New Ethereum dGEN1 Mobile Phone Enters the Crypto Smartphone Wars

It’s not only Android and Apple that are vying for smartphone dominance; now, cryptocurrency protocols are also descending onto the battlefield.

Freedom Factory, the company that develops the Ethereum mobile operating system dubbed ethOS, revealed the dGEN1 phone on Oct. 17. The phone aims to compete with the recently launched XForge phone unveiled by XProtocol and Solana’s two smartphones Saga and Seeker.

The new mobile phone aims to make on-chain crypto transactions more accessible by directly integrating the company’s blockchain-based operating system into the device. The phone is built on ethOS v4.0, an Ethereum-based operating system. This OS comes with a dApp store that offers Ethereum and Ethereum Layer 2 applications.

“This phone is for the degenerates,” said a team member on the phone’s website. “You’re not going to carry a device that uses crypto all the time unless you’re someone who does many transactions a day,” who also pointed out that this “isn’t a device that’s going to replace your iPhone.”

A retro yet dystopian video presenting the phone on X read, “Technology used to be fun. Used to have character. Used to give us hope. Things changed.” Dosed with images of censorship and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the team claims the phone will “take our future back” and allow for “on-chain freedom.”

Upon delivery of the device – set for spring 2025 at a price of 0.2 ETH, 61,269 DEGEN or $530 – users will be eligible to claim an airdrop. The pool, which will accumulate the funds to be later airdropped, has a current value of $14,000 with 1,069 NFT holders and $13 held per holder. Users mint a non-fungible token on Coinbase’s Layer 2 protocol Base so they can redeem the token that makes them eligible for dGEN1.

dGEN1 also comes with a built-in light node, offering users the option to validate transactions themselves.

Other blockchain phones that have hit the market include Solana’s Saga phone, which sold out the 20,000 device stock in its first month, and later sold 40,000 pre-orders for its second version in the first week. According to research firm and Web3 cloud infrastructure firm Syndica, Solana mobile phones have cumulatively sold 149,000 units, though the summer doldrums hit the ecosystem hard, with June-August registering barely any sales.