Snippings

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The wand is the first edition of a new form factor, Cash APP tags – NFC-enabled, physical payment accessories that let customers pay without having to reach for their phone or card.

From: Cash App launches contactless wand.

The Cash App people probably thought this was a new idea, but I have longer memory than they do.

A couple of decades ago, Transport for London (TfL) were complaining about the “craze” for get the chip and antenna out of an Oyster card and then attaching it to various objects. I can remember many such examples at that time, from the guy who put his into a magic wand to the people who gued the card and antenna to a £5 note so it looked as if they were tapping banknotes to ride on the bus. A ticket inspector was reported as saying “It’s the latest thing. We’re seeing more and more of it”.

(It was quite easy to do. If you leave the card overnight in a bowl of nail polish remover, the plastic will dissolve and leave behind the chip and antenna.)

Of course, this is the sort of thing that Digiseq have been doing for years (but it in a more sophisticated way, because they personalise the chip remotely through their iPhone/Android apps). My wife uses her key ring as a John Lewis Mastercard, whereas I prefer play around more. Here’s an example of me demonstrating pay-by-bank with a bank made from Lego.

It’s actually an interesting growth sector. Wearable payments were an $80 billion market last and are projected to reach close to $200 billion by 2030 (a CAGR of more than 18%). The main payments wearables right now are smartwatches, fitness trackers, payment wristbands, rings (the fastest growing sector) an dothers. Analysts seem to think the growth is becaud of an increasing consumer preference for cashless transactions, the expansion of contactless payment infrastructure and improved payment network acceptance amongst other factors.

 

Got it, let’s stay strictly with passive NFC devices (no on‑device logic, just token+antenna) like rings, bands, tags.

## Overall wearable payments vs passive devices

– Broad wearable payment forecasts (all devices, active and passive) expect the market to grow from about 47 billion USD in 2023 to roughly 393 billion USD by 2033, at around 23–24% CAGR. [alliedmarketresearch](https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/press-release/wearable-payment-market.html)
– Those totals are dominated by smartwatches and “smart” bands; passive form factors (simple NFC wristbands, cards, rings without displays/OS) are explicitly described as a niche within that. [abiresearch](https://www.abiresearch.com/news-resources/chart-data/passive-payment-wearable-revenue-form-factor)

So the headline numbers you see in big wearables reports overstate things if you care only about passive objects.

## Passive payment wearables specifically

ABI and similar analysts carve out **passive payment wearables** (no battery/OS, typically closed‑loop or scheme‑tokenised):

– One ABI dataset notes that passive payment wearables are still a *niche* given the dominance of cards and phone wallets, and focuses on wrist‑ and ring‑worn devices. [abiresearch](https://www.abiresearch.com/news-resources/chart-data/passive-payment-wearable-revenue-form-factor)
– For **closed‑loop passive payment wearables** (events, transit, hospitality, stadiums, resort wristbands, cruise bands, etc.), shipments are forecast to remain under 1 million devices in 2025 and to reach about **1.37 million units by 2030**. [abiresearch](https://www.abiresearch.com/news-resources/chart-data/closed-loop-passive-payment-wearable-device-shipments-outlook)
– In that closed‑loop slice, wristbands dominate due to fit/comfort and event use cases; rings are constrained by sizing/standardisation and the need for more durable materials. [abiresearch](https://www.abiresearch.com/news-resources/chart-data/closed-loop-passive-payment-wearable-device-shipments-outlook)

That’s a tiny volume compared with card issuance, but in closed‑loop ecosystems these bands and rings capture a very high share of transactions per user over the device life.

