The smartphone that earns you 250 euros a month

Minephone WX is the first smartphone created specifically to mine cryptocurrency. Users will be able to earn up to 250 euros per month

Foldable smartphones aren’t the strangest novelty seen at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: the global show dedicated to the mobile market also saw the first phone capable of mining cryptocurrency, which promises to earn you 250 euros per month by producing up to 2 Ethereum in thirty days. It’s called the Minephone WX and it’s being sold by Spanish virtual phone operator Wings Mobile through a strange contract.

How the phone that mines cryptocurrency works

The process used by the Wings Minephone WX to mine cryptocurrency is different from the one used by most PCs and workstations used by miners today. The Wings WX uses POD (Proof of Data) technology which has the potential to mine up to 1,000 Mega Hash per second, corresponding to the production of 2 Ethereum per month. Using the DDR (Doppler Data Rate) protocol through an Internet connection and depending on connection times, the virtual currency is deposited directly into the customer’s Ethereum wallet. To manage this, the phone purchaser must sign a Smart Contract with Wings Mobile, whereby they agree to provide between 100 MH/S and 1,000 MH/S of processing power. This contract, however, costs money: while the 100 MH/S “mining package” is free, the 1,000 MH/S one costs 13 Ethereum. That is, about 1,550 euros, to be paid in advance. On the other hand, the phone without any mining package costs 6,000 Bitwing, another cryptocurrency issued by Wings Mobile itself and which is currently not traded on virtual markets (so it has no official value). In any case, the Wings Minephone WX with 1,000 MH/S package costs 2,900 euros and will be sold in a limited edition of 40,000 units. With this model, the estimated profit from Wings Mobile amounts, even, to 10,440 euros over three years.

Wings Minephone WX: technical features

For 2.900 euros, in addition to the contract to mine Ethereum in the background, we take home a smartphone with MediaTek Helio P60 Octa Core processor (four A73 at 2 GHz and four A53 at 2 GHz), ARM Mali-G72 MP3 GPU at 800 MHz, 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal memory (of which 32 are reserved for the mining system) expandable up to 256 with microSD. The screen is  6.2 inches with FHD+ (1080×2246 pixels) resolution and 19:9 aspect ratio. The front cameras are two, Sony, 16 and 8 MP, as two are the rear cameras, Samsung, also 16 and 8 MP. The battery is 5,000 mAh lithium-ion in a semi-solid state.