It’s rare to encounter people who are genuinely altruistic, who give away remarkable gifts to the world, gifts they could profit from immensely if they kept all to themselves.

Masahiro Hara was one such person. His name hardly rings a bell, but that is consistent with this great man’s humble character – and his wonderful gift to the world: the QR (Quick Response) code that now underpins the modern payment system.

QR could also stand for quietly remarkable as a succinct description of the man himself. To see why, let’s back track to the year 1992 in Japan. Picture hundreds of line workers in a Toyota factory scanning ten different bar codes just to track one car part. They are exhausted; the system is back-breaking inefficient.

Enter Masahiro Hara, then a quiet 35-year-old engineer who loves playing Go during lunch breaks. While everyone else was complaining about the problem, Hara wants to solve it. At every lunch break, he is staring at the black and white stones on the game board, hoping for a bright spark.

Perseverance paid. One day, it dawned on him that if codes could work like Go, not just left and right but also up and down, then a lot more information can be packed on the same space. For six months, Hara obsessively studies every piece of printed material he can find: magazines, newspapers, flyers. He’s hunting for the perfect pattern that scanners will never confuse with random text. Finally, he cracks it: position three small squares on a compact two-dimensional format (top left, top right and bottom left) such that a QR code scanner can quickly locate and orient the code, regardless of the angle or distance. These three little squares are known as finder patterns. The rest of the code consists of various types of encoded information represented as a maze of black and white modules (individual squares). Together, these components enable a QR code to store large amounts of data in a compact form that can be quickly and accurately scanned from any directions.

In 1994, Toyota wanted to patent Hara’s idea and charge royalties. But Hara shocked everyone by deciding to give it away completely free with no licensing fees whatsoever. His colleagues were stunned, thinking he must be mad, but Hara stood firm on his decision because he believed in something bigger, that if you want to change the world, you don’t own it; you share it.

Today QR codes process over 2 billion transactions in China alone. The global QR payment market in 2024 was $12.2 billion and growing fast, according to a March 2025 report by Globe Newswire. And the seed of all this frenetic growth is that magnanimous decision by a humble engineer who understood the value of gifting something good to the world.

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This post is an adaptation of an Instagram story on Masahiro Hara by Aziz Nishanov, an entrepreneur based in Japan.