Coin

» see onlycoin.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

coin never reached turkey at a meaningful layer. it was a us payment-rail-coded product, the card swiped at us point-of-sale terminals and assumed a us bank issuing the cards you were trying to consolidate. by 2013 i was 29 and working in computer vision in ankara. the magstripe slot at point of sale terminals had already been deprecated, garanti and akbank ran chip cards by default. coin solved a problem the turkish wallet did not really have.

kanishk parashar founded coin in san francisco around 2012, came out of paypal. the device was a small piece of bluetooth-connected plastic the size of a credit card, with a dynamic magstripe that could be reflashed on the fly to mimic any one of eight stored cards. you paired it with a phone, kept the originals at home, swiped the coin at checkout like a normal card. the launch video on november 14 2013 was the kind of consumer-tech demo that everyone reposted that week, and the crowdfunding goal of $50,000 was hit in 40 minutes. honestly, by the end of the campaign they had pre-orders in the millions.

but anyway, coin raised about $15 million in a series a from redpoint and spark on the back of that response. shipping turned out to be the hard part. the first batch was supposed to ship summer 2014, slipped to spring 2015, the early units came back with read failures at many checkout terminals because the dynamic magstripe could not match the field strength of an embossed plastic card. for whatever reason, coin 2.0 in 2015 was the version that mostly worked.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

coin came in the same crowdfunding-flop class as pebble and jibo, a small piece of hardware whose demo video did better numbers than the shipping product. the version of the wallet that coin imagined was a 2010-era wallet, ten plastic credit cards plus a couple of loyalty cards. you could put them all on the coin and walk around with one card. the bet was that the us magstripe had a long enough tail to be worth wrapping in a bluetooth shell.

the bet looked plausible in 2013. it stopped looking plausible by 2015. emv chip cards became mandatory at us merchants in october 2015, the magstripe coin used was being phased out as the primary read path at the same time coin 2.0 was shipping. apple pay launched in october 2014, android pay in september 2015. the contactless tap-to-pay wallet that everyone now uses got built around the same window coin needed to scale.

~ the unraveling ~

the magstripe being deprecated was the obvious problem. the less obvious problem was that the dynamic magstripe in coin was not actually a magstripe, it was a small electromagnetic field generator that emulated the swipe. some pos readers picked it up cleanly, some did not. forum threads from 2015 fill up with users posting at gas stations and grocery stores asking which terminals their coin worked at this week. coin maintained a compatibility list, which is the kind of thing a product should not need.

coin pivoted in 2015 toward wearables, announcing a watch-band integration that would put the dynamic magstripe into a wristband. the wearable strategy was what fitbit eventually bought. by then coin was running out of cash, the consumer product had stalled at maybe a few hundred thousand units, the unit economics of building custom hardware for a category that was being absorbed by phones were already broken.

~ what it became ~

fitbit bought coin's assets on may 18 2016. it was an acqui-hire for the wearable payments team and a small set of patents, not a continuation of the consumer product. fitbit folded the team into what would later become fitbit pay, the nfc-based contactless system on the ionic and versa watches. the original coin card service shut down on february 28 2017. every card that had been shipped became a dead piece of plastic the next morning. coin maintained a small support page for a while explaining how to delete your account.

in 2026 fitbit itself sits inside google, fitbit pay was rolled into google wallet on the wearable side. the coin cards are tray-of-bricked-electronics-tier objects you sometimes see in retro tech subreddit threads. the more lasting effect was that the silicon valley bet on consolidating the us magstripe lost to the bet on bypassing it entirely. apple pay won the wallet, the magstripe coin was built around is no longer the read path most merchants use first.

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