At Ethereal Summit NY recently, scores of hungry blockchain enthusiasts lined up at food trucks serving shawarma wraps and pizza after a day spent learning about the latest in decentralization and Ethereum. Notably absent from the scene, however, were those quintessential elements of a fiat economy: credit cards and cash. Instead, the hundreds of attendees paid for their meals with cryptocurrency via a QR code on their phones, made possible by an ingenious little widget called Burner Wallet that ran right in their mobile web browser.

Created by Ethereum R&D impresario Austin Griffith, Burner Wallet is a remarkable example of how much can be achieved with the most accessible implementation of blockchain technology. It’s simple, it’s functional, and it’s open source, meaning that any event or gathering in the world can utilize Burner Wallet as a Point of Sale methodology for free, and easily onboard visitors into the blockchain ecosystem with minimal fuss.

Here’s how it works…

We chatted with Burner Wallet creator Austin Griffith about how the project came to fruition, lessons that can be learned from the process, and what it means for blockchain adoption…

How did you come to the idea for a Burner Wallet?

I got into this space building games, and then I realized that no one could come play my games because the on-boarding was so challenging. So then I spent my time exploring how to abstract away gas and the need for ETH, having a better UX. I was building this wallet to meet a standard on which users can just get in and use it first, then everything else can be taught as you’re incentivized to learn, instead of upfront, where you have to download something and put in a seed phrase.

I was just playing around with the wallet idea at first. I had a talk with Alejandro from the Open Money Initiative. They were talking about putting wallets in Venezuela and what that would look like. My point of view was: ‘Let’s put it in a web browser and make it really, really simple to use.’ It was basically just a QR code, a balance, and a send button, and that was the entire Burner Wallet.

Where did it go from there?

I built the first version the night before Devcon 2018, during a layover at Heathrow Airport on the way to Prague — it’s like a 12 hour flight coming out of Colorado. That’s a long time with just me and my laptop! By sending it around at Devcon, I noticed that a lot of people were having this magic moment. I knew that there was something there. For me it was just like, ‘let’s just build something quick where we can send value around on this new xDai side chain, let’s try running it with fast transactions, cheap transactions pinned to the dollar.’ Taking all of that and putting a really easy to use web wallet on top of it, you get a pretty smooth experience. On the way back, I was laid over for the same amount of time and that’s when I built the exchange, so you could send ETH to it, from ETH to Dai, and then Dai to ETH.

Once we decided we were going to use it, we took it to a bunch of bars. I had what I call the Cypherpunk Speakeasy, where once a week for six weeks before ETH Denver, we emulated the ETH Denver set up. Users got a paper wallet at the door, they would scan it with their phone, then they’d have a wallet with value. They could take that wallet and buy something at the bar with it. And then I just watched: Where did their eyes go, where did their thumbs go, where did they trip up? I just iterated on that UX to make it as smooth as I possibly could. By the time we got to ETH Denver, that was the real trial by fire where all that UX preparation really paid off. And it was a pretty smooth experience for most people.

It’s pretty amazing that this was all built in the matter of days and iterated on collaboratively…

Definitely. That’s a big lesson. The very first project I built was this decentralized oracle and I didn’t come up for air while building it. I basically built the whole thing in a silo in the dark and then was like: “Okay, here it is!’ That is not the way to do things in this ecosystem. You really have to even put the idea out there first, see if something similar exists. Can you iterate on that? Then get something started, iterate on it, put it in people’s hands, see how they use it, and keep that loop going. You can’t just get it exactly right on the first try. Even if you do have $50 million sitting in your treasury and you’re going to spend three years in the dark working on something, it’s better off if you came up for air and iterate with the ecosystem.