JCB and Keychain to offer offline contactless payments

JCB and Keychain have developed a payment infrastructure for machine-to-machine transactions that supports offline payments using NFC. Leveraging Keychain's blockchain and self-sovereign identity technology, the system addresses challenges related to the risks of operating through network outages and distributed attacks.

The new infrastructure allows payments to be conditionally accepted by merchants, even in the event that both the payer and the merchant are disconnected from the network, a scenario known as double offline. 

Under the collaboration with JCB, Keychain implemented the payment processing system using IoT devices, mobile phones, and smartwatches, and demonstrated the following:

• Payments may be conditionally processed even during a double-offline scenario;

• Payment processing consensus may be done over mixed networks simultaneously;

• Upon network restoration, the offline transactions may be securely repatriated to online in batches.

The system uses NFC network protocol and leverages Keychain Core to support small IoT devices with, in principle, as little as 32 megabytes of memory.