China Telecom, a major phone operator, has published a white paper on blockchain-based smartphones in the 5G Era.

According to a report by Sina, the local finance news outlet, China Telecom released the white paper at the China International Intelligent Industry Expo on August 27^th. 

Existing troubles

In the document, China Telecom noted the potential advantages of leveraging blockchain technology to smart phones, including transaction traceability and automation. As per the report by Sina, China Telecom’s document believes that individuals can master their digital assets in the 5G era, “regardless of data volume, data varieties and data dimensions, data assets will grow geometrically.”

The firm also purportedly stressed on the increasing adoption of blockchain in the mobile industry. Currently, the rate of adoption is fairly low, because blockchain-based mobile phones do not yet have mass production.

 Even so, maximum manufacturers of these blockchain-powered mobile phones have leveraged blockchain for speculating market hotspots, instead of directly implementing the actual power of the technology. The company purportedly claims that this has caused poor performance of the current blockchain phones so far.

China Telecom’s project

The blockchain application ecosystem, created by China Telecom, explained in the document that they aim to find solutions to major problems in the operating mobile networks, including harassment, loss of data, fraud, and crimes related to identity theft. Additionally, it also explains a project of blockchain crypto management system, which is SIM card-based.

China Telecom’s initiative to implement blockchain to prevent theft and loss proposes to make blacklists that are associated with trusted IMEIs and secure it via blockchain. Smartphone supplier, end-users, and carriers would quickly be able to identify and disable the stolen devices through the technology, if a mobile device happens to get blacklisted.

Moreover, the document also states that the 5G blockchain has five main use cases, including financial applications, supply chain tracing, digital identity verification, express delivery applications, and judicial applications.

According to a previous report, the integration of blockchain and 5G can potentially surge the economic value, because of 5G’s ability to support blockchain by increasing decentralization and node participation. It also enables on-chain scalability, transparency and shorter block times.