A set of building blocks for making fast, lightweight crypto experiences.

In February 2019, hundreds of Ethereans descended on Denver, Colorado for the ETHDenver hackathon. This event introduced the community to Austin Griffith’s Burner Wallet: a lightweight web-based wallet that attendees could use to buy tacos and beers. This experiment in micro-economies was so successful, that the phrase “burner wallet” grew from more than a single application, into a general design pattern for building blockchain applications.

Since February, many projects have popped up using some sort of burner wallet. At this past Berlin Blockchain week I counted 4 different exhibits using some type of burner wallet, and 2 of the winning teams at ETHBerlin incorporated burner wallets as well.

However, all burner wallets so far have either completely forked Austin’s original codebase, or started a new project from scratch. It was clear to me that a set of shared libraries and components for building a burner wallets could significantly lower the barrier for anybody trying to build their own project.

Just as the Ethereum community has rallied around the “money legos” that make up a composable finance system, I’m hoping that these “wallet legos” will help facilitate many more experiments in the area of decentralized applications.