You Can Now Buy HTC's Exodus Blockchain Phone Without Paying Crypto

Taiwanese consumer electronics manufacturer HTC is making its blockchain phone more widely accessible.

Previously only available for purchase with bitcoin or ether, the HTC EXODUS 1 can now be bought with U.S. dollars and other fiat currencies.

Announced Tuesday during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company has also expanded the range of cryptocurrencies accepted for the phone to include litecoin and the Binance exchange's BNB token.

For now, the $699 phone is still exclusively sold online.

To protect users' cryptocurrencies, the phone has a "Kind of walled-off area," typically known as a "Trusted execution environment," Chen said.

The phone's operating system cannot interact with the wallet, giving it some protection from malicious actors able to compromise the phone itself, Chen said.

"That's been a fundamental problem, if you lose your device or lose your private keys, in this case what happens if you lose your phone? Coming up with the solution of splitting up your keys without us having access to your keys or storing them on a server that was a big breakthrough for us."

Chen declined to say what sort of interest the phone saw during its early access period, though a press release said the expanded purchase option came after "Validation from the crypto community." The product was first announced during CoinDesk's Consensus 2018, last May. The company will have stiff competition.

Last week, Samsung - the world's largest cell phone manufacturer - announced that its new flagship, the Galaxy S10, would include support for secure storage of blockchain keys.

The cheapest variant, the S10e, sells for $749.99, still $50 more than the EXODUS. Moreover, where the EXODUS has its unique distributed key recovery system, Samsung will back up the private keys saved on the device through the company's "Find My Mobile" service.