By Yesterday CoinBeat reported on the news that South Korean tech giant Samsung had applied for three patents pertaining to blockchain technology. At the time of press, it was unclear whether the company would be integrating any of the proposed technologies to the upcoming S10 range, but according to SamMobile, the biggest online Samsung community, the electronics company is, in fact, planning to integrate a cold wallet system into the upcoming Galaxy S10 smartphone.
Senior executive editor at SamMobile Adnan Farooqui 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.”
Why Crypto Wallet Integration?
Since early this year, Samsung, which is the biggest conglomerate in South Korea, which has had market dominance over many of the country’s major sectors which include insurance, online payments, asset management, motor vehicle manufacturing and even property development has shown growing interest in the world of cryptocurrencies.
In contrast to rival conglomerates in the South Korean market, Samsung entered the crypto arena with a venture which is focused on bitcoin mining as well manufacturing mining rigs and equipment from their factory in Suwon, South Korea, in order to export to international distributors.
In recent pasts, several reports have surfaced claiming that Samsung has been working with Halong Mining in China and Squire in Canada, but as of December, it remains unclear as to who Samsung’s ASIC mining chip partners are.
In the last 8 months, the conglomerate has steadily been growing their mining business and it seems that the crypto wallet arena is their next move.
It’s common knowledge that Samsung opts to make use of and leverage their existing resources in order to expand into new and emerging markets instead of creating entirely new infrastructures. They established their mining equipment manufacturing sector in an effort to maximize the potential of their large-scale foundry and their crypto wallet which is in development is to be integrated into their celebrated Galaxy smartphone range.
However, if Samsung is to enter the cryptocurrency exchange sector, which almost every other rival company in South Korea has done, including telecommunications, gaming, financial and even the insurance sector have dipped into, they will need to create a new infrastructure from scratch, much like what Shinhan Bank has done with Gopax.
As per SamMobile, if Samsung’s wallet does indeed become integrated into their Galaxy S10, users will have the ability to import their data from other crypto wallets such as MetaMask and Trust Wallet in order to natively transact with the mobile phone.
SamMobile 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.”
Hardware Focused Businesses Could Face Difficult Times:
Businesses which are currently the dominant figures in the global mobile phone market which include Samsung, Apple, HTC and many others could integrate crypto and provide native support for the emerging asset class.
In last year’s bull market, many projects successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars with one company Sirin Labs claiming to have raised $158 million in an ICO sale in order to manufacture smartphones which boast cryptocurrency support in order to compete against the mobile phone giants.
However, as these already established smartphone manufacturers such as Samsung begin making moves to integrate crypto support, projects with like Sirin who raise funds to create new hardware could possibly face the inevitable song of irrelevance.
Do you believe that the smartphone sector could come in and dominate the wallet and cryptocurrency hardware arena? Let us know your thoughts.
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