Finney, which is supposed to be the first smartphone that is blockchain-enabled, will be available for consumers in Bangladesh soon. According to a September 9 report, the Bangledeshi Telecommunications regulating authority allowed the phone to be imported in August. It will be available for sale starting in October 2019.

The launch of the Finney comes after a growing trend of owning smartphones in Bangladesh. In a report issued in 2018 from a global research company called GSMA Intelligence, about 138 million people in Bangladesh will have a smartphone. About 73 million of them will have a mobile internet service. This means about 75 percent of the population will have a smartphone, and 41 percent of them will have mobile internet services.

There are a few reasons for this. The Bangladeshi population is highly urbanized. It has been buying more smartphones as each new inexpensive device comes to the marketplace. The price of Finney will be more in line with a high-end phone in the Bangladeshi market. It will cost about $999, while the Samsung Galaxy S10 is sold on the Mobile Dokan market for around $894.

The Sirin Labs company, based in Switzerland, developed the Finney. They did this after having one of the five largest initial cryptocurrency offerings of 2017. The phone offers a built-in cold storage wallet. It also has a decentralized app ecosystem and secured communications.

According to the co-founder and co-CEO of Sirin Labs, Moshe Hogeg, the Finney bring all of the facets of blockchain and cryptocurrency into a single item. It is manufactured by the Foxconn Technology Group, which is an electronics giant. Before the Finney, a person would need a ledger, wallet software, a computer, a place to do the exchange and a conversion process. The Finney can do all of it.

In August 2019, the Bangladesh authorities chose to use money from their $208 million IT project to send IT graduates for blockchain training in Japanese and Indian schools. The Bangladeshi government intends to do this for 100 people in order to expand their expertise in ledgers, AI, machine learning systems and cybersecurity.