This Guy Just Implanted a Payments Chip in His Hand, Literally [VIDEO]

Your next wallet may be your hand.

Unless you’ve been on a Buzzfeed-less streak in the past few days, you’ve probably heard of a Buzzfeed news reporter’s mission to spend a month without a wallet — a journey that led him to implant an NFC-enabled chip inside his own hand.

Tech reporter Charlie Warzel first took up the experiment to see whether the mobile payments world has evolved enough to allow an average consumer in the U.S. to forever ditch cash, checks, physical credit or debit cards. (No, was the answer, but read the full story here). Warzel ends up in Stockholm “to see out the extreme conclusion of a monthlong experiment,” he writes.

As extreme as it sounds, getting a chip implant — or what some call biohacking — is not new. (In fact, a full Injection Kit is now on sale here … not that you should be purchasing one.) The fascinating piece, however, is getting a Venmo engineer to program that chip to pay for dinner with your hand — and that’s exactly what Warzel did. This may represent a whole new level of journalistic sacrifice.

So, will we all soon be carrying Venmo-enabled NFC chips in our bodies? Probably not, but that’s not the point: Mobile payments and mobile wallets have been on the rise in the past few years, but a completely walletless future seems as near as NFC chip implants.