Hyprkey’s Mobile Wallet Uses Fingerprints To Authorise Payments

Mobile shoppers may soon be able to pay for their purchases using just a fingerprint thanks to a new and supposedly fraud-proof payments solution.

Hyprkey, which says its authentication process is “almost unhackable”, has opened up pre-order for its HYPR-3 Android mobile wallet, which integrates biometric data from a user’s fingerprint to act as security clearance for any payments conducted by a mobile device.

Thanks to an accompanying app, the system is able to support all major credit and debit cards, and will even be able to process Bitcoin. Hyprkey says the process will also work with any existing app which integrates with its API for authentication.

Costing $20 (£14), the company hopes to ship the HYPR-3 by June.

Secure

The wallet consists of a 3.2mm thick ‘bio-sticker’, which attaches to the back of a mobile device, alongside a supporting app which is able to manage a user’s cards and accounts.

The sticker (pictured below) carries over a year of battery life and communicates via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and NFC technology. It is easily attached and removed and can secure multiple devices.

Users simply scan their debit or credit card to add it to their wallet, with the card number biometrically secured and tokenised. Payment is completed when the user has their fingerprint over the sticker, with the payment being processed in the cloud.

Hyprkey is also planning to launch a debit-to-Bitcoin conversion gateway upon launch in June, which means customers won’t need to own any of the cryptocurrency to be able to spend it, with payment taken instead from their linked debit or credit account.

“Biometrically securing credit cards is cool, but that was the easy part,” said HYPR’s CEO George Avetisov. “We’re aiming to provide the biometric tokenisation protocol to secure all digital currencies and third-party wallets.”

“Consumers should be able to access irreversible digital currency without having to worry about fraud, and we believe the HYPR-3 logic is the appropriate method of doing so.”

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