If you’ve avoided falling victim to an AI-generated scam thus far, count your blessings.
- AI-enabled impersonation scams against older adults alone grew eight-fold between 2020 and 2024, from $55m to $445m, per Federal Trade Commission data.
- Deepfakes and voice cloning have gotten so convincing that it can be hard for even digital natives to decipher between what, or who, is or isn’t real.
So, in an increasingly online world where you can’t trust your eyes or ears, how do you establish trust?
Design studios Modem and Retinaa think the answer might lie in a handshake — they designed Quartz, a ring-based ID verification system grounded in real-world connection that wards off online scams by verifying the personhood of its user and their friends.
How it works
The ring, which is only a concept for now, holds a piece of quartz whose unique pattern is recorded on a blockchain certificate, and a scanner that records the vein structure of its user’s finger to generate a secure cryptographic identity, similar to FaceID.
- It also has a pulse reader to make sure you’re alive and that your dead arm isn’t being used by someone else. (Scary, but reassuring.)
When two ring owners meet and shake hands, the devices create a “shared secret” — a unique digital key, or an encrypted bond, that gatekeeps their future communications by confirming that both rings are present, connected, and being worn by their authorized users.
If any checks fail, your DMs, calls, or other communications with that person are locked down to prevent potential spoofing.
Technologies of trust
Unlike other biometric human verification systems, like Sam Altman’s eyeball scanner or VeryAI’s palm-based tech, Quartz “reintroduces something… human” by making physical presence “a foundational layer of the security stack,” Modem’s Scott Kooken told Inc.
“The handshake isn’t symbolic: it’s part of the architecture.”
Do they all seem a little dystopian? Yes. But at least with Quartz, proving you’re human through real-life connection restores some meaningfulness to being human in the age of AI.
Plus, you’d get to rock a cool-looking signet ring. (Yes, that was a quartz joke.)
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