Chipped Nails and NFCs
Date: 09/07/2025 15:16:03
I was bone-tired on the second day of the NFC Summit and wanted to sit down wherever. It's been a difficult week, and I got out of the habit of socializing that much while spending all the time on my feet.
So I sat down in front of the Alpha stage and hoped for the best. The next speaker turned out to be Florence Vuong, COO of Chipped Social, who stepped up to talk about how to build Web3-powered real-world consumer products that people want to use.
She spoke about press-on nails. I couldn't believe the audacity of it: among all the complex, hard-to-understand tech and visually challenging art where women struggle to become visible, bringing something as banal and stereotypically girly as press-on nails?
It was amazing. I was hooked. Or maybe nailed, but in an acrylic sense.
Here is the essence of the product:
- You glue press-on nails over your own.
- You look pretty.
- You touch another person's smartphone with your thumb.
- You instantly transmit your business card via an implanted NFC chip.
- …
- PROFIT!
Business Cards: RFID to NFC
Do you recall Pokens?
Probably not, if you weren't in a very tight-knit geek circle in 2007-2009. They were USB devices that held your electronic business card and used RFID chips to transmit info to other Pokens. I still recall a scathing article on Wired (see this copy in the Webarchive) that said that electronic business cards don't work and never will until everybody you want to swap details with is using the exact same application or widget. Well, guess what? Surprise, we all have smartphones now!📱
RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips are still used to protect goods in stores and in car keys, but RFID only communicates one way. NFC (near-field communication) tags are part RFID and part Bluetooth and communicate one or two ways, which allows for transactions that require action from both devices, like payments or access control. NFC does not require manual device discovery or synchronization and are generally hassle-free. The evolution of NFC and mobile phones brought us to this point where almost everyone has a device capable of enhanced communication.
In the Chipped nails, NFC chips come pre-installed in the thumbs. They allow the wearer to tap another person's phone to transmit the wearer's business card on Chipped Social.
Where is the Web3?
“Make everything pink and fun enough that people don't realize there's anything crypto in it”. — Leah Winberg.
CEO of Chipped Social, Leah Winberg, nicknamed Winny, said in her interview to Rehash that crypto is too often associated with scam. When most people hear "crypto", they automatically assume it's something fraudulent. So she wanted to do something fun that could also onboard ordinary people to Web3 without them realizing it.
Her solution was to put the blockchain part into the back-end. Good idea, right? People interact with pretty nails and a nice user interface in the app and never suspect anything Web3-related.
According to the privacy policy of Chipped Social, it uses blockchain to store user data. However, I haven't heard or read Winny ever mention what kind of blockchain they use. I found her company in the list of Polygon grantees, so Polygon is a pretty good bet. If they used it, that would make total sense: it's an L2 network built on top of Ethereum that has significantly lower fees and uses plasma sidechains to scale computation. An important feature of Polygon is that it prioritizes security, a necessity for storing user data.
What's in it For the User?
Using Polygon as a back-end solution provides a sustainable, inexpensive, and secure way to store and interact with user data. It's a good way to comply with GDPR and other privacy regulations, as well as guarantee data safety for users.
Polygon is known for its fast transaction speeds and low transaction costs, all of which contribute to the overall UX of the app and to the cost of the product.
The product is as simple as it can get: pretty nails and an app to update your business card. No AI, no gestures, nothing extra, no fuss, and that is a choice of principle for Winny. Nails are high-quality and reusable, which means you'll only need a new set in case you want a different design.
How it All Started
Leah Winberg is a Master of Science from the University of Southhampton who already had several years of experience in Web3, having been a co-founder of SHILLR and a partnerships manager at Figuregot. She fell on some hard times and started doing her own acrylic nails to sell on the internet. Then, just for fun, she ordered NFC chips and implemented them into the nails.
So she tried it out herself with a nail instead of a payment card — and loved the fun of the interaction and people's reaction. Development of the actual physical product took some iterations, and currently Chipped Social has a limited range of press-on nails of different length and designs, some of which were developed in cooperation with Siannie Quartero, marketing strategist and designer. Each set has a choice of three different sizes.
Final Thoughts
The product itself is wonderful. It's pretty, easy to use, easy to understand, and accessible to anyone willing to wear press-on nails. It's also obviously scalable to other wearable tech: I recall the COO of the company talking about their plans to cover the pet accessory market.
However, the goal behind Chipped Social, which is to onboard people to Web3, sounds difficult to impossible to achieve, since people don't really care about which back end their product runs on — it's like onboarding Web users to nginx, which they definitely use, but usually have no idea about.
Overall, it's a great and actually useful product that boasts additional security as well as sustainability. I admire how Winny stands behind the decision to keep things simple and knows exactly what her audience wants. We need more products like this one in the Web3 wearables market.