EthOS, a native operating system that connects with the Ethereum blockchain, has released a significant new version. According to Markus Haas, co-founder of EthereumPhone, ethOS 2.1 has “a System Wallet secure enclave, a mint app, a light node indicator, and easier chain switching.”
This is a clone of the popular Android fork LineageOS, which makes ethOS open source and available on GitHub. You’ll need an OEM Unlocked Google Pixel 3, 3XL, or 5a to install it, with this serving as a bridge to the team’s intentions to develop a full-fledged hardware device named the Ethereum Phone (Phone).
The operating system, as you’d expect, has a native eth wallet and some blockchain capabilities like insta NFT minting a picture you take with your phone. It connects with the blockchain roughly the same way as most wallets do, through a light node which instead of downloading every block, downloads only the block headers containing a summary of the information within the blocks.
These used to be called SPV wallets, and they still are in Bitcoin, which stands for Simplified Payment Verification. They have some theoretical problems, but for more than a decade now they have run without problems in practice. It integrates with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) natively as well, something that then brings us to the actual potential unique ‘selling point’.
The ENS can be thought of as a sort of decentralized DNS that allows one to register a name and receive an Ethereum address at any time without trusting anyone else with it—in fact, they can even sell their own names on it if they want!
The Extensible Message Transport Protocol (XMTP), which touts itself as an open protocol, network, and standard for secure, private web3 messaging, is integrated into this operating system. “Because the XMTP network persists messages, and those messages are tied to web3 identities rather than a specific client app,” the project notes, “each web3 identity has an interoperable inbox that it can access using any client app built with XMTP.”
So, like the defi dapps, this is an open chat app, but it does not use a blockchain or the Ethereum Virtual Machine. (EVM). It does, however, contain nodes. “The nodes provide a messaging API through which client apps written with the XMTP client SDK can communicate with the XMTP network.”
One of the most exciting things about [product] is that it’s a fully decentralized, open-source operating system for your blockchain. It’s an operating system that can run on any device, from a phone to a server. You don’t need special hardware to use it—just download the app and go! But you do need to connect your ENS to XMTP through ethEOS and… party on?
That’s right: making this whole infrastructure from start to finish, well once the hardware phone is built, all crypto native as much as it can be. So giving a vivid indication of the expansion of this space in seemingly unrelated areas, though crypto is making some significant advances even in what might look like further out areas.
One such area is data replication, like database replication for say MySQL but other sorts too with a full-on 200 page long dissertation discussing just how crypto is contributing to that space and in turn how new research can contribute to crypto.
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