## Payment rings as a market

When analysts look at **contactless payment rings**, they usually mix passive and semi‑active devices, but the economics are still heavily “passive‑style” (simple NFC + token):

– One “contactless payment ring” forecast values the ring segment at about 55 billion USD in 2026, growing to about 192 billion USD by 2033, with a ~19–20% CAGR, framing them as part of the broader contactless wearable category. [coherentmarketinsights](https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/industry-reports/contactless-payment-ring-market)
– Smart‑ring market reports (all use cases) put the overall ring category in the low‑hundreds‑of‑millions USD mid‑2020s, heading into the low‑billions by early‑2030s (CAGRs around 20–25%), and repeatedly call out payments as one of the fastest‑growing applications. [grandviewresearch](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/smart-rings-market-report)

Most of these ring numbers assume the primary function is exactly what you describe: passive NFC “tap to pay”, sometimes combined with fitness or access control, but not running rich agents on the device.

## How to read these forecasts if you care about passive rings

Putting it together:

– Passive rings and wristbands are forecast to stay **niche in volume terms** (single‑digit millions of units per year globally for closed‑loop only), but
– They sit inside a **fast‑growing revenue space** where overall wearable payments are on a 20–30% CAGR trajectory, and
– Within that, **rings are consistently tagged as the fastest‑growing form‑factor segment**, off a small base, because of “always‑on” convenience and the ability to integrate with schemes’ existing tokenisation rails. [grandviewresearch](https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/smart-rings-market-report)

For the kind of work you do: these numbers imply more of a **high‑margin niche accessory** story than a mass‑replacement of cards/phones, at least through 2030.

What would you like to dig into next: scheme/business‑model assumptions behind those ring revenues, or technical constraints (tokenisation, lifecycle, KYC) that might cap passive ring adoption?

I was genuinely flattered to be listed in the top 10 thought leaders in European financial services. To be highlighted in such a list is of course a matter for pride, but in this case I was particularly pleased to make the cut given the criteria. There were: Making a substantive contribution to the field of financial services leadership; Active engagement through published content or public advocacy.; and Including  voices the reader may not yet have encountered alongside more familiar names.

As you can imagine, I it feels good to see these different aspects of my work recognised.

In their recent report on the future of digital assets, Boston Consulting Group quite rightly say that such assets should be treated as a “strategic infrastructure transition” for banks rather than as a niche innovation
theme, going on to observe that the task of bank leaders is not to predict the winning rail, but to keep the bank in control as assets (including money) become programmable.

 

In our recent paper on 

There are, of course, new risks associated with the new infrastructure. At a time when multimillion dollar hacks of defi platforms are almost daily news, banks are right to be cautious.

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None of this comes without tradeoffs.

Smart contract bugs are a real attack surface. Programmability that enables legitimate logic can also enable exploits. The history of DeFi is littered with protocols that had sound economic logic but nuanced vulnerabilities that left them vulnerable to exploits. Audits help but don’t eliminate risk.

There’s also the oracle problem: contracts that depend on real-world conditions need reliable data feeds, and those feeds are themselves attack vectors. (Just look at what happened recently with the Polymarket Paris weather bet.) Conditional programmability is only as trustworthy as the data it conditions on.

And for most mainstream use cases, the UX overhead and difficulty of interacting with smart contracts still exceeds the benefits. Programmable stablecoins are powerful in the hands of developers building on top of them — but remain relatively inaccessible to non-native users.

From: Why banks can’t retrofit their way to programmable money — The Financial Revolutionist.

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Criminals who steal others’ electronic IDs can manipulate information in public registers, apply for loans, transfer money, set up companies, and receive public benefits on false grounds. This leads to major losses for individuals, companies, and the public sector.

From: Digital Identity Management in Norway is a Success but also a Disaster – Research News.

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Five centuries ago, Pope Gregory XIV waged war on prediction markets. The reason? Back then merchants and priests were betting on papal elections, sparking tales of insider trading. So in 1591 the Pope excommunicated these gamblers. You could see this as one of the first attacks on market manipulation in history.

From: Don’t bet on Trump reining in the prediction markets.

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None of this comes without tradeoffs.

Smart contract bugs are a real attack surface. Programmability that enables legitimate logic can also enable exploits. The history of DeFi is littered with protocols that had sound economic logic but nuanced vulnerabilities that left them vulnerable to exploits. Audits help but don’t eliminate risk.

