Why Samsung Plans to Integrate Crypto Cold Storage in its S10 Series
Samsung and Opera could help fuel mass Bitcoin adoption. | Source: Shutterstock
According to SamMobile, the biggest online Samsung community, the electronics giant is planning to integrate a cold wallet system into its upcoming Galaxy 10.
Adnan Farooqui, the senior executive editor at SamMobile, wrote :
“After hearing about the trademarks for Samsung’s blockchain and cryptocurrency software, we decided to dig around a little deeper. We can confirm that the company is indeed developing one and that it may be launched with the Galaxy S10.”
Reasons Behind Crypto Wallet Integration
Since early 2018, Samsung, the largest conglomerate in South Korea that has dominance over many of the country’s major sectors including insurance, online payment, asset management, car manufacturing, electronics, and property development, has demonstrated its interest towards the cryptocurrency sector.
Dissimilar to other conglomerates in the local market, Samsung entered the cryptocurrency sector with a venture focused on Bitcoin mining, creating mining equipment from its foundry based in Suwon, South Korea to ship to international distributors.
Throughout the past several months, reports claimed that Samsung has been working with Halong Mining in China and Squire in Canada, but as of December, the partner distributors of Samsung’s ASIC mining chips remain unclear.
For over eight months, the company has been gradually increasing its mining business, and the cryptocurrency wallet sector seems to be the company’s next target market.
Samsung prefers to utilize and leverage its existing resources to expand into new emerging markets rather than creating an entirely new infrastructure to support it. The company established a mining equipment manufacturing business as a means to maximize the potential of its large-scale foundry and the company’s cryptocurrency wallet that is currently in development to be built into its popular Galaxy mobile phone series.
If the company is to enter the cryptocurrency exchange market, which nearly every major company in the country including telecommunications, gaming, financial, and insurance companies are involved in, it will have to build a new infrastructure from the ground up, similar to what Shinhan Bank has done with Gopax.
Instead, the company decided to utilize its existing line of products to help strengthen the infrastructure surrounding cryptocurrencies as an asset class.
According to SamMobile, if the wallet gets integrated into the Samsung Galaxy S10, users will be able to import their data from wallets such as MetaMask and Trust Wallet to transact natively with the mobile phone.
The publication reported:
“Samsung’s cold wallet app will enable users to import their existing wallets from third-party services like Metamask or TrustWallet. They will also be able to create a new one in the app itself. The cryptocurrencies and tokens supported initially may include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum-derived token ERC20 and Bitcoin Cash.”
Difficult Times For Hardware-Focused Businesses
Companies that dominate the global mobile phone market including Samsung, Apple, HTC, Huawei, and Oppo can easily integrate cryptocurrencies and provide native support for the asset class.
In the bull market of 2017, many projects raised hundreds of millions of dollars, and one — Sirin Labs — claims to have raised nearly $158 million in an initial coin offering (ICO) to create mobile phones with native cryptocurrency support to compete against the behemoths of the mobile phone market.
As companies like Samsung integrate cryptocurrency support, projects that focus on creating hardware could become increasingly irrelevant.
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