The Burner Wallet (Burn Baby Burn) – David Mihal & Austin Griffith

what's up my name is David Mahal and we're gonna talk about burner wallets today apologies in advance that these slides are a little thin we've been like working nonstop for the past six weeks but especially this week getting those buffa Dow apps that you guys have on your phone that are hopefully working the good bad yeah so yeah we want to talk about kind of go over what the burner wallet is what's been going on in the past year if you were here a year ago you use kind of the original iteration that Austin put out and what's going coming in the future of this project so you want to kick us off this history well you can start off with kind of basically puts the I'll get you a burner wallet basically puts that private key and local storage sometimes you operate on a side chain you you sort of make these trade-offs for better UX and smoother sending for small amounts of money right when when you tell a crypto maximalist about putting a private key in local storage they usually get goosebumps and throw up and run off right like it's not it's not something that people are used to doing something so insecure but if you think about $10 it totally makes sense and it makes the the whole journey of sending money and moving money and programming money a lot easier when you can just generate a private key willy-nilly and use it to sign a few things and throw it away when you're done so the the trade-offs were initially when I put it together I got I got a lot of crap from a lot of people and I still do but what I noticed was when so I built it on the plane I was laid over in Heathrow in London yeah a short history I was I was laid over and Heathrow in London for like nine hours and I had this idea of like sending money with like a queue actually it came from alejandro he was all sorts of cool stuff in like trying to get a wallet and Venezuela and stuff way beyond me but he he and I talked and it really inspired me to build a wallet that was more approachable and easy for people to use that didn't take a download and a 12 word seed phrase so I put it together on the plane it was just a web app and at Def Con I had it on my phone and I was like hey you know buddy take out your phone scan this and then he had money and then he went to the next guy and he had money here money pretty soon there's like a circle of people at some dingy Prague nightclub passing around X died and there I noticed right away there was like this vacuum for great UX in the space and and this thing was feel filling that vacuum like people were waiting for the ability to just do this and they were really excited about it even though there were those trade-offs and you have to talk about the trade-offs and you have to say we're just gonna use a small amount of money to do this but it makes the experience much more magical so then I met rich maker doubt and Richard maker Dow and my buddy Brian eighth year decided we were going to try to do this thing at eighth Denver and we knew it was gonna take a lot of testing you know a circle of people at Def Con is a lot different than 14-hundred hackers right so we started doing UX tests with this wallet where we would open a bar up and hand out these private wallets at the door people would scan the private key they'd walk up to the bar they'd shoot a QR code they buy it drink it for us as crypto people we're used to then you go to meta mass then you have to go eat then you have to put in a seed phrase then you have to write it on a piece of paper and put it in your underwear drawer like when we weren't used to this and so that that vacuum was filled by this idea of these trade-offs and it was a lot of like a lot of exciting people using it and then Ethan ver came and we did the same thing but it was a lot higher scale and I think the same for the people that had a happy path and I think there's about 80% they were able to scan a coin get a wallet go to food trucks buy food all using crypto so it was kind of like that was the good first step for the burner and I think that got the name out of the burner and then when I was the next step was like okay let's let's try to get funding for this let's let's get something together to just like I want to do like R&D type stuff I'm not trying to like start a company and build a product or whatever and that kind of fell flat to be honest I I learned a lot about myself and I am not good at raising money so then what we did was create a Burnet collective where I was just like okay this is gonna be more of an ecosystem thing I'm probably not going to be the leader of this thing I can just kind of like throw everything I know up in this collective get a bunch of good people together and play around and see what we come up with and I think can I hand that off to you now yeah sure so yeah I was at ethan ver a year ago when i kind of first played with his burner wallet and kind of fell in love and i was like this is the first thing in crypto that i would give to someone not encrypted to use like you know I love all the cool projects in this space but most of them unlike their cool crypto projects this one I was like man anybody could use this and yeah so I kind of was like digging around the code and then as yes Austin said he kind of started building a little bit of a community of people who were just passionate about the project who wanted to contribute code contribute design all those kinds of things and my code was really gross I should say that there was some work to do but one thing that kind of became clear is after I feel like after Denver after like the idea of a burner wall began to explode like lots of people wanted their own burner wallet they wanted a burner wallet that used state channels instead of X die or they wanted to burn our wallet that used you know added some kind of DAP features where you couldn't trade stuff and Austin did a ton of like pushing the idea that a burner wallets more than just like