Snyder explained:“This is why smartphones have an edge over laptops and desktops for cryptocurrency wallets: without the benefits of the hardware-based TEE, the keys are more vulnerable. There is a significant caveat: a naïve wallet developer might choose to simply store the keys on the normal internal storage of the phone, in which case there’s little additional protection from using the smartphone platform. Or the wallet itself might be malware, in which case all bets are off. But with the right wallet leveraging the benefits of smartphone TEE, there’s no place safer to store your money.”
So how does samsung have the advantage, the right wallet can be installed on any smartphone?
Did you know (TEE) ? OR The Trusted Execution Environment is a secure area of the main processor of a smart phone (or any connected device including tablets, set-top boxes and televisions). It guarantees code and data loaded inside to be protected with respect to confidentiality and integrity. The TEE as an isolated execution environment is providing security features such as isolated execution, integrity of Trusted Applications along with confidentiality of their assets. In general terms, the TEE offers an execution space that provides a higher level of security than a rich mobile operating system (mobile OS) and more functionality than a 'secure element' (SE)
Samsung competitor HTC is developing a smartphone that it is billing as the world’s “first native blockchain phone.”
In December 2016, a research team at the prestigious Cornell University led by professor Emin Gun Sirer first teased the idea of scaling bitcoin with secure hardware, using TEEs. The Cornell research team went further than using the native TEE environment in smartphones, and built a technology called Teechan on top of TEEs present in the CPUs and Software Guard Extensions of Intel. Since TEEs exist independent of whichever device it operates within, and it can process transactions off-chain that are then batched into larger transactions for on-chain settlement, scaling solutions based on these trusted environments have seen significant progress by processing more than 2,480 transactions per second.