On March 7, 2024, I spent a day paying for things around Tokyo the way I prefer to pay for things: by putting my hand near the terminal. The video below is three and a half minutes of that. No wallet, no phone, just a payment implant and a series of contactless readers.
Getting to that day took years. When the Polish-British startup Walletmor set out to build a payment implant, founder Wojtek Paprota turned to me to help realize the concept, and I signed on as chief technology officer. I was honest with him about the odds at the time: "I cannot guarantee that it's going to succeed because I've never done something like this before."
The Walletmor implant was about 28 millimeters long, sold for 199 euros, and worked like the contactless card in your pocket: an NFC payment device under the skin. When Digital Trends covered it in May 2022, it was on the market in Europe, with hopes of expanding to the U.S. My time as Walletmor's CTO was a chapter rather than the whole book; by 2023 it sat on the "prior roles" line of my bio. The problem it attacked never stopped being mine.
Tokyo was the payoff demo. There was more road ahead on the payment implant problem, but that day the future worked: tap, beep, paid.