something for sending receiving money with like the the coin exchange exchange emoji clinics change and a bunch of other you know cool apps so I began kind of thinking of the burner wallet as not just a wallet but like a platform for people to build wallets and I kind of came up with this idea of you know over time the burner wallet - which is just like a it's still burner wallets but they're a set of libraries that we put together to make it like really easy to build your own burner wallet that instead of like forking one get github repo and like trying to change the code there it's like you install like 10 different packages like pick the features you want you know like said a couple variables what you wanted to say in the title what colors and all that what assets you want to include and that kind of makes it a lot more accessible people want to build their own Berner wallet they just need to pick out a couple different things there but again next well and then yeah from there you know we've kind of we've run a bunch of these events leading up to Denver which is kind of our craziest most ambitious burner wallet we've done but yeah I guess the next thing I want to talk about is just kind of where where we see this project going in the future so I say burner wall is growing up this this thing that kind of started as just like a toy a little hackathon kind of thing is like going in some really cool directions cool spaces and so yeah I kind of see the burner wall going in three different directions and the first one is kind of the one that is the most well-known it's it's onboarding it's the one that most of you guys have probably used it for you have a picture here yeah like this is a teeth Boston yeah we've got some good pictures from like all the DAP the hours we've done but to me I think burner walls are the best way to bring new people into crypto blockchain ecosystem like the the thing that like makes all this work worth it is like when I do one of these Daffy hours and I see someone who's like their face kind of lights up they're like whoa this is possible like I have money on my phone like there's a lot of people a surprising amount of people who go to like crypto meetups and Dappy hours and stuff like that who've never actually used crypto they're like or maybe they have something on coin base or something like that but they're like they're interested in it they think it's cool but like they don't have meta masks or anything and so it's just amazing to see people like they scan a QR code and they have money on their phone they didn't sign up with anything so I think one of the the goals you know mean Austin have run a bunch of different meetups Dappy hours hackathons over the past year but when goals we want to make this not something that's dependent on on us like having a developer to do we want this to be something that anybody can anyone who runs a blockchain meetup or a university group can run an event like this one thing that that I started like half a year ago was the burner factory which is a website that lets you build a burner wallet without originally was just building a burner wallet without writing any code and it really took off people really liked it but there was you know the the wallet itself is a very small part of this whole experience so at this point we pretty much have the whole experience down you can you can go to the site create a wallet pick which tokens and assets you want to include and mainly you can make your own you know here we're using Buffett I usually these events it's really fun to have like a local coin you know currency with some value but you're incentivized to use it at that event so you can make your own coin you can make paper wallets and print them out that paper wallets are still pretty ugly right now but we're working on making those look a little bit nicer and then you can like in one-click air drop tokens to all those paper wallets so it's basically like one of these events in a box so we're still working a bunch on this you'll go to set you'll see it's still like kind of ugly post Denver this is like my main focus and one of the the goals with this project is to do what I want to call a burner day because we want to like push this idea of these happy hours are we ready in a month we can maybe that's the warmup burn your diet that's a different burner day burn your day we want to you know kind of kick off this this idea of people running these events by getting like a bunch of communities like every city in the world that's got a blockchain ecosystem to run one of these vents and will work with any community members will you know with the burner factory we should have all the tools you need to like technically do that event we're already talking with sponsors about getting some funding so like you know when you do one of these events basically you end up picking up the whole tab so you know having sponsors that'll that'll pay for everyone's bar tabs and just get a bunch of fun people playing with cryptocurrency in a bar or restaurant somewhere so if you are a community leader if you're running a meetup or something like that or you're just interested in hosting one of these burner days definitely get in contact with me so the second kind of area that I think that I see the burner wallet being important in and going in is being for developers as I said we have this new like modular architecture the burner wallet to that it's you know it's easy to kind of stack together your own burner wallet without writing much code but if you want to add features if you have a cool idea for a game in a wallet if you want to like make it accept some other kinds of currencies or if you want to make a whole Buffett out game like there's a pretty good architecture for doing that and personally I think this is like the easiest way to build add app because you know the rest of the wallet takes care of all the like not fun things about building adapts like wiring up accounts and all