Securing access to both digital and physical points of entry, the Token ring can also be used to buy groceries, scan subway fares, unlock computers and even unlock keyless front doors and cars.
A $1.75 million-dollar investment from New York Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of Empire State Development, gave the young company a running start as it mapped out its first product’s development cycle and launch.
Token’s military-grade secure technology, explains CEO and co-founder Melanie Shapiro, is made possible by a proprietary combination of asymmetric cryptography and biometrics.
“It’s a challenge-response: whatever you’re trying to get into, it will ask, ‘is this you?’” she explains. “Token simply passes back a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ It doesn’t require any other information.”
The ring’s owner controls everything with a fingerprint scan each morning and simple gestures throughout the day. If the Token ring is taken off, only the owner's fingerprint will turn it back on.
The company’s most pressing goal, however, is not just to make people’s digital lives simpler and safer. The bigger problem, Shapiro says, is a fundamental flaw in the way personal identities are stored online.
“All we have is our identity, and the way we prove who we are right now is completely broken,” Shapiro says. “Identity is such a multi-faceted problem. It’s not just your medical report. It’s not just your passwords: it’s you and everything about you. It doesn’t belong on some massive server that makes us even more vulnerable. As the number of digital interactions we have increases exponentially every year, our risk of being attacked and corrupted along with hundreds of millions of others will only grow as well.”
Shapiro, inspired to act by her own frustration in managing multiple gateways to her digital identity, founded the company in 2017.
“It was a very personal pain point for me,” she says. “The more I had to carry around and also protect, from bank accounts and online networks to my building and apartment keys and even my car key, which was digital, the more I had to remember just to prove who I was. I’ve always felt, as an entrepreneur, if you don’t feel the pain of the problem you’re trying to solve yourself, it’s going to be difficult for you to understand your customer’s pain.”
Although she majored in fine arts as an undergraduate at RIT, Shapiro says the startup never set out to create a piece of jewelry.
“We set out to solve this problem. The ring came about because we knew that in order for a massive behavioral shift to work, the consumer’s daily routine has to feel as familiar as all the other habits that have become so ingrained, like pulling out a credit card or digging in your bag for keys – everything we do with our hands.
“We knew our solution would need to be somehow part of that habitual movement. Since there’s a fingerprint scanner on the inside, what better place to put a device than on your finger?”