The Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC has announced its partnership with Midas Labs, the ASIC chip design firm, to launch Monero (XMR) mining application “DeMiner” for its Exodus 1S users in Q2 2020.
HTC acknowledges the concern of cryptocurrency mining and the huge amount of energy the industry consumes each year, which leads to the concentration of mining facilities in certain regions where electricity is cheap and abundant.
Phil Chen, decentralized chief officer at HTC, sees smartphone mining as a solution. “Mining on mobile is an important research topic in understanding the development of secure crypto networks. The number of mobile phones in 2020 is approaching 3.5 Billion, which would further decentralize and distribute the hash rate and mining power of such crypto networks,” he added.
He also noticed that the hash rate distribution of popular cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is being dominated by a few mining pools. To achieve decentralization, mining equipment needs to be easily accessible by everyone, therefore mining via mobile phones is one way to tackle this challenge.
Midas Labs also revealed that the application will only start mining cryptocurrency when the smartphone device is not being used and in a plugged-in state.
Both firms have not yet provided any further details if the application will support other cryptocurrency mining apart from Monero (XMR) in the future.
