New Partnership Enables Naked Cryptocurrency Payments

Singapore-based naked payments pioneer Touché has teamed up with a Luxembourg-based blockchain platform to offer a simplified means of in-store purchases using cryptocurrency.

The system is of course based on Touché’s biometric payments concept, which revolves around linking users’ fingerprints to their payment accounts to allow them to make purchases with a simple fingerprint scan — and no need for an actual payment card, or even a virtual card. That functionality has now been extended to cryptocurrency thanks to a collaboration with EDDITS. The company offers an Ethereum-based platform that assigns users a specified blockchain address that can facilitate digital payments; thus, EDDITS and Touché have together established a solution that lets an end user pay for something with Ether cryptocurrency, just by scanning a pair of fingerprints.

In a statement, Touché CEO and co-founder Sahba Saint-Claire asserted, “This payment method will simplify cryptocurrency transactions for payment providers by removing the need for them to manage user wallets while still maintaining security for customers since each payment will require cryptographic proof generated on the Point of Sale device at the touch of two fingers.”

Of course, there remains the question of infrastructure. The number of merchants that accept payments in cryptocurrency is currently a minority, and it may be that there are even fewer merchants who have fingerprint-scanning POS terminals. But that is changing, with Touché having announced a partnership earlier this year with Singaporean bank OCBC, which could add some major institutional backup to efforts to promote its technology in the country. What’s clear enough is that the technology is now available to support naked cryptocurrency payments, and now it’s just a matter of bringing it to market.

Sources: Finews.asia, e27

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October 11, 2018 – by Alex Perala