An access token can be used instead of a password for basic authentication. This may be useful when you need a client (such as certain dependency managers) that only supports basic authentication to access Artifactory. In this case, it is important to access Artifactory using the same user name provided when creating the token (with -d "username=<USERNAME>").
For example, to use an access token as a password to ping JFrog Platform URL, you could use:
curl -u<USERNAME>:<TOKEN> http://JFROG_PLATFORM_URL/router/api/v1/system/ping