Singapore's Status Wants to Bring Ethereum to Every Mobile Device

"One way to think about Status is that it'll eventually serve as a sort of onramp or gateway so that everyday people can benefit from decentralized applications built on Ethereum, whilst simultaneously helping DApp developers to reach new users," said co-founder Jarrad Hope. Carl Bennetts, the other co-founder, described Status as providing "a clear path towards Ethereum user-adoption on a meaningful scale, while remaining flexible and general enough to cater to the wide range of DApp ideas we're yet to see conceived." He added: "We truly believe that Ethereum and blockchain technology has the potential to change fundamental aspects of how society functions, and if Status can play even a very small part of this transition it'd make us very happy."

The app lets users send encrypted messages, interact with smart contracts, and move digital currency across Ethereum's decentralized protocols. A feature called Discover uses hashtag-based search to help users find other Status users and DApps, share ideas, and conduct transactions. Status plans to add a Local P2P Exchange to its beta version, enabling users to locate other Status users in their area and trade conventional currencies for ETH and vice versa, taking a small fee on each transaction.

Messaging applications dominate how people use smartphones, a reality that shaped Status's choice of a messaging platform. Bennetts explored this landscape in an October 2016 blog post. In China, the world's largest smartphone market, users spend 36% of their time on messaging applications. Global Industry Analysts expects the mobile messaging market to reach 2.1 billion users by 2020, fueled by rising smartphone and tablet adoption, greater connectivity across age groups, and cheap mobile internet access. Research from Business Insider Intelligence shows that the four largest chat apps have commanded more users than the four largest social networks since 2015.

Chat applications have evolved from simple services exchanging messages, photos, videos, and GIFs into ecosystems with their own developers, apps, and APIs. These platforms have established messaging as a form factor, a paradigm, and a set of user expectations. Tencent's WeChat, the dominant messaging application in China with over 840 million monthly active users, illustrates this transformation. The app offers video calls, instant group messaging, news feeds, shopping, and gaming. WeChat Wallet, known as WeChat Pay, launched in 2013 and lets users link credit and debit cards, send money to contacts, and pay for goods online and in-store without leaving the app. By March 2016, the wallet had over 300 million users worldwide, and in April, Tencent invested RMB 100 million, or about $14.5 million, to accelerate expansion of its payments service.