Token Launch

This is not the story of another cryptocurrency coin offering, but of a product that is using a tangible, age-old form factor to manage and secure our digital and analog identities. I am pleased to announce that Future\Perfect Ventures portfolio company Tokenize has launched its latest product: Token, a ring that allows users to make payments, use public transport, log into websites, and enter our homes, cars and offices without carrying around keys or credit cards. Using advanced biometric technology and sensor detection, the ring is disabled when the user takes it off and has a battery life of 14 days on one charge.

Over the past few years as I’ve invested in the thesis of rapid decentralization, I was on the lookout for a company that represented what I call the “post smartphone” world. In the future, we will be accessing services and products through more seamless means, rather than pulling out our wallets or smartphones to transact. While information is at our fingertips at an instant, our identities are still in silos managed by companies — ranging from Facebook to our banks to our insurance providers. I see a future world where we will all be able to manage our identities without intermediaries, and permission out what we want to.

When I met Melanie Shapiro in 2014 I loved her vision of utilizing biometrics with decentralized back-end technology to allow people to keep their data secure. We also talked about portable access to our identities. We had many conversations about the 1.5 billion people in the world, including refugees, who don’t have a form of government identity, excluding them from the formal economy. Future\Perfect Ventures led the company’s seed round of financing in early 2015 and have had the honor of working with Melanie and her team as they developed their product.

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