Samsung Announces Crypto-Enabled Software on New Smartphones

In a recent press release, Samsung has announced that their new Galaxy S10 phone series will allow for wallet functions for several cryptocurrencies.

Although previously dismissed as rumour and speculation by Samsung, the rumours have slowly being corroborated as more details emerge. Then, on February 25th the phone’s new features were confirmed at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain. As stated by Hankyoreh, a mainstream media outlet in South Korea:

“Based on the fact that the Samsung Blockchain Keystore tutorial features Bitcoin, Ethereum, and an add new token button, it is likely that Samsung will allow users to directly add ERC20 tokens onto the native crypto wallet.”

The wallet functions will extend to Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), COSMEE (COSM), and Enjin (ENJ). Having native crypto wallet functions on the new phone will allow for the storing and transferring of ERC-20 tokens at a very high level. Samsung is currently the largest phone manufacturer in the world, which makes this a very notable step towards “mass adoption” of crypto.

Explaining the Functionality

The ERC-20 token standard is a group of rules that a protocol must follow in order to establish a token contract on top of the Ethereum blockchain network. Companies can essentially piggyback on the previously established network in order to create their own cryptocurrency.

The wallets would be cold storage enabled, which means they would have no connection to the Internet and is much safer. You could theoretically already do this using the Opera app for Android phones, but now there is a more mainstream version available to the public.

As has been repeatedly noted before, cryptocurrencies and their usability has continued to advance significantly over the last year and change of the bear market.

Where Does This Lead

The latter two tokens are less well-known, but have special links to Samsung. COSMEE is rumoured to have been chosen to be the primary partner of Samsung as they begin to partner with decentralized apps (DApps). It is a mobile beauty decentralized app that allows COSM tokens to be used as currency inside. The Enjin token may be used within games based on crypto assets, and will allow for ERC-20 and ERC-115 tokens to be sent within the platform.

As Facebook showed in the last decade, games show a huge potential for upside in terms of mobile advertising. But then if you look at massively multiplayer online (MMO) online games like World of Warcraft, they have been able to monetize their platform very successful by selling in-game perks. It is likely that Samsung sees this as a possibility for them to create a new revenue stream, and is partnering with Enjin in an effort to harness that.

One could take the current innovations Samsung is rolling out, and predict the creation of a “DAppStore” somewhere down the line. This would be the most widespread way of making blockchain-based applications available to everybody. It would also represent a significant change in the times, in that Apple would be behind the times in this innovation.