y happened to all those other phones, and did the producers deliver on their promises?
To find out, we dug up reports of blockchain phones dating back to 2018 and looked at the status of these projects today.
Sirin Labs’ Finney phone
Among the first companies to announce a purpose-made blockchain phone was Switzerland-based Sirin Labs with its Finney phone, named after the late cryptographer and Bitcoin (BTC) pioneer Hal Finney.
The company itself received its funding through the fourth largest initial coin offering (ICO) of 2017, having raised USD 157.8m from the sale of its SRN token.
And although the price of the token has collapsed from a peak of USD 3.5 in 2018 to basically zero today, the Finney phone was made and still remains for sale in the Sirin Shop.
Moreover, the Sirin Labs as recently as June 2021 launched an updated version of its phone known as Sirin V3, per a tweet from the company.
Pundi X’s XPhone
The xPhone was a smartphone planned by Pundi X, a crypto payments firm based in Singapore.
Among the products that Pundi X has delivered is XPOS, a device the company on its LinkedIn page says is the “world’s first point-of-sale solution that enables merchants and consumers to conduct in-store transactions instantly on the blockchain.”
The company’s smartphone, however, appears to be a dead project, with little information to be found since the initial announcement in 2018.
According to the announcement at the time, the xPhone was supposed to work without a carrier by routing data through blockchain nodes. “Unlike traditional phones which require a centralized mobile carrier, XPhone runs independently without the need for that,” the blog post said.