Xiaomi and the famous blockchain Be they have reached an agreement that will bring a pre-installed cryptocurrency wallet on new smartphones sold in Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa. No downloads, no complex setup: cryptocurrencies will arrive ready to use. Here's everything we know thanks to the newly signed partnership.
Cryptocurrency on Xiaomi smartphones: what's new in Europe and beyond
The meaning of the operation is all in the numbers. Xiaomi is the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world with 168 million devices sold in 2024 and a dominant presence in markets such as Greece (36,9% share) and India (24,2%). Integrating a crypto service directly in the system It means reaching users who probably would never have downloaded a dedicated app.
Access will be via Google or Xiaomi ID, eliminating the most difficult step for beginners: the management of seed phrases, i.e. those sequences of words that act as a recovery key and which have always represented a technical obstacle. safety will be guaranteed by multi-party computation, a system that fragments control of cryptographic keys among multiple parties, making any unauthorized access much more difficult.
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Sei, for its part, brings with it an infrastructure capable of ffinalize transactions in less than 400 milliseconds. A necessary speed if the goal is to manage daily payments: among other things, in Xiaomi physical stores it will be possible to use stablecoin (a type of cryptocurrency that aims to maintain a stable value against a specific asset) without the waiting times typical of other blockchains.
The strategy reverses the industry's traditional approach. Instead of encouraging people to search for crypto tools, the wallet will appear among the system apps like any other native service. Those already using the Xiaomi ecosystem may find themselves exploring peer-to-peer payment functions or decentralized applications simply because they are there, just a tap away.
It remains to be seen whether familiarity with Xiaomi will be enough to overcome the mistrust that still surrounds cryptocurrencies. But bringing these tools into the same category as weather apps or calculators is a concrete way to normalize them, and perhaps the first step toward stopping them from feeling like tech for insiders.
