Sei Partners With Xiaomi For Pre-Installed Mobile Stablecoin Payment App

Sei announced a partnership with Xiaomi on December 10 that will put a pre-installed crypto wallet and discovery app on every new Xiaomi smartphone sold outside mainland China and the United States. The app, built on Sei infrastructure, will use Google or Xiaomi IDs for sign-up and include multi-party computation security. It will let users send stablecoins peer-to-peer and, later, pay merchants.

According to the official blog post, the first markets will focus on Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa—regions where Xiaomi already has strong footing. The companies plan to roll out stablecoin payments through Mi Pay and at more than 20,000 Xiaomi retail stores, starting in Hong Kong and the European Union around Q2 2026.

“This collaboration with Xiaomi represents a watershed moment for blockchain adoption,” Sei Labs co-founder Jeff Feng said in the announcement. Fellow co-founder Jay Jog added that the goal is to make crypto something that “finds you” instead of the other way around.

Xiaomi shipped 168 million phones in 2024 and holds roughly 13 percent of the global smartphone market, putting the Sei app in front of tens of millions of new users each year without requiring a single download.

The deal also includes a $5 million Global Mobile Innovation Program to support developers building consumer-facing blockchain tools.

Sei and Xiaomi: ‘The Largest Hardware Distribution in Crypto History’

Strategic advisor and Sei Ambassador Tanaka called the integration “the largest hardware distribution in crypto history” in a post following Sei Network’s announcement, noting that no previous project has reached OS-level placement at this scale.

Other cryptocurrency projects have similar endeavors, but, as Tanaka said, hardly at that scale and seamless onboarding.

Klaytn worked with Samsung in 2019 on the Klaytn Phone, a variant of the Galaxy Note 10 that came with a preinstalled wallet and DApp store. However, this was a special edition sold only in South Korea, with no widespread rollout across Samsung’s global devices.

Aptos partnered with Jambo in 2024 for the JamboPhone, a $99 Android device preloaded with the Petra wallet and Web3 apps. It has aimed at emerging markets like Africa and Southeast Asia, available in over 40 countries, but Jambo isn’t a top-tier manufacturer like Xiaomi—it is more of a targeted crypto-focused product without massive annual shipment volumes.

Other cases, like SolanaSaga and Seeker phones or HTC’s Exodus, are custom blockchain devices with limited production and sales, not integrations into existing mass-market phones, despite attracting significant attention as when Solana’s Seeker phones started being distributed worldwide.

On a similar note, NEAR has a still ongoing use case with KAI-Ching, a shopping and cashback app developed by Cosmose AI and built on the NEAR Protocol. The KaiKai lock screen app—which integrates Kai-Ching for rewards and payments—is preinstalled by default on mobile devices from several Asian smartphone manufacturers, including OPPO and realme, but it also does not reach the same potential scale as Sei’s just-announced partnership with Xiaomi.

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