Sei on your phone: How Xiaomi could change crypto payments market

All news

Editors' Picks

Crypto News

Financial News

Market Voices

Billionaires

Companies

Broker News

Regulators News

Eugene Komchuk

12.12.2025

Sei on your phone: How Xiaomi could change crypto payments market — How the Xiaomi–Sei partnership could play out

Xiaomi is set to add a crypto wallet based on the Sei blockchain to millions of its smartphones. Users will gain simplified access to crypto payments, dApps, and stablecoins. But will Sei become infrastructure for everyday payments — or is this just the first step toward a much larger market transformation?

Xiaomi’s crypto move

Sei Labs has reached an agreement with smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi to pre-install a new crypto wallet and a crypto discovery app on devices sold outside China and the United States. The rollout will start in Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa — regions where Xiaomi has a large user base and where mobile payments are already part of everyday life.

Loading...

The tweet was deleted by the author.

But we saved everything 🙂.

The idea behind the product is to make entering crypto as simple as possible: users can log in via Google ID or Xiaomi ID, without separate registration, and use a wallet with enhanced security. The app is designed around basic, practical use cases — access to popular crypto applications, peer-to-peer transfers, and payments to merchants.

At the same time, Sei is launching a $5 million program to support mobile projects that bring blockchain features into everyday apps. The plans go even further: the companies want to introduce stablecoin payments (such as USDC) across Xiaomi’s retail and online channels, allowing customers to pay for devices — including smartphones and electric vehicles — with crypto. The first pilots are planned for Hong Kong and the EU and are expected to launch by mid-2026.

The secret behind Sei’s success

Before answering why Xiaomi chose Sei, it’s worth understanding what kind of project it is. Sei Network is a layer-1 blockchain — a standalone network with its own rules, similar to Ethereum or Solana. Built on the Cosmos tech stack, it was designed from the ground up for applications where speed and low fees matter most, such as trading platforms and high-activity services. In simple terms, Sei aims to be “fast rails” for Web3 applications, so transfers and transactions don’t turn into long waits with high costs.

One of Sei’s key features is that parts of the trading infrastructure are built directly into the network. The team emphasizes parallel transaction processing, faster order matching, and protection against certain types of manipulation. On paper, this translates into very high performance — up to 20,000 transactions per second — which is why Sei positions itself as one of the fastest blockchains on the market.

The mainnet launched in August 2023, making the project relatively young. Its rapid rise is largely driven by a mix of technology and capital: Sei Labs has raised tens of millions of dollars in venture funding and announced a $120 million ecosystem fund to support application growth and liquidity. This quickly attracted market attention — in March, World Liberty Financial spent $100,000 to buy SEI tokens, and in August, MetaMask added support for Sei, opening the network to the wallet’s massive user base.

Why Xiaomi needs crypto

This naturally raises the question: why did Xiaomi decide to enter the crypto space at all? The answer is straightforward — interest in digital assets has been growing rapidly in recent years, and a company of Xiaomi’s scale can’t ignore a global trend like that.

For a smartphone manufacturer, this is also a clear signal: if part of the audience already stores crypto, sends money, and pays online using digital assets, it makes sense to integrate these functions directly into the device and make them as simple as possible. In this model, blockchain is not a buzzword but another layer of financial services within Xiaomi’s broader ecosystem.

Xiaomi is not alone in moving in this direction. Samsung has been developing built-in blockchain features in its Galaxy smartphones for years, including its own crypto wallet and direct access to Web3 services. There have also been more niche experiments, such as the HTC Exodus — a smartphone focused on crypto wallets and digital asset management. A separate category includes dedicated Web3 devices like Solana Mobile smartphones, built specifically around decentralized application ecosystems.

What this means for the market

If Xiaomi follows through and delivers true “one-click” crypto payments, the market could see a rare shift for the crypto industry: the crypto wallet would stop being a separate tool for enthusiasts and instead become a standard smartphone feature. Pre-installation removes one of the biggest entry barriers, while a focus on stablecoins makes the use case easier to understand — paying with “digital dollars” feels safer and more familiar than using volatile assets.

That said, much depends on execution: how smooth the user experience will be, how security and regulatory compliance are handled across different regions, and whether merchants and users see real value rather than another tech checkbox. If pilots in the EU and Hong Kong succeed, Sei could become everyday payment infrastructure within Xiaomi’s ecosystem — and at that point, the story would be less about crypto hype and more about a new normal in mobile finance.

This material may contain third-party opinions, none of the data and information on this webpage constitutes investment advice according to our Disclaimer. While we adhere to strict Editorial Integrity, this post may contain references to products from our partners.