On October 28, 2013, Dangerous Things launched an Indiegogo campaign for the xNT, a fully NFC-compliant RFID implant. The pitch was simple: an $8,000 funding goal, and a $99 pledge got a chip into your hand. My announcement post the next day ran two words of editorial: "Cyborgs unite!"
The word worth crowdfunding was "compliant." My original implants spoke older 125 kHz protocols and needed dedicated reader hardware; an NFC-compliant tag can be read and written by an ordinary NFC smartphone, no extra gear required. The finished xNT was built around NXP's NTAG216 chip in a 2x12 mm glass tag.
The campaign blew past its goal and raised over $30,000. Tech press reaction was fast and friendly: Hackaday ran an interview with me two days after launch, and The Guardian covered the xNT the same week. The xNT went on to become the first personal, publicly available NFC-compliant transponder marketed for implantation in humans, and the product that defined what Dangerous Things was for.