Is the Crypto Phone Finally Here?
Coinflux Network partnered with China telecom to launch its pilot program for a blockchain phone.
The news was broken this week, when Conflux Network announced its partnership with China Telecom, the 2nd largest wireless carrier in China, to develop Blockchain-enabled SIM cards - BSIM.
Up to date, this pilot will be the largest blockchain hardware product yet, and also the one that involve “the most users and applications”.
The pilot program is expected to launch in Hong Kong later in 2023.
Who is Conflux Network?
Conflux Network is a smart contract platform that features a Turing-complete state machine built on top of a high-throughput consensus protocol, focusing on speed and cheap transactions.
Their plan is to lower the barriers to entry in for Web3.
They employ a Tree-Graph consensus mechanism that provides scaling benefits relative to existing blockchains. It’s a hybrid chain since the Tree-Graph (Proof-of-Stake) consensus protocol is supplemented by Proof-of-Work (PoW).
CFX is the native token of the Conflux network and serves as a medium to pay rewards for network miners and transaction fees.
Conflux claims to be the only regulatory-compliant public blockchain in China.
In 2018, the Conflux Foundation was established, to build an open application platform. The foundation aims to advance blockchain education and research through the Tree-Graph Research Institute, which has partnered with the government of Shanghai, the Key Laboratory of Blockchain Infrastructure & Applications, the government of Hunan, McDonald's China, and Oreos.
Just last month they signed an agreement with Little Red Box, the “Chinese Instagram”:
How is the BSIM special?
The BSIM card integrates Conflux’s Tree-graph, dual proof-of-stake, and proof-of-work technology, enabling the highest system performance for any blockchain in the world.
Will manage and store the use of public and private keys, as well as carry out digital signatures without revealing the private key;
Will allow encrypted storage and key retrieval;
Will store, transfer, and display digital assets safely;
Transaction information and status progress can be assessed in real time with the “one-click-check” functionality;
As Conflux is a distributed identity authentication carrier, data asset information will transparent and secure.
According to Conflux, the R&D phase for the BSIM card is complete and the sim already connects to Conflux's main network in testing.
Moving On
The creation of blockchain-specific hardware is the holy grail of blockchain killer apps. We can expect the Hong Kong pilot to be live before the end of the year, a trial that most likely will be successful and will be followed by more of them in China mainland. It’s still early days to value the effectiveness of such projects, but nonetheless, Conflux has showed to be very well positioned and trusted in China and has a good reputation as the “place to go” for companies and government actors interested in Web3 infrastructure.
Time will tell how far the project will eventually move to production.
Given the close collaboration with the Chinese government, some questions are raised regarding the decentralization of the network.
Will it be effectively distributed? Or only decentralized?
Will it be controlled by gatekeepers? And will everyone be able to join and leave?
We do accept and welcome new innovations, but there is a fundamental need to make sure they comply with the Web3 ethos and are not centralized trojan horses disguised as distributed.