Austin Griffith and a group of volunteers created the Burner Wallet 🔥👛 to help people in emerging economies onboard themselves into blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

A burner wallet used an ephemeral private key generated instantly, saved in local storage that was perfect for onboarding people as you only need to understand how to scan QR codes and receive and transfer money. It used xdai network (now Gnosis chain) to abstract gas and volatility and make transactions instant. Of course, these wallets were insecure and should be used only once with small amounts of money, hence the term burner wallet.

The Boulder Blockchain meetup organized an event called Cypherpunk Speakeasy where the narrative was simple: we are in a future time where the US dollar is hyperinflated and credit card companies have long since passed. In order to buy food or beers, you have to pay with a cryptographically-backed currency.

Ethereum TGU replicated this event with huge success in Honduras 3 years ago where Baleadas, a delicious local food, was used instead of beers.

Burner wallets are perfect for allowing people to live a crypto experience without all the hassle of setting a secure wallet and remembering a secret phrase. The issue is that you onboard newcomers to a fictional environment that they won’t experience in any other place, meaning that once they head home and try to create their own wallet many things can go wrong.

We wanted to keep the simplicity of the burner wallet experience while preserving security and actually allowing users to keep that wallet functional. We decided to use Argent wallet for their simplicity, seed phrase backup, and support of ZkSync, a Zk Rollup layer two solutions that significantly reduce transaction gas fees.

The idea was simple: create a wallet, we would drop some money for zkSync account activation, gas, and the food, and finally, they would simulate buying by doing a transaction.

The process

We started the meetup by giving a few instructions to all participants to prepare them for what was going to happen, we also encouraged them to download Argent and avoided step-by-step guides to encourage participants to explore.

Once everyone had their account ready, we had a line for redeeming pizza and beers, with two stations, in the first one users would have open their QR code ready to receive 2 DAIs from the organizers, and in the next one, they had to scan the payment address to send the remaining amount (not an exact value as $ was required for activation and was variable because of gas on L1).

Once organizers confirmed the transaction in a few seconds they gave participants their reward, a hot pizza with a cold beer.

Overall, the community loved this experience, we want to make this a mandatory experience to claim swag or food in every event of Ethereum TGU, this would provide incentives to the attendees to be active crypto users.

About Ethereum TGU

Ethereum TGU is an open community for anyone interested in Ethereum as a problem-solving technology. A Decentralized Community in the heart of America.

You can also contribute in other ways, like sharing our content or being a guest in our meetups. You can reach me by sending me a DM on Twitter @Crisgarner.