I have two NFC chip implants. One in each hand. I put the one in my left hand in myself, on a Saturday afternoon in January 2024, after spending two or three minutes holding the needle against my skin and slowly working out the exact spot. The one in my right hand I drove an hour out to Worcester for, paid a guy $150, and held still while he did the install in a tattoo and piercing studio.
Same technology, more or less. Two completely different installation paths. There's a reason for that, and the reason is also the reason one of them has a blue LED that lights up when I scan it and the other one doesn't.
The first implant: left hand, just in case
I'm right-handed. So when I ordered my first implant in January 2024 (a Dangerous Things NExT, which is a dual-chip module containing both a 125 kHz RFID transponder and a 13.56 MHz NTAG216 NFC chip), I knew it was going in my left hand. If something went wrong, if I hit a tendon, if the chip migrated weird, if I got an infection, I wanted my dominant hand to be the unaffected one.
The original plan was to find someone to install it for me. I called a tattoo and piercing place a friend recommended. They said no, it wasn't legal in Massachusetts for a body piercer to perform implant procedures. I called a guy in Worcester from the Dangerous Things partner list. Same answer. He told me to look at Connecticut or Rhode Island.
I'm not driving to a different state for this. So I watched a YouTube video of someone doing a self-install end to end, grabbed some alcohol wipes, and decided to do it myself. As I told a friend at the time:
I might end up doing it myself.
A few hours later:
I implanted a chip in my hand today. Do you want to see the video?
I filmed the whole thing on my phone. The injector that comes with the NExT kit is essentially a very large gauge hypodermic needle preloaded with the bioglass chip. The needle is wide. It is also, as I noted afterward in real time:
That was a very large gauge needle and not very sharp.
The xSIID went in. It hurt about as much as the first one. The LED took several days to be visible, because there's a lot of trapped blood at the install site that takes time to clear. By the second week, I could see the blue glow when I scanned my hand, and now, two years later, it's a solid clear blue every time.
What I actually do with them
People ask if you can pay for things with these. You can't, not really, not in the US. The implants don't have the secure element that contactless payment cards use. Anyone telling you otherwise is either using a workaround that expires or is in Europe.
Here's what mine actually do, on a normal Tuesday:
The NExT in my left hand is a clone of my office building access badge. I tap my left hand against the reader, the door unlocks. I haven't needed to carry a physical badge in two years.
The xSIID in my right hand is doing the kind of thing the Dangerous Things community calls a "fistbump login." I have a small USB device on my desk, a Dangerous Things KBR1. It's a 13.56 MHz reader that presents itself to the computer as a USB HID keyboard. When I tap my right hand on it, it types out the chip's UID followed by Enter. I've concatenated that UID with a regular memorized password to form my actual laptop password, so the actual login flow is: tap the reader with my hand, then type the rest. To log in to my laptop I have to type something I know, and tap the device with the chip in my hand. Two factors, one motion.
Is that proper cryptographic multi-factor authentication? No. The UID is a public identifier. Anyone with a 13.56 MHz reader and physical proximity to my hand could capture it. Anyone with a Flipper Zero could clone it onto a Magic NTAG card. What it actually is is a long random string I never have to remember and never type, that an attacker can't get from a phishing page or a keylogger alone.
I'm comfortable with the tradeoff. The threat model on my personal laptop doesn't include nation-state actors close enough to my hand to scan it. If it did, I'd add a Yubikey. For everyday use, the convenience and the small entropy boost together are a real upgrade over a memorable password.
What I'd do differently
Two things. First, I'd consider doing the install on the LED implant earlier, while I was still in the "I just installed one myself" mindset. The Worcester install was easy in retrospect. Splitting the two installs by six weeks broke a streak that I might have been able to ride.
Second, I'd think harder about the second LED placement. P1 is right at the index knuckle, which is the most expressive part of the hand and the part you naturally point with. Mine looks great, but the chip is large enough that I notice it when I make a fist. P0, in the webbing, would have been less visible day-to-day but maybe more comfortable for fine motor work. If you're considering an LED implant, the visibility-vs-comfort tradeoff is real and you should think about it before, not after.
Where this is going
Two years on, the implants are part of how I interact with the physical world. I forget about them most of the time. Then I tap my hand on a reader, the LED catches, and I remember. Whatever the future of personal identification looks like, I've spent two years living with a version of it.
The next round of projects is about building my own readers. I have a 3D printer and a soldering iron arriving this week, a stack of ESP32 boards, and a PN5180 long-range NFC module on the way. The first build is a bedside reader. The second is a USB-HID desk reader to replace the KBR1 on a second workstation. The one after that is, well, more theatrical.
But that's a different post.
SOCIAL SHARE CARD GENERATOR