The Exodus 1 Phone from HTC was launched at the Consensus Conference which held in May. It is now available for pre-order. It is aimed at the development community primarily and allows payment using Ethereum or bitcoin.

Ethereum (ETH) Price Today – ETH / USD

Name Price 24H % $346.87 7.24%

It is available at the price of 0.15 Bitcoin (ETC) as well as 4.78 Ethereum (ETH). This sum is close to the price of the newly released iPhone XS with a starting price of a thousand dollars.

The Exodus costs around $975 putting the current price of BTC into consideration. However, the price is not fixed as it will wise if BTC price rises. BTC reached $10,000 a couple of months ago, and if it rises to that level again, the phone’s value could surge to around $1,500.

Why fiat is not accepted

The main feature of the device is its security. It was built to run as a hardware crypto wallet. It allows users to store digital assets safely in local wallets in the phone.

A few months ago, Samsung, one of the largest manufacturers in the world revealed that mobile phones are more secure when it comes to processing crypto payments. It is preferred to alternative devices or platforms such as web and desktop because of the presence of a trusted system known as the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE).

How TEE works

This system operates as a different execution environment that has its own storage and memory. This makes it difficult for hackers to gain access to protected data stored in the TEE ecosystem. It can come in handy in case of a security breach or a hacking attack.

Joel Snyder, senior IT consultant with Samsung explained,

“This is why smartphones have the edge over laptops and desktops for cryptocurrency wallets: without the benefits of the hardware-based TEE, the keys are more vulnerable. There is a significant caveat: a naïve wallet developer might choose to simply store the keys on the normal internal storage of the phone, in which case there’s little additional protection from using the smartphone platform,”

The Exodus device uses this ecosystem with so many other security features in the mobile phone to create a safe environment for crypto users.

The decision to sell in crypto

The company made the decision to sell its phone exclusively in digital currency with price pegged to ETH and BTC. The head of HTC’s Blockchain initiative, Phil Chen, told SCMP, a Hong Kong-based publication that the brand intends to sell the device to the global Blockchain community as the core audience.

He said,

“Selling it in crypto only and being the first to do so means we are bringing this directly to the core audience and those who will want this device – the blockchain community. It reflects our belief in cryptocurrencies – in fact, we had to recreate and overcome many processes internally, as well as find new distributors so that we can achieve the goal of only accepting cryptocurrencies as the form of payment.”

Price changes to expect

Since BTC price determines the price of the phone, the price is not fixed at a particular price; it will fluctuate as BTC price remains unsteady.