Last Wednesday, hip-hop artist and humanitarian Pras Michel launched Blacture — a platform designed to provide “both access and voice” to the black community — during a keynote speech at the University of Pittsburgh. Blacture’s most unique initiative appears to be the Motif, the first blockchain-based meant for the U.S. market.
Motif – The First Blockchain Smartphone for US market
The Motif doesn’t look all that different from your typical smartphone. However just like you learned in school, it is what on the inside that counts. And the Motif incorporates the Zippie operating system (OS).
Created by mobile tech and blockchain tech firm Zippie, this OS automatically rewards customers with tokens each time they use their Motif smartphones for actions like shopping for things online, agreeing to share their personal information (it’s not yet clear what info, or with whom), or making the exceedingly obscure endeavor to “provide services and products” to the Blacture community.
The tokens will go into the Motif’s safe digital wallet. The consumer can then spend the tokens utilizing a special debit card by Motif , which will work anywhere conventional debit cards work. No special bank account will be required.
The Motif should be available on the market this fall and can cost between $350 and $400.
Based on the press release, the card makes it straightforward to transfer money anywhere on the planet without additional costs, which “serves as a part of Blacture’s mission to uplift the Black community by means of financial empowerment.”
Even if smartphone customers don’t embrace the Motif, though, it will possible be the very first of many blockchain smartphones to hit the United States market.
And there are many different ways smartphones may embrace the blockchain. Last September, developer Embedded Downloads started delivery of its BitVault smartphones. The cool device, heralded as “the world’s first blockchain smartphone,” makes use of blockchain technology to amp up security, so it’s no shock its target market is the defense and military sector. Military technology has reached the consumer market before, and the BitVault could conceivably follow suit.
In the meantime, electronics developer Sirin Labs already has a blockchain designed particularly for the consumer market called the Finney. That smartphone specializes in making it simple for customers to spend and store cryptocurrencies. It will be accessible on the market in a number of nations, including Vietnam and Turkey, by October 2018.
Sirin CEO Moshe Hogeg told Bloomberg the firm thinks it might ship upwards of 3 million Finneys in 2018. If demand is as high as Sirin is hoping, many other blockchain-based smartphones just like the Motif would possibly soon compete with Galaxies and iPhones in the market.
