Bitcoin Wallet To Come Pre-Installed For Users Of Huawei
The third-largest maker of handsets in the world Huawei will be releasing the bitcoin wallet of BTC.com in its AppGallery. This was revealed by business operations vice president at BTC.com, Alejandro de la Torre.
“It’s a good opportunity to tap into the Chinese market. The use of cashless payments with apps is very big, and the traditional banking system is lacking, so there’s a good use case for crypto payments to grow there,” de la Torre told Bloomberg in a phone interview.
The digital currency wallet from BTC.com will emerge as the first virtual currency app provided by the Shenzhen, China-based Huawei. According to de la Torre, the AppGallery will come pre-installed but only on the new Honor and Huawei handsets. On older devices, AppGallery will become available as time goes by.
Chinese Users to be the Biggest Beneficiaries
It is expected that the biggest impact the move by Huawei will have will be felt in China where the smartphone maker is the largest seller of handsets. The world’s most populous country has also emerged as a virtual currency hotbed.
However, access to Google Play Store as well as some parts of iTunes are blocked by the Chinese government and thus downloading apps from the likes of BTC.com is limited. And while China has banned Initial Coin Offerings and ordered the shutting down of digital currency trading platforms, there is no law barring citizens from owning crypto coins.
BTC.com is owned by Bitmain Technologies, a privately-owned firm which is based in Beijing. Bitmain is primarily known for designing Application-Specific Integrated Circuits which are used in the mining of virtual currencies. The Chinese firm is also a miner of digital currencies itself and is behind one of the biggest bitcoin mining pools in the world, Antpool.
The wallet will provide support for bitcoin and bitcoin cash, and could propel Huawei’s popularity further in Europe, where it has been gaining a foothold in recent times.
Blockchain Smartphone Coming Soon
The move by Huawei comes less than two months since reports emerged indicating that Huawei was developing a handset which would offer support to decentralized applications that run on blockchain technology. At the time it was reported that Huawei was in discussions with blockchain company Sirin Labs with a view to licensing an operating system known as SIRIN OS which runs blockchain applications. SIRIN OS is built on Android. If the plans come to fruition, Huawei will become the first major smartphone maker to enter the blockchain technology and potentially leading to the mass adoption of the technology.
Since then SIRIN LABS has gone on to disclose the specs of a blockchain smartphone which will be released late in the year. Manufacturing of the smartphone known as FINNEY will be done by Foxconn International Holding while Sirin Labs will focus on developing the operating system as well as the hardware for a cold storage wallet.
Blockchain Patent Awarded to Huawei
In March 2018, a patent application filed by Huawei for a blockchain technology was published by the State Intellectual Property Office of China. The networking and telecom giant had initially filed the patent in the second half of 2016. According to the patent document, the technology described is a verification system based on blockchain and which is used to protect digital content, intellectual property rights in a peer-to-peer network.
Per the patent document verification data, including copyright holder’s ID, would be permanently recorded on the blockchain network. After a download request has been sent by a user within the peer-to-peer network, the license or private key will be identified and compared by the verification system before access being granted for the content. This will only be done once the matching of validation data has occurred.
