Charles Hoskinson recently shared a somewhat mysterious video to his Twitter account. In it, Hoskinson is seen lightly tapping a white card against the back of a Samsung Galaxy S9+, only to bring up a Cardano wallet within the Tangem app. Moreover, the video was accompanied by the short caption ”Aaah Yeah”.



Hoskinson has previously teased working with Tangem on a physical Cardano wallet



This seems to indicate that Hoskinson, who is best known as the CEO of IOHK and one of the co-founders of Ethereum, is about to launch an NFC-enabled card-shaped Cardano wallet in cooperation with Tangem.



This is not entirely unexpected, however. Back in November of 2018, Hoskinson showcased an NFC-enabled card from Tangem during an impromptu AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on YouTube.



Specifically, Tangem is a Swiss manufacturer of so-called ”smart banknotes” which take the form of traditional bank cards. Tangem’s cards, however, allow for off-chain physical transactions and are designed to work in conjunction with NFC-enabled smartphones.



In his November AMA, Hoskinson showed how users would only need to tap the back of their NFC-enabled smartphone to bring up an application, from which users would be able to spend their cryptocurrency.



At the time, Hoskinson said that he was negotiating with Tangem in order to develop similar cards for Cardano. Moreover, Hoskinson noted that the main advantage with these cards was the low cost of deployment, as they only cost around one US dollar per card to manufacture.



These cards could potentially be very cheap to manufacture and deploy



Although it is unclear whether or not Hoskinson’s plans have changed or not, his November AMA saw him describe a potential multi-sig system comprised of two separate Cardano cards issued to users.



Furthermore, one of these cards would act as a recovery card, whilst the other card would be a dedicated spending wallet. As such, the spending card would be equipped with a PIN code that users would be able to program.



Hoskinson went on to explain how this would boost security:



”So when you want to spend, you’d have to enter the PIN code, and if you ever lose your spending wallet you can go to your recovery variant and drain the wallet to a safe place.”



Moreover, Hoskinson stressed the advantages of the low cost associated with such NFC cards. Although not stated outright, the low manufacturing cost could potentially allow for these NFC wallets to be deployed at a competitive price all around the world.



For example, developing nations could benefit immensely from such easy-to-use NFC wallets – especially seeing as NFC-enabled smartphones have become increasingly commonplace during the last few years. As a result, this could also significantly increase cryptocurrency adoption.



Hoskinson will no doubt reveal more details regarding this is the coming days or weeks. Nevertheless, these cards’ immense potential for boosting cryptocurrency adoption is undeniably intriguing.

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