SmartMetric boasts world’s first biometric bitcoin card

SmartMetric has announced that it has developed and will soon launch the SmartMetric Biometric Bitcoin Card.

“SmartMetric’s bitcoin card can significantly accelerate the growth and rate of adoption for bitcoins as the new global currency,” SmartMetric President and CEO Chaya Hendrick said. “By applying our patented biometric technologies to a bitcoin payment card, we offer the world’s first fingerprint-secured method to safely store and use bitcoins.”

Acording to the company, the SmartMetric Biometric Bitcoin Card uses the company’s patented fingerprint technology, located on the card itself.

The card is capable of peer-to-peer transactiosn and card-to-card direct bitcoin sending, as well as standard payment transactions.

Bitcoins are becoming more widely used around the world, driven by government non-intervention and merchant and consumer demand.

SmartMetric recently announced that its fingerprint-activated payments card (non-bitcoin) will be available for quantity sales in the first quarter of 2014. This card is designed to work with EMV chips and relies on a positive match of a user’s fingerprint stored on the card itself.

SmartMetric has long been planning the North American launch for this card but recently took a big blow in court, after a judge ruled that its long-standing patent lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard was not valid. SmartMetric’s complaint claimed MasterCard and Visa infringed its patent for a system to automatically connect to a network.

As Bloomberg reports, the judge ruled that neither Visa nor MasterCard infringed on SmartMetric’s patents, saying “the parties here are comparing apples and oranges.”

 

 

Article Topics

biometric payments  |  bitcoin  |  fingerprint  |  smart card  |  SmartMetric