HONG KONG – Exodus – the first blockchain-based smartphone produced by Taiwan-based phone maker HTC – is projected to be released later this year.

While HTC is in charge of the hardware side of the phone-making, Animoca Brands, a Hong Kong-based mobile game developer co-founded and led by Siu Yat, is teaming up with HTC through developing games and content.

HTC is “reaching out to consumers in ways we cannot,” said Siu, also director of Animoca Brands, citing the phone maker’s supremacies in distribution. The broader mission of the tie-up is to increase customers onto the blockchain platform to 1 billion from the current 30 million users.

Sirin Labs, a London-based phone manufacturer, earlier unveiled its US$1,000 dual-screen blockchain-powered smartphone named Finney, which is expected to debut this November, in a bid to vie with HTC’s Exodus for the title of being the first blockchain phone.

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Gaming, Siu said, would be the closest match for developing blockchain as “gamers understand virtual currency”

Commenting on the competition with Sirin Labs, Siu said HTC’s brand provides comfort and trust for consumers. “Making hardware, in general, is hard,” he said. With HTC, “What you are doing is you are buying trust”.

The crypto market has seen double-digit declines in the middle of last month, with Ethereum tumbling 10 percent on Aug 14 after a 17 percent plunge on the trading day before.

Yet, according to Siu, volatility in the price is a foundation when dealing with emerging technology. “We think it's a necessary risk,” he said, “It will find a nice equilibrium when you have lots of utility.”

As the Greater China distributor of CryptoKitties, the world’s first blockchain game in which players can buy, sell, or trade their digital kitties, the company has multiple blockchain-based games that are rolling out, including Sandbox and Walletpet, according to the firm’s director.

The gaming industry nowadays is zero-sum driven, said the Vienna-born entrepreneur, and 99 percent of all games are designed as closed-loop game systems.

However, Siu said the gaming industry would be going through a paradigm shift with NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) – digital collectibles with unique attributes implemented on the blockchain.

“Digital scarcity was not possible until the blockchain came along,” said Siu, “Some people pay over US$100,000 for CryptoKitties, because they know through the blockchain, that this is the only cat like this, there are no other cats that have the same attributes or the same look.”

In his vision, with the NFT concept being more commonly applied, the assets that belong to a player in one game can be shared and used in other developer’s games since it would maximize the utilities of the original game’s assets, and when the assets need to be upgraded or have value added, players have to go back to the original game.

“The game itself becomes a platform, and that is exciting about the blockchain as well, because you have a completely new way of distribution.” added Siu.

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It would be a win-win deal with new game developers grabbing new customers and the original games getting potentially more utilities out of their game content, according to Siu. “With NFT, it lasts forever.”

Gaming, Siu said, would be the closest match for developing blockchain as “gamers understand virtual currency.”

“The biggest challenge that blockchain has today is utility, and the beautiful thing about the game industry is that, the game is good enough utility,” said Siu, “That is the lowest hanging fruit to convert.”

kevindai@chinadailyhk.com