that stuff we've already like kind of you know at start like I built a bunch of plugins on my own but we're kind of in the point where we're starting to get other companies coming into the ecosystem and building plugins because it's a great way to show off their product you know if you build a really cool product and you go to some events you know you can kind of get people on board into your products really quickly this slide i was the one i was throwing together we've got unstoppable domains are in your your buffett doll wallets right now everyone has a unstoppable domain that you can transfer out we also support ENS and we're gonna do some cool like burnable ENS names ching is a point-of-sale system that built a plugin and if you're going to the maker Dowd Appy hour on Sunday evening they'll be using Jing there's a couple others a link drop there's a company called carbon that does like it's a credit card on-ramp like so we're kinda starting to build this library of plugins and so going back to the whole instant onboarding thing and the plugins together these plugins don't necessarily need to be a POS system or a financial service this could be a game that's just changing state on chain right like you could host an event and have a plug-in that's like everyone playing tic-tac-toe or something like that on chain just just putting that out there because these these are very financially or I guess stoppable name domains isn't really like you can make games and you can harness this instant onboarding and harness that burner well and harness the fact that you can drop tokens to people and have paper wallets and all of that with the burner factory and it doesn't just have to be for money you can just change state or make games and that's kind of what we did with the wallet for the event yeah that's right I mean the scale of one of these things can range from I'll say like the ones on the screen are actually the really small scale plugins actually I put them up because they're like bigger names but like Ching doesn't have a UI they just support like their form of QR codes and the domain you know ENS and sample domains just kind of pop in those domain names but that's kind of the small end of a plug-in the big end is you can have pages and you can have you eyes you can build a hold app just in a burner wallet and that's that's what I'm excited to see and so if you're interested in building oh sorry one more thing that's a good that's a good but wait there's more so burner connect the next the next announcement for developers this is something we actually I think we both had like kind of in our minds for for a while but we built it specifically for Denver is burner connect and what burner connect is is it's not a scam coin it's a it's a web 3 provider that lets you connect like any DAP can drop this in and your web site can connect to like accounts that are in a burner wallet in like another tab so this is all like within the browser there's no server anything it's supported by web 3 connect if you've if you don't know what web 3 connect you might have gone to some DAPs and you click connect and something pops up that says do you wanna use meta mask do you want to use 4matic do you want to use Portus do you want to use like kind of all these different web three providers so i can set up a paper wallet with the private key on it i could scan the paper wallet and have the burner wallet on my phone and then I could take that and login to some third party web 3 and use my burner wallet to interface with it making transactions and signing messages exactly without without sharing a private key the private key is still kept save your you're basically prompted are you sure you want to do that awesome yep so you guys will see this if you're using this Buffett au wallet this weekend you'll use the burner wallet for like accumulating your XP and then when you want to vote there's a button on the bottom of the screen that'll take you over to alchemy by dow stack so this is this like whole taoist system that they built but they wanted to kind of integrate with the burner wallet so we built this system so when you go there you'll log in with your burner wallet and kind of share that account across websites and so this is nice because again any developer that wants to kind of dabble in some burner Wallet stuff but doesn't want to build a whole thing you can just pop this right in so if you are a developer that's interested in doing some burner Wallet stuff got $2,000 worth of bounties for hackers this weekend maker dad was offering $1500 for projects I don't know if that's like for one project or what but $1500 pot for people who build burner wall plugins that use any of their they've got this long list of like grantees I put that I think the two most notable ones are say blir and pool together but they have a ton of other grantees so check out that list of grantees and if you think you can build something cool with it and want to build it as a burnable plugin there's a good pot of money there if you're out there at the table and you're building a project with the burner wallet don't go use my code reach out to me we'll get you set up and then I'm throwing in 500 bucks of my own money for just like the overall best wallet I think at these hackathons we see a lot of groups that like I mean burnin walls are perfect for hackathons because they're like really easy like anybody can try them out really quick like you got like a nice UI to start from so the best project that integrates a burner wallet using our libraries and so the final area is like this one's a little bit you know more in the future but you know Austin was talking about some of these trade-offs that that you make when you use a burner wall at that like you know you're storing a private key and local storage and stuff like that that it's been like up until now it's been kind of a toy it's good for hackathons it's good for meetups and stuff like that but you know as this projects