Foxconn to produce Sirin Labs blockchain smartphone, due October
With 25,000 pre-orders, a manufacturing deal and new stores, the Finney phone is heating up for release.
Last year, Sirin Labs conducted an extremely successful round of fundraising, picking up $158 million in December on top of another $70 million raised earlier, Bloomberg reports. Its goal is to create the world's first dedicated blockchain smartphone, the Finney, and a blockchain PC.
Unlike most cryptocurrencies, the Sirin Labs token is specifically designed to represent a piece of a pre-order. Although the Finney will be sold like a normal phone, token-holders will be able to pay with Sirin tokens to get a discount.
Sirin has now settled on a deal with a Foxconn subsidiary, FIH Mobile, to manufacture the phone, of which 25,000 have reportedly been pre-ordered.
"Bringing the first blockchain-based smartphone to market obligates us to partner with the very best in the market. FIH Mobile – the gold-standard in smartphone manufacturing – was ultimately the clear and natural partner for us," said Sirin Labs CEO Moshe Hogeg.
It's not Sirin's first smartphone, but it might be more commercially successful than the company's previous creation, the niche high-security Solarin smartphone which cost over $10,000 and only sold a handful of units.
The Finney is pegged to be much cheaper, coming in at around $1,000.
Sirin has also floated the possibility of dropping that price further by licensing the technology to other phone manufacturers. According to Bloomberg, such software deals could drop the price to as low as $200.
"I think I can take it to a mass market phone in a world where innovation in phones is saturated, it’s dead," Hogeg said.
"I want to do something that’s better than the current user experience. In the end, when you look at the Chinese wall, it started with one guy taking one small brick and putting it into place. And then another one and then another one. We can do it step by step."
The phone is tracked to ship in October and to be sold through eight new stores located in places with active cryptocurrency communities, like Vietnam and Turkey.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author holds ETH, IOTA, ICX, VEN, XLM, BTC and NANO.
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