Inside a converted warehouse on the edge of Bushwick, a line of people waits to get their photo taken. The photographer, a device the size of a few shoeboxes, is placed on a table. The photos are raw, printed on receipt paper, and look completely different from photobooths in the past. And it turns out, the photos that come out are the least interesting thing about it.
This is Checkpoint, the flagship product of Future Primitive, the New York and Vancouver company co-founded by Benny Giang, Steve Jang, and Jayden Windle. Checkpoint is deliberately simple. It takes a photo, prints it instantly, and gives people something physical to leave with. It does not run the image through a model or push it to a feed. It photographs a face, prints it on receipt paper (not a strip), and people leave. In the background, Checkpoint can create a lightweight digital account tied to the moment, letting venues extend the experience beyond the print itself through rewards, collectibles, or future interactions.
Since its commercial launch, Checkpoint has reached more than ninety locations across New York, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, Tokyo, Seattle, and Chicago. More than one million people have used one. The brand partners read like a cross-section of the contemporary cultural establishment. Nike, Reebok, Arc’teryx, BAPE, and Puma on the fashion side. A24, Complex, Universal Music Group, Sony Music, HYBE, and Live Nation in entertainment. MoMA PS1, LACMA, and Pioneer Works on the museum and arts side. Venmo, Cash App, Target, Partiful, and the LA Dodgers round out the rest.
For a product that photographs faces and prints them on receipt paper, Checkpoint sits at an unusual intersection. Giang came out of the early blockchain world, but Checkpoint is less a crypto product than a bet that physical places will matter more in an internet saturated with synthetic content. He was employee number thirteen at what became Dapper Labs, the company behind CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot, and helped ship ERC-721, the standard that now underpins the entire NFT category. In 2023 he co-authored ERC-6551 with Windle, a second standard that gives any NFT its own wallet. Checkpoint is among the clearest consumer expressions of that work to date.
“The question we kept asking was where a wallet should actually live,” Giang said. “It should not live on a laptop or inside an app that most people do not want to download. It should live somewhere people already go. The booth is the answer we arrived at.”
That answer has landed in the middle of a larger shift. Spending on in-person entertainment and live cultural programming grew faster than retail in both 2024 and 2025, according to trade data tracked by IAAPA. A feature in The New York Times in August of last year reported on the return of the traditional photo booth, noting that Photomatica, a San Francisco operator, had grown its fleet past four hundred locations nationwide. Photo booth museums have opened in Brooklyn, Chicago, and Portland. The objects, some restored from the 1950s and 1960s, others purpose-built with digital sensors, have become reliable features at weddings, gallery openings, and corporate launches at levels operators describe as historically unusual.
The pattern is easy to dismiss as nostalgia. Giang reads it differently.
“There is a reason the physical world is becoming valuable again,” he said. “Generative content is flooding every platform we use. Feeds look less and less like anything a person made. People are quietly deciding they want to spend time in rooms where everyone around them is definitely real.”
That thesis, that physical space is about to carry more cultural weight, shapes where Checkpoint has been deployed. The company has avoided locations that trade on crypto branding. It has focused on venues with long-standing cultural capital, including independent theaters, music venues, museums, and what Giang calls “the rooms that decide what is interesting a year before anyone else does.”
The blockchain layer is infrastructure, not the pitch. It gives venues lightweight ways to reward attendance, mark a moment, or extend the experience digitally without asking users to understand any of the underlying mechanics. It lets a museum issue a collectible that has the weight of a ticket stub and the portability of a digital file. None of it requires the user to know what any of it is.
“We are not selling crypto,” Giang said. “We are selling a booth. The booth is fun. If someone wants to understand what is happening in the background, they can. Most people will not. That is fine.”
Future Primitive has not disclosed revenue. The company keeps a share of brand-funded activations, licenses units to cultural venues, and has run large-scale installations during events including Lollapalooza and a Nike campaign that placed booths in three popups in 2025. The company raised $8 million in 2024 with participation from a16z Crypto, Kindred Ventures, Hashed Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Archetype, and PTC Crypto, and joined the Fall 2024 cohort of a16z’s Crypto Startup Accelerator. The team, spread between Canada and the United States, now sits at fourteen people.
What the product represents, more than the hardware or the software, is a reading of where the culture is headed. The hyper-digital, hyper-generative shape of the last three years has produced what several analysts have described as a slow exhaustion. A Pew study published in March found that a majority of Americans under thirty reported reducing their time on at least one major social platform in the previous year. Galleries, bars, and theaters have filled the gap in part because the alternative has become harder to tolerate.
Giang sees Checkpoint as a piece of that rebalancing rather than a rejection of the digital world.
“Physical space is not going to replace the internet,” he said. “It becomes the part of life people trust more. The internet is still where information lives. Culture, status, identity, the things people actually care about, those are moving back into the room.”
There is a quieter argument embedded in the product about what the onchain layer is for. Giang, who spent the wildest years of the NFT boom inside one of the companies that set it off, has been vocal about the limits of a category built around speculation. Checkpoint reframes the wallet as a receipt for showing up. Presence becomes the act that earns something. Loyalty becomes measurable without being tracked in the way a retail chain would track it. The value that accumulates inside these wallets is small by design. A few dollars in USDC. A collectible tied to a specific night at a specific venue. The scale comes from repetition.
The booth itself does not advertise any of this. It prints photos. It runs on hardware that Future Primitive designs in-house. The flash fires. A photo comes out the front, and something quieter happens underneath.
