When Muse Wearables, incubated at IIT Madras, announced its partnership with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), it set out to do more than unveil a new gadget. The goal: to turn a simple ring into a payment instrument, bypassing phones, wallets, and cards. The startup calls the product Ring One, and it is positioned at the intersection of wearable health tracking and instant, contactless payments.
The ring’s promise is bold: tap it at any NFC terminal; the payment is executed via RuPay, without exposing card data. Under the hood, Muse Wallet—its payment platform—converts linked RuPay credit or debit cards into secure tokens, storing them in a tamper-resistant Secure Element (SE) chip inside the ring.
Co-founders argue that this is more than a novelty: it is a step toward sovereign alternatives in India’s payments landscape, countering the dominance of foreign tech firms. “With Muse Wallet, we are making cashless payments effortless,” said KLN Sai Prasanth, CEO.
Technology, Trust, and Tokenization
What makes Ring One different than typical “wearable payments” is the reliance on hardware tokenization, not software wallets. Rather than storing card credentials in a phone app—vulnerable to malware—the ring houses them in a secure module. When tapped, the ring sends a tokenized transaction to the NFC terminal. The actual card data never leaves the secure module.
Muse describes its underlying platform as India’s first Secure Element Tokenisation Platform, enabling any RuPay card to be added and used through the ring.
From a security standpoint, this architecture isolates payment logic from the phone’s operating system or apps—an advantage, advocates argue, in a world where smartphone malware and side-channel attacks are proliferating.
Yet challenges remain. The ring must be worn to activate payments; removing it should disable the functionality. Its chip must resist tampering, side-channel probing, and replay attacks. And adoption depends not just on the technology but on merchant infrastructure, user trust, and regulatory assurance.
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Scaling, Sovereignty, and Ecosystem Risks
The ambition is not merely the domestic market: Muse already operates in over 40 countries, supporting cards from nearly 600 banks. The plan is to scale rapidly, enabling millions of RuPay cardholders to use wearable payments over the coming years.
However, scaling brings multiple fronts of risk:
Merchant acceptance: While most point-of-sale (POS) systems already support NFC, merchant firmware and payment service providers may need updates or certification to support tokenized wearable devices.
Interoperability: The ring must interoperate with varied terminal standards, card issuers, and banking protocols.
Regulatory clarity & certification: Wearable payments must comply with Indian standards for tokenization, digital transactions, payouts, and data security. NPCI’s backing helps legitimacy, but the ecosystem must mature.
Consumer trust: Users must believe their payments are as secure—or more secure—than existing digital wallets. Any breach or exploit would undermine adoption.
The sovereignty narrative is critical. By building the tokenization logic within India (rather than using third-party wallets or platforms), Muse hopes to reduce reliance on foreign payment ecosystems and data pipelines.
A Step, Not a Revolution — Yet
What Ring One represents is more evolutionary than revolutionary: an incremental move in the long arc of digital payments. India’s payments ecosystem is already dominated by UPI and RuPay; this is an attempt to overlay a more personal, more seamless interface while preserving security.
But adoption hurdles are high. Wearables require comfort, reliability, durability, and consumer willingness to replace existing habits. Payment behavior is sticky. And while the ring looks promising on paper, its success will depend as much on partnerships, certification, consumer education, and real-world experience as on technical merit.
Still, the move speaks to a maturing fintech ethos in India: designers and technologists now want to embed financial computing into everyday objects, pushing closer to the edge of zero-interface computing. Whether Ring One becomes a wedge or a gadget, it is a statement that the next frontier of payments may not be in apps but on the skin.
