Sei has announced a strategic partnership with Xiaomi, the world's third-largest smartphone manufacturer, marking the largest on-chain user onboarding in crypto history. This partnership will see the Sei mobile app pre-installed on new Xiaomi devices worldwide, including stablecoin payment functionality. The industry is evaluating this as a significant market turning point, as it's extremely rare for a blockchain network to be integrated into a global hardware ecosystem by default.
Xiaomi is a manufacturer with 680 million global smartphone users and annual shipments of over 170 million units. Having the Say app pre-installed on this device ecosystem allows blockchain services to connect with a massive user base without requiring initial installation or training. This collaboration is particularly significant as it marks the first time on-chain payments have been directly integrated into the smartphone operating experience.
Beyond simple wallet functionality, the Say app is designed to support real-time, stablecoin-based on-chain payments across the entire Xiaomi ecosystem. Users can make on-chain payments directly from their smartphones, and the same transactions can also be made at over 20,000 Xiaomi retail stores worldwide. This represents a practical attempt to bridge the "gap between real-life payments and on-chain," a point repeatedly raised by the crypto industry, and is attracting attention as the first large-scale model for transitioning everyday payments to on-chain.
The industry believes this collaboration offers scalability dozens of times greater than existing strategies like Solana's Saga smartphone or Base's app distribution strategy. This is because, rather than simply supplying devices, the blockchain app is built into the manufacturing process. This provides Say with unparalleled accessibility and onboarding speed compared to all existing crypto platforms, laying the foundation for rapid expansion of its global Web3 user base.
This partnership represents the first mega-scale attempt to integrate on-chain payments into the essential consumer good of smartphones, setting a new standard for crypto adoption. It remains to be seen whether the combination of smartphone manufacturers and blockchain networks will become a new market standard and whether the real-life payments market will be reorganized around on-chain technology.
