The British telecommunications company Vodafone plans to combine SIM cards with cryptocurrency wallets. This was stated by the head of the blockchain department of the firm, David Palmer, in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
According to his calculations, by 2030 there will be about 20 billion mobile devices in operation. By the same time, the number of crypto wallets will reach 5.6 billion.
"Therefore, we focused on linking SIM cards to digital identification and blockchains, as well as using the cryptographic methods that are in these SIM cards for integration," Palmer added.
A representative of the company spoke about the Vodafone PairPoint Digital Asset Broker platform, which is designed to become "the largest ecosystem of crypto assets." The solution facilitates transactions between public and private blockchains and "provides decentralized digital identifiers to IoT devices."
The development is designed to simplify on-chain payment and introduce traditional money transfer operators into the ecosystem.
Vodafone is one of the largest mobile operators in the world, headquartered in Newbury, UK. Its subsidiaries and partner companies operate in many countries, including Russia and Ukraine.
In 2020, Vodafone withdrew from the Libra Association, which participated in the development of the blockchain network from Facebook.
Earlier, the LayerZero omnichain project entered into an agreement with Conflux on cooperation regarding the use of blockchain-based SIM cards (BSIM) developed by the startup and China Telecom. Through the partnership, BSIM owners will be able to transfer assets and messages between networks via the protocol.
Recall that in July 2023, one of the largest state—owned banks in China, Bank of China, introduced a new offline method for paying with digital yuan using SIM cards.