It can't, and I wouldn't hold my breath for such a small company being able to navigate compliance for contactless payments. The Pebble does use standard watch straps though, so you could get one of the ones with a programmable payment chip embedded inside.

If that's all you use your smartwatch for, you may as well skip the watch and get a payment bracelet or ring though.

e.g. https://www.curve.com/wearables/

I used to use Curve but they became really unreliable, especially when paying for public transport, so I just switched back to a normal card.

Shame because you can get some nice watch straps with curve integration, which would neatly solve the missing payment feature on Pebble watches.

Except not in the USA. To bad the rings looks nice.

Since this is hackernews, I'll point out that you can use a solvent to remove the card part of a credit card leaving only the chip plus antenna. Then embed in a new housing of your own design.

Ya, and then attach it to the back of your watch...

Yeah, Hornady makes a nice rubber thingy that you can slide onto a watch band with their RFID tag inside, but it's easy to swap it with a t5577 or whatever

This. I seldom leave the house with an iPhone, and my Apple Watch with cellular is my primary "mobile" device. I want to leave the Apple ecosystem as my devices age out, and the one thing I would love to have is an NFC ring or bracelet to replace my Apple Watch.

Eric has said publicly this is not happening. Looks like he's making a watch that fits his use case, and since he always carries his phone that's not a priority.