First unveiled in May 2018, HTC’s EXODUS phones can connect to decentralized networks and allow users to download and run decentralized applications in much the same way as conventional apps run on smartphones. The phone also doubles up as a hardware wallet, providing owners with a secure and mobile means to hold their cryptocurrencies.
HTC, which has around 3,000 employees, has not disclosed the scale of the lay-offs or the departments that will be most affected, according to a report from Taiwan News. This will be the third round of job cuts staff at the phone manufacturer have faced in the past five years. The company let go 2,250 employees in 2015, and cut a further 1,500 in July 2018.
Taiwanese phone manufacturer HTC confirmed earlier this week that it would axe jobs to remain competitive and better focus on a handful of high-end products, including the EXODUS, its blockchain phone.
HTC says the downsize will allow it to retain an innovative edge for a selection of its products. This includes its virtual reality system VIVE, as well as the EXODUS, its series of blockchain-powered smartphones.
An in-wallet cryptocurrency swap feature, initially enabling quick exchanges between ERC-20 tokens, was added earlier this year.
The EXODUS went on sale at the end of 2018, and was initially only available to buy in cryptocurrency. HTC’s latest blockchain-powered phone, unveiled this October, can run a full bitcoin node. Future plans include adding support for Binance Chain, with a new special edition of the phone.
The EXODUS isn’t the only blockchain phone on the market. Sirin Labs also began shipping its own blockchain phone, the Finney, at the end of 2018. Samsung released its Galaxy S10 earlier this year, which is fully compatible with ERC-20s, dapps and bitcoin. There have also been reports that LG is contemplating launching its own product, although nothing has been confirmed.
More generally, competition in the smartphone space, from established rivals like Samsung and Apple, as well as new entrants like Google, has hit HTC’s market share and may have placed the company under substantial financial pressure. Revenue is reportedly down, with July sales only reaching $1.5 million, according to Liberty Times.
HSBC: Blockchain Platform Will Keep Trade Finance Smooth Despite Coronavirus
A blockchain trade finance platform developed by eight major banks, among them HSBC, BNP Paribas, and Citi, is now ready for commercial launch in Singapore in Q2 2020.
Named Contour, the launch follows a successful trial of the platform involving over $30 million in letter-of-credit transactions last year, South China Morning Post reported on March 5.
Letter-of-credit transactions are a payment mechanism widely used in international trade, in which a bank provides a seller with an economic guarantee for a buyer’s payment.
As the coronavirus continues to shake global markets, a regional executive told reporters that the platform can ensure commercial trades proceed smoothly even in times of crisis.
Ajay Sharma, HSBC’s regional head of global trade and receivables finance, claimed that:
“Leveraging blockchain for trade finance has overcome the physical constraints we are having today.”
He added that the company operating Contour expects to have a workforce of around 20 employees by the year’s end.
An established use case for blockchain
Bank-backed blockchain trade finance platforms are already prevalent in Asia-Pacific and globally. In 2018, a platform dubbed eTrade Connect – backed by HSBC, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered and nine other banks – launched in Hong Kong.
Trade finance platform we.trade – which also counts HSBC as a founder bank, alongside Rabobank, Santander, Société Générale, UniCredit, Deutsche Bank, and others – collaborated with the Hyperledger Fabric-powered IBM blockchain to complete its first live operations earlier that year.
In China this spring, a People’s Bank of China-affiliated initiative run by the country’s foreign exchange reserve regulator piloted its own cross-border trade finance blockchain in three major trading provinces.
Blockchain technology has been found to be beneficial across the trade financing process – allowing for the automated verification of customs documents and corresponding financing balances and enabling real-time and transparent data sharing.
In Oman, major oil and gas enterprises and HSBC Bank Oman SAOG conducted their first fully digitized letter of credit on the blockchain using R3’s Corda platform last fall.
Human Resources Giant Randstad Explores Blockchain to Quickly Match Talent With Recruiters
Randstad, the world’s largest human resources firm, has begun testing a combination of the Cypherium blockchain and Google Cloud to better match talent to corporate needs.
The Netherlands-based firm said in a blog post that it believes the blockchain can offer ways to automate bureaucratic tasks associated with workforce recruitment by handling the «nuts and bolts» of day-to-day recruitment activities, making the entire process more efficient.
A recent study conducted by Randstad found that distributed ledger technology (DLT) provided a means to securely preserve customers’ personal data while enabling the verification of academic and professional qualifications, as well as birth dates, addresses and IDs, of prospective talent.
The initiative aims to match appropriate candidates with companies seeking immediate role fulfillment such as healthcare services requiring emergency staff after a disease outbreak, without compromising on privacy.
Cypherium CEO Sky Guo told CoinDesk recently that clients did not have to store all the data centrally using the network and could employ a database extractor to preserve their privacy.
«If a job candidate wants to prove that he has the grades and diploma, what they need to do is provide the hash of the diploma and the employer can verify that hash with the hash of the university,» Guo said.
Cypherium is a blockchain infrastructure platform, specializing in smart contracts, based on a hybrid concept marrying proof-of-work and HotStuff, a relatively new consensus protocol that has been adopted by the Facebook-initiated Libra project.
Google Cloud’s G Suite would further offer Randstad a means to monitor and build its human resource platform without the need to maintain and manage its own cloud system.
Global collaboration manager at Randstad Frank van der Bijl said that a blend of Google Cloud’s services and the Cypherium blockchain provide the company with a faster and easier way to verify and match appropriate workforce talent.
“Google Cloud and G Suite already free us from some manual verification tasks, and we plan to use Cypherium’s blockchain to hand off even more”, Bijl said.
