Five Reasons to Be Excited About the Finney Smartphone (SIRIN LABS’ Ambitious Blockchain Phone)

SIRIN Labs, the Swiss startup that had the fourth-largest ICO of 2017 (with $157.8 million raised in two weeks), is hoping to have Finney, which it calls “the first open source blockchain smartphone” (competing with HTC’s Exodus for this title), ready for launch by the end of November 2018.

For this article, we went through almost every official source of information about the phone (website, Medium blog, Twitter account, Telegram Channel, Facebook page, YouTube channel). Here are five reasons to be excited about this ambitious Android phone:

• The phone has 2018 flagship hardware specifications: 6” 18:9 (1080 x 2160) display; Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 845 processor; 128GB storage memory; SD memory card slot (up to 2TB);
• There is a built-in cold storage crypto wallet that will support all major coins/tokens (Cardano’s ADA token will definitely be supported) and all ERC-20 tokens; there is an “ultra secure” mode that can be enabled via a physical switch on the phone; in this mode, all unencrypted communications are turned off, which means that “the crypto wallet inside Finney will effectively be offline unless intentionally activated.”); a “second touchscreen, which measures in at two inches and slides up from the body of the device” that has the effect of “warming up” the cold crypto wallet, “allowing you to securely transact with fellow crypto enthusiasts” (source: a report by The Verge); this second screen is known as the “Safe Screen”;
• The phone runs on SIRIN LABS’ open-source operating system, SIRIN OS, which is designed to “support inherent Blockchain applications, such as a crypto wallet, secure exchange access, encrypted communications, and a P2P resource sharing ecosystem for payment and apps, supported by the SRN token”;
• Finney devices “will create an independent blockchain network” using a distributed ledger; and
• A Web 3.0 DApp store with an integrated Token Conversion Service (TCS) that, through a partnership with Bancor, seamlessly converts a user’s SRN tokens to whatever cryptocurrency is needed for use in a particular DApp; normally, when you want to buy a DApp from the store, you need to have the sufficient amount of SRN tokens in your wallet, but due to a partnership with Cardano, you will be able to make the purchase with ADA, with the wallet automatically exchanging your ADA for SRN.

Featured Image Credit: Image Courtesy of SIRIN LABS