce the platform for cryptocurrency and blockchain applications, becoming a sort of "Google cryptography". For example, if you can have an operating system encrypted by a Samsung, Huawei or HTC phone, then it will go a long way in making the mainstream crypted, which is why Erin Brazilay said that Sirin OS is "at least" as important as the Sirin Labs long-term strategy: "We need to put a lot of pressure on the OEM side, to get them to adopt the Sirin operating system as a de facto standard technology to allow their phones to be blockchain-enabled."
As you can imagine, Sirin Labs is confident about Finney's future. With the goal of sending 100,000 smartphone units within a year, it is already accepting orders for the device on its website and, in January, the phone will also be available for purchase through the Amazon Launchpad platform.
Niche segment or mass market?
However, other voices and figures in the sector are skeptical that the smartphone will have a large impact outside the cryptocurrency circles. Speaking with Cointelegraph, Gartner's principal principal analyst, Tuong H. Nguyen, believes that it is aimed primarily at "technology experts" and "early adopters".
"I would question the ability of this device to achieve mass market success." The broader question I think you're asking is "what is the appeal / must-have feature that this blockchain phone" Is it providing? The storage portfolio will apply to a mass market niche segment, not only would it be attractive to the few people who own the cryptography, but it goes deeper trying to convince these few people who need a phone to do it specifically (in another way, why should not I buy a phone from a larger, better-known OEM with lots of features – more than I'd probably use – less cryptographic capabilities? "
Sirin Labs not only has to deal with the possibility that Finney only appeals to a "niche segment" of the market, but also has more than one competitor in the blockchain-phone sector.
For one, HTC should release Exodus 1 in December – and like Finney, it's a high-end smartphone with a cold wallet, although it currently costs $ 39 less than Sirin Labs' offer. And on HTC, there is another manufacturer of a blockchain phone, Pundi X.
In October, the blockchain payment provider based in India announced its "XPhone", a smartphone expiring in Q2 2019 able to transmit phone calls, SMS and mobile data via blockchain nodes, thus avoiding the need to use networks centralized furniture. And because the vice president of the company, Peko Wan, told Cointelegraph, this ability to provide basic telephone services through decentralization makes it more a Finney's blockchain phone.
"What makes XPhone unique is that it actually uses a blockchain-based protocol for communicating data, making calls, sending messages and more, which means that users communicate with each other in a safe and independent from a central manager through nodes, the uniqueness of the way we have reinvented the blockchain to be used as a transmission protocol for telephony and data of all types: in all senses, we have created a real blockchain phone ".
Regardless of these opinions whether it is a "real" blockchain phone or not, what is clear is that, with Finney, Sirin Labs has taken an important step in the cryptocurrency sector. In the space of a year, it has produced a huge ICO by releasing a high-performance and secure product that will provide real utility and value to its users. This is something that many blockchain projects can claim to have done, and while it's hard to predict only where the future will take Finney and Sirin OS, it may just be a good thing that the cryptography industry has finally started producing gadgets that all people can use.
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