There’s also the oracle problem: contracts that depend on real-world conditions need reliable data feeds, and those feeds are themselves attack vectors. (Just look at what happened recently with the Polymarket Paris weather bet.) Conditional programmability is only as trustworthy as the data it conditions on.

And for most mainstream use cases, the UX overhead and difficulty of interacting with smart contracts still exceeds the benefits. Programmable stablecoins are powerful in the hands of developers building on top of them — but remain relatively inaccessible to non-native users.

From: Why banks can’t retrofit their way to programmable money — The Financial Revolutionist.

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4. Fees are unpredictable and can vary widely – for example, Solana is known for low fees but in just three USDT payments in my test they varied from 0.001% to 0.43% of a $40 payment. Such large and unpredictable swings make it difficult to develop commercial stablecoin propositions for retail and consumer payments at scale.

5. It is unclear from a user perspective why there are so many blockchains on which USDT and USDC are issued and transacted and why a user would choose one blockchain over another – in the small sample of blockchains I used in my tests, there is no obvious correlation between fees, confirmation times and share of issuance of the different blockchains (there is also the question of why a user would choose USDT over USDC and vice versa or any of the other 150+ USD stablecoins but that is a question for a separate article).

Overall, it is the blockchain used that determines the speed and cost of a stablecoin payment, rather than the stablecoin itself

From: (12) Blockchain Reaction – by Jeremy Light – Agenda: Payments.

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Meanwhile, in a developed country…

Berlin here: Today, a pharmacy generated an invoice on-screen and I scanned their QR code and sent the money via instant payment from my bank account because their card payments were down…. veeery interesting experience, but it worked. Felt a little smug for suggesting the solution – I don’t carry EUR 250 with me in cash… why would I?!

From: It just keeps happening… Seems cash will remain the back up until we can get digital payments that are reliable. ATM was down as well. Lucky there’s a Post Office. John Howells Nick Quin David… | Faith Reynolds | 13 comments.

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I have long argued that giving non-banks risk-free (ie, pre-funded) access to central bank settlement accounts would be good for competition and therefore good for consumers and businesses. This is one area where the Bank of England did come down on the side of innovation. Their “omnibus” account was introduced in 2021 to spur innovation and competition in payments. As Huw van Steenis, who was an advisor to the former Governor Mark Carney, said at the time “this is what to watch, not the Bahamas’ sand dollar”.

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The biggest immediate opportunity is the ability to clear payments directly over Fedwire Funds, FedNow, and NSS without using a commercial bank sponsor. In my view, this is a major structural shift, but the Fed is imposing a heavy liquidity penalty to protect its own balance sheet.

THE PRE-FUNDING BOTTLENECK
If you are a FinTech, the Fed is not going to extend you a dime of credit. Under the proposed rules, Payment Account holders are ineligible for discount window borrowing and are strictly prohibited from incurring daylight overdrafts. The Fed will use real-time monitoring to automatically reject any transaction that exceeds your account balance. We all know how investors just love having “regulatory capital” just sit around for clearing and settlement. Normally Fintech’s are cash lean, even neobanks fit this characterization. Winners here? Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Walmart, Target, yes I mean that scale.

From: Fedwire for Fintechs – Opportunities | Noyes Payments Blog.

 

Now, one of the reasons as to why I think this is such a big deal is that it begins the separation of payments from credit.

Polymarket is enticing users to provide identifying information by offering them faster trading speeds. Earlier this month, it rolled out an online portal where individual customers can submit information including passports, licenses and proof of residence. Submitting the information isn’t mandatory. But customers who complete the forms can access Polymarket’s U.K.-based server, which offers the fastest trading speeds, giving them an advantage of milliseconds over other users. Those milliseconds make a difference for the key subset of their customers who drive significant levels of high-speed, automated trading volume. A difference of milliseconds can make or break some trading strategies.

It’s almost as if identity is the new… well, you know.