Could Crypto Mining Migrate to Smartphones?

It is believed that nearly four billion people across the world are actively using their smartphones at any given moment, with the figure is expected to reach six billion by 2020. These numbers indicate that smartphones are a very potent source of computing power for cryptocurrency mining or other blockchain project uses.

Additionally, data from last year showed that the computing power of all smartphones is estimated at 1,250 petaflops, or ten times as potent as the most advanced supercomputer. However, smartphone capacity is being underutilized, with only 10% actually used at any given time.

Anton Nikonorov, CTO of enterprise blockchain integration platform Enecuum, said in an interview for Cryptovest that if we consider the classical scheme of mining, smartphones get poor ratings on this count because they have insufficient memory to store the full version of the blockchain.

"The future is massive adoption to millions of users utilizing mobile phones, mobile operators, and organic growth. The future has been under the hood in key companies that care about speed, scalability, and security and making a world a better place for people globally," Nikonorov said.

He explained that smartphones overheat quickly because of the resource-consuming nature of cryptocurrency mining. It could even result in the phone breaking down or the battery deteriorating. Moreover, the display could be frozen and the keyboard fail because of the heavy use of the processor.

For smartphones to be effective tools for digital currency mining, existing algorithms must be improved to free the computing power and allow the devices to perform their intended purposes while functioning as a solution of cryptographic problems to let users mine tokens, Nikonorov explained.

He said Enecuum developers had found ways to make use of unutilized smartphone processor capacity for verification and validation of transactions, calculation of smart contracts, and decentralized data storage with shared secret technology.

Nikonorov added:

“We focus on mobile devices, which is a standard medium that any person on Earth has in his pocket. We want to become a de facto standard for mobile blockchain. Plus, we focus on scalability, security with multi consensus algorithm of POW, POA and POS and, of course, speed.”

At the Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, digital security company Avast warned that cybercriminals could exploit the vulnerabilities of smartphones, smart TVs, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to create an army of millions to mine cryptocurrencies.

Avast mobile business manager Gagan Singh noted at the time:

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"Until recently, cybercriminals were focused on spreading malware to turn PCs into crypto-mining machines, but now we also see an uptick in attacks targeting IoT devices and smartphones. According to current data from Shodan.io, a search engine for internet-connected things, 58,031 smart devices in Barcelona are vulnerable. If each of these devices was recruited to a botnet to mine Monero at Mobile World Congress, cybercriminals could earn the approximate equivalent of $3,600, or €3,000.”