developing we're getting more features that are bringing this closer to I think hopefully a wallet that you can kind of keep your actual funds on and yeah we originally sacrificed security for onboarding but like can we do both can we have this web-based wallet that's really easy to use that you can on board by just scanning a code and still have it like a secure enough easy to use enough that you can put like a thousand dollars in it and not be worried about losing that to like Alex pandas an how many you say I've seen them it was like two years ago he was talking about like we shouldn't be moving private keys around you should just have an ephemeral private key that signs a message that goes to a contract and the contract like lets that guy spend a little bit right and it's finally like coming true and people are doing it and it's working I don't know if I made slides but that's too bad because I think this is the most exciting so the thing that I think is really making this possible and it's something that's in these wallets today is we've built the system for for contract wallets for counterfactual contract wallets in a burner wallet and the idea is like you know this originally came from like a while ago Austin integrated nosis safe into the burner wallet so this is a contract wall you can have multi-sig and all that stuff like that and that kind of opened my mind that like you can have a secure way to store your funds in a like lightweight web-based wallet and what we've gotten to today with these counterfactual wallets that you just create - it feels exactly the same you don't need to create a safe like you just open a burner wallet and the contracts already there you can send money to it and you can lock it down and you probably don't know it that all of you guys already had a contract wallet when you walked in the door today like by by getting on Buffett down it takes an ephemeral private key and derives a create to doesn't deploy it but then anytime you need to transact it goes through GSN and we'll talk about all that talk about all yeah so that yeah we'll talk about that more later but basically yeah that contract doesn't get deployed until you make your first transaction so there's no on chain transaction like set up a wallet like user experience is exactly the same but we got some like really cool stuff under the hood and and this opens up so many possibilities you know the reasons we're using it here for one we're using gas station network which is a system for like meta transaction relaying which is why like you know last year when we did the burner Wallace like Austin had a system for air dropping gas money to everyone this year like we're using gas station Network like you don't have any gas money in your wallet nobody's paying gas we're paying for all your gas out of one account yeah it's working most of it's working most of the time the other reason is that we were integrating with 4matic this year and so we kind of have this system where you're 4matic owns this account and it authorizes your burner wallet to like use it that's why you'll see when you sign in 4matic it asks for a signature and this is kind of what the way like the direction I see this going that you know Fort Maddox kind of providing our identity in our case and then you have a private key that's on your device that's still like a burnable private key you can throw it away like your fort matic account owns that wallet so if you put a thousand dollars in the wallet that you have today and then you go and clear your history you throw your phone in the trash you can still get that money back because it's attached to your 4matic which is a whole separate system so in the future like I can see us really expanding this basically the goal is like can we give all the like awesome UX the awesome features and the security of like a wallet like argent but still have it run in the browser still have like that super easy onboarding where like you can just scan someone's QR in a bar and then like the wallet pops up with real money in it yeah yes the answer is yes it's coming so that's what we're working on and I think that's pretty much it so we can do questions these guys out here the food trucks yeah so the food trucks will there's kind of a strange off ramping process because our tokens are just like a coin we minted right so what they're gonna do is they're gonna they burn their tokens and it it triggers a wire script on our end to send them die so it's kind of like and it's for safety like we could we could wire that up and we can make that work but for for safety for sending you know thirty thousand dollars we're probably just gonna have a human say yes that's good but we don't have to but they do get off ramp through wire so it's right it's still crypto the guy's the food trucks are like eat the shooting up like get us our guys you can convert it to eat again you have exposure yes yes yes yes well that'll be died but you think they're gonna pay down their bank accounts yeah no no it's a bank account connected to wire so so basically they burn it triggers one one wire to send to another wire in die so they receive die for what they received at the food trucks and then they can move that to their bank account or like some of them move it to eath and ride the ride yeah burner factory is burner factory calm for like the libraries and stuff now you can go to github.com slash burner - factory and pretty much like all the code for everything we talked about lives there there's the burner wallet - which is like the most of the good code but there's like a bunch of other repos there's ones for burner connect now there's a bunch of contract repos and stuff but yeah github.com slash burner - factory for code burner factory no - com2 to make your own burner wallet really easily anything else thank you so much guys we're gonna be doing like 10 minutes talking more about Buffett out during the opening ceremony so we'll see you guys there [Music] you