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The Korea Herald
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THE INVESTOR
March 19, 2024

Samsung

Galaxy S10 emerges as ‘white knight’ for troubled crypto market

  • PUBLISHED :March 11, 2019 - 15:31
  • UPDATED :March 11, 2019 - 15:36
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One of the eye-catching features of Samsung Electronics’ latest Galaxy S10 lineup is a built-in cryptocurrency wallet -- the first adoption of crypto technology by a top-selling smartphone maker.

Despite a limited number of decentralized applications, or Dapps, available on the Samsung crypto solution, some believe that the adoption of the crypto wallet in the S10 could revitalize the crypto market faced with the falling value of digital coins in recent months and negative sentiment toward these new-age assets. 




Shin Min-sub, CEO of Coinduck, an Ethereum-based payment solution developer, is one of those who think the crypto market will regain vigor with the wider adoption of crypto solutions in more smartphones.

“Many are still pessimistic on the highly volatile crypto coins, but things could change in a blink of an eye once coins pegged to Korean won or US dollars and crypto payments via flagship smartphones like the S10 become more available for crypto coin solutions like Coinduck,” Shin told The Investor.

Coinduck’s crypto payment solution is one of the four Dapps that the S10 supports. It allows users to shop for groceries, buy a cup of coffee and pay fees for ski equipment rental.

The crypto wallet service firm said the partnership with Samsung would help it to expand to wider areas.

With the Coinduck app, S10 users can simply scan a QR code to pay for their purchases at 1,000 brick-and-mortar stores, marts and restaurants across the nation.

Owners of restaurants or shops receive text messages that notify the completion of transactions, and the fee is 1 percent of the selling price.

The crypto startup, founded in November 2017, as an in-house venture of blockchain firm Chain Partners and was spun off in August 2018, has been participating in Samsung’s startup accelerator program C-Lab since December 2018.

“Crypto payments will address the problems that block global customers from purchasing at Korean online stores, and help contribute to increasing the spending of foreign tourists,” Shin said.

Currently supporting only Ethereum, Coinduck plans to embrace more types of digital coins on its platform.

Other three Dapps compatible with the S10 are mobile cat-breeding game CryptoKitties, game-item storage solution Enjin and review platform for beauty products Cosmee.

For the three months after the pilot service in August, Cosmee achieved some 300,000 downloads and around 70,000 posts were put up on the platform. It rewards its users with digital coin Cosm if they write posts on beauty products. Cosm can be exchanged with cash at crypto exchanges, including Gdac, Coinzest and CPdax.

“The fact that the Cosmee Dapp targets female users was one of the main reasons why the firm was able to partner up with Samsung,” Song Ho-won, chief of Cosmo Chain, operator of the review service, was quoted as saying by local news outlet Seoul Economic Daily.

More than 1.5 million pieces of data about beauty products are on the review platform, according to the firm.

The CryptoKitties mobile game, launched in December 2017, lets its users sell and purchase cats collected in the virtual world, and a CryptoKitty virtual cat was once traded at US$170,000 in May 2018. The trade volume of digital cats have dropped significantly over the past months as the value of Ethereum coins have nosedived.

By Kim Young-won (wone0102@heraldcorp.com)

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