Forget Apple Pay: this guy has made a way to pay with your hand

As Apple Pay and other mobile payments services grow, these guys from Sweden have taken it one step further and just made the first ever payment via the human body.

The world's first ever bio-payment was done with the xNT implant inside a man's hand and it has used the NFC chip to trade Bitcoins between two different accounts.

Patric Lanhed is the biohacker who used his implant to send money from one Bitcoin account to another by just using the top of his hand.

Lanhed told techradar, "We want to do something with the chip implant that actually mattered to people. This is a great way of using this kind of tech."

Handy payment solutions

"What we're really missing right now is the payment option – we think this could lead to something good."

Patric has founded a biohacking organisation called Bio Pay Dev with friends Hektor Wallin and Juanjo Tara. Based in Sweden, the team aim of to develop implant payment technology to help it into the mainstream.

Patric was implanted back in the spring, but Juanjo also had the implant on Monday this week after seeing the success Patric has had. Hector has plans to get his installed very soon.

Juanjo said, "It took ten seconds – I didn't feel any pain. I thought it'd be more painful. After a couple of days I had a swelling in my hand. I know it's there but I can't feel it, there's no pain or weird sensation."

Lanhed estimates there are now over 1,000 Swedish people who are implanted as opposed to 200 earlier in the year and the technology is growing faster than ever.

"Two years from now..."

On November 3, the Bio Pay Dev team attended a software conference in Malmö, Sweden called Oredev. All 1,500 attendees were offered the opportunity to get the implant for free.

Wallin said, "This type of technology needs to be adopted by the mainstream. Right now, people go "what are you crazy" because it's impossible for them to think they'd do it themselves.

"It will come to a point where they accept it. When we reach that point more and more people will get the tech."

Security is another big issue and it's understandable why some people would be worried about "getting their upgrade" when it involves inserting a new kind of technology into your body.

Tara assures us it's all fine though. "People think there are risks with this kind of tech but you can't read it from a few kilometers away.

"The fact is the chips are passive – they're not active, they're not sending out stuff. The important thing for people to understand is the data on the chip is secure."

Lanhed said, "Maybe two years from now we'll have the actual digital solution for payments on the market.

"It would be really cool to get a credit card or PayPal on board because that's more accessible than Bitcoin."

Biohack plan to make this technology open source as well so people can play around with it themselves and add in new features.

For now it's just the Bio Pay Dev team working on the tech. The first live bio-payment was successfully carried out at the Oredev conference in Malmö yesterday.

But there's still a lot of work to do before we'll be using this instead of a credit card, or even Apple Pay.

You can watch the video of the first-ever bio-payment down below.

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