Hitachi Tests A New Fingerprint-Payment Technology Based On Blockchain

The Japanese tech conglomerate Hitachi has been working with the telecommunication giant KDDI and apparently testing a new blockchain-based system that will allow it to develop a technology that will settle retail payments that are validated through the customers’ fingerprints.

As one press release on Wednesday noted, a group of staff from both Hitachi and KDDI have been experimenting a coupon settlement system which is deployed in a KDDI store in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, as well as a smaller donut shop.

The technology that is built by Hitachi and based on the Hyperledger Fabric platform, will integrate with Hitachi’s biometric verification and KDDI’s existing coupon system. As such, it will seek to settle shoppers’ coupon transactions over the network using only their fingerprints as the main validators.

Hitachi went on to explain why this technology is important, noting that shoppers need to register their coupon credits in a better way. The credits will be encrypted into biometric information – and then encoded into a string of encrypted data and stored on the blockchain.

Therefore, shoppers will be able to verify their identity with a fingerprint-reading device that will broadcast the request to the network that a transaction is settled. The company (Hitachi) said that the end goal is to make blockchain assistance an important part of our lives and that users can keep their coupon usage information accurate within the network simultaneously.

The company said:

“As a result, users can authenticate themselves by holding the finger on the authentication infrastructure, so it is not necessary to present a coupon at the store, and the coupon can be used even without a smartphone.”

Meanwhile, this is the latest pilot test taken by Hitachi and aiming at the blockchain technology. Last yet, the company announced another blockchain-based platform that will help supply chain businesses to manage their orders and invoices on an immutable ledger.