HTC Exodus 1 unveiled: a phone that runs dApps and is also a hardware wallet

HTC unveiled the its first blockchain-focused phone – the Exodus 1. It’s available for pre-order now and is expected to ship out in December. You can only pay for it in crypto-currencies – BTC 0.15 or ETH 4.78 (which is about $960/€830 today, but tomorrow who knows?).

What makes this phone special is the Zion crypto wallet that was developed by the company. It uses the security enclave of its Snapdragon 845 chipset to keep your keys hidden from untrusted parts of the OS (Android Oreo) and apps.

Zion will turn the HTC Exodus 1 into your hardware cryptocurrency wallet. But what if you lose the phone? Social Key Recovery allows you to pick several trusted people in such a way that if they all come together, they can recreate your private key. This is called Shamir’s Secret Sharing or (as it’s better known in the crypto world) key sharding.

The Exodus has deeper ties to the cryptocurrency world. It will run dApps, decentralized apps, which run simultaneously on many devices to ensure that results can be trusted and cannot be tampered with. HTC doesn’t go into much detail, but presumably these will run on top of Ethereum. Here’s CoinDesk’s overview of dApps.

As for the phone itself, it features a 6” 1440p+ display (18:9). It has a Snapdragon 845 chipset, 6GB of RAM and 128GB storage. There are dual cameras on its back (16MP main module) and on the front (8MP). The phone has a 3,500mAh battery and IP68 water resistance.