According to the announcement, HTC, in partnership with the ASIC chip design firm Midas Labs, the Taiwanese company would be able to mine cryptocurrency Monero through an application called DeMiner. The application will be available for download in the second quarter of this year. The application would be available on its smartphone, Exodus.
Crypto mining on phones could reduce mining costs.
The cryptocurrency mining involves very high energy consumption, which costs a lot. Smartphone manufacturer HTC wants to ensure that these levels can be reduced by transferring crypto mining activities to mobile devices. The application on Exodus would be designed to automatically inactivate mining regardless of whether the mobile phone is in use or when the charger is not plugged.
Phil Chen, the decentralized chief officer at HTC, said that the mining on mobile is an important research topic in understanding the development of secure crypto networks in the future. He added that the number of mobile phones in 2020 is approaching 3.5 Billion, which would further decentralize and distribute the hash rate and mining power of the crypto networks.
“Smartphone device will have a hashrate comparable to a desktop.”
Dr. Jri Lee, CEO and founder of Midas Labs, commented on the application, saying that they developed the DeMiner application such that a smartphone device will have a hashrate comparable to a desktop while consuming much less energy. He added that this would enable mobile devices to be suitable for cryptocurrency mining for the first time. Starting from open-source frameworks, they restructured and optimized mining for mobile, he added. Earlier last year, HTC had released its first blockchain-based smartphone, Exodus 1s, which allows running a full Bitcoin node on the device. The executive at HTC believes that the crypto world is under threat from hashrate dominance by giant mining pools.
