Millions of people use credit cards everyday. This summer, the new “Coin” smart card will tie people to their cards even more. With a simple swipe, Coin’s “magic” scanner saves credit card information and allows the user to select any saved card by pressing a button.
“Give people the need for only one card while giving the peace of mind they deserve,” Coin’s creator Kanishk Parashar said.
Coin is a high-grade safe with a 128-bit encryption or an 256-bit encryption code. “It’s just as secure as the Federal Reserve,” Head Embedding Software Tech Gil DePaula said.
Coin is also capable of storing twelve cards at once, and alerts your phone via Bluetooth when you are far away from it. All purchases must be approved within five minutes of each transaction by entering a password specified by the user.
Credit card companies like American Express, Visa, Mastercard and Discover are amazed but enraged at the same time. Coin has a two year battery life, which will significantly limit the amount of plastic cards these companies produce for people each year. Coin has also patented the idea of a electronic smart card which will provide a problem for these companies for the next twenty-five years.
The makers of Coin are now bringing it to the public for pre-order for 55 dollars. Coin is aiming to sell about 90,000 units once pre-orders are available, bringing in more than five million dollars in sales.
Coin does have some drawbacks however, such as its fragility, getting water on the card, and how magnets will easily break the Coin. Its makers suggest buying the Coin protection plan for an additional twenty-five dollars. Users cannot view specific information that Coin has about one’s credit cards either, making it difficult to make online purchases with it.
Currently the Coin application can only be found on iOS. Coin plans to eventually release an application for Android smartphones, but for now, all their sales are going to be from iPhone users with iOS 7 and any iPhone that is model 4S or later.
Still, Coin has set the bar for potential competitors in the world of credit card-based smartphone devices and applications. In short, Coin is the future of how humans will make transactions, changing technology and lives as they are known today.