Vodafone, a telecommunications company based in the United Kingdom, plans to combine cryptocurrency wallets with subscriber identity module (SIM) cards in order to introduce blockchain technology to smartphone consumers.This ambitious initiative coincides with a firm financial plan that apparently entails over $3 billion in debt, including $1.8 billion in loans over the next two years, taken on by Vodafone Idea Ltd., a separate company operating in India in which Vodafone Group owns a 45% ownership.Vodafone Blockchain Lead David Palmer talked about the company’s intentions to incorporate blockchain technology into smartphone SIM cards in a recent interview with Yahoo Finance Future Focus.
“By 2030 we’re expecting more than 20 billion mobile phones to be in operation, many of those being smartphones. … So we’ve focused on linking the sim card to digital identity, linking the sim card to blockchains, and using the cryptography we have in those sim cards for that integration.”
Palmer provided more details on the numbers he had shown, estimating that by 2030, there will be almost eight billion cellphones in circulation and 5.6 billion cryptocurrency wallets, which would represent over 70% of the world’s population.Vodafone Group has had a busy 2024 despite the financial squabbling with India-based Vodafone Idea Ltd., which recently sold off $2.2 billion worth of shares ahead of a debt raising plan worth an estimated $3 billion.In order to provide Vodafone’s clients with generative artificial intelligence (AI) services, the business recently signed into a 10-year strategic relationship with Microsoft, as reported by Cointelegraph.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella seized the chance to promote the disruptive qualities of his company’s AI capabilities when he announced the acquisition, saying that the “new generation of AI will unlock massive new opportunities for every organization and every industry around the world.”This is not the first time a business has attempted to integrate blockchain hardware with mobile technology.The goal of American startup VaultTel was to develop a physical wallet that could fit into the SIM slot of a smartphone back in 2019.