Show HN: Burner – A low cost wallet to gift crypto
burner.proHi HN! I’m one of the creators of Burner, a low cost Ethereum hardware wallet designed for gifting. After creating various forms of crypto “cash” (https://kong.cash/, https://offline.cash/) we learned that gifting cryptocurrencies was consistently one of the biggest challenges for holders and enthusiasts.
Burner looks and feels like a colorful gift card, but under the hood it incorporates a secure element chip. You can access its wallet with just an NFC tap, and it works entirely through our (soon to be) open source web app.
There is a lot more to share, like USD II (created by https://www.bridge.xyz/), a stablecoin that we designed to work with Burner without gas, but for now we’re excited to push Burner out the door and start getting feedback from users. Man, looking at the comments it's crazy to me that hn's knowledge of a $3T industry hasn't evolved at all in 7 years. For those not in the know, Bridge, the stablecoin partner here, was just purchased by Stripe for $1.1B because they see future cost savings from using stablecoins for global remittances and forex. https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/10/22/stripe-announces-1-1-b... It's cool to have some skepticism, but update your beliefs. Scams and illicit transactions in crypto are actually smaller by proportion in all crypto than in USD or other fiat currencies at .3% last year. https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2024-crypto-crime-report-in... This looks like just a secure enclave that you can deposit any crypto onto, so whether you trust the manufacturer of your smart card or credit card or not is up to you. Seems like there are easier ways to run a crypto scam, imo A crypto security firm says that crypto is safer now and we are all supposed to believe it? Also stablecoins like USDT which is supposed to be backed with USD but has never had an external auditor look at its books are somehow the solution here? There is a reason crypto is looked at skeptically. Why would a crypto security firm be incentivized to tell people there is LESS crime? They want to sell MORE services for hunting down criminals. They are the de facto FBI enforcement arm. If you don't believe them, check the FBI's official numbers: https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/philadelphia/ne... Tether has public audited reports from BDO Italia S.p.A, the fifth largest independent firm globally, which are made available directly on their website. https://tether.to/en/transparency/?tab=reports You can keep your skepticism, but it helps to update your beliefs on new information. Bold of you to "Show HN:" a crypto project. As best I can tell, this will be use for all the things scam gift cards are typically used for now but more (because now crypto is involved somehow). Your 'stable-coin' doesn't inspire confidence either. Why can't I just gift someone some BTC or ETH? The only reason to include a coin of your own is for a pump and dump. Really though, this stuff all sounds quite technically difficult. It's surprising to me that people still work on these projects considering it's rather dense subject matter (fin-tech) _and_ it hasn't really proven to be useful for very much in the West. You can just gift ETH. And good news, as a stablecoin backed by dollars USD II is pegged to the dollar so no “pumping” or “dumping”. Interesting...the name of this makes it sound like criminals will be using it to transfer cash around the world, like with gift cards? Genuinely I'm curious, is there really a big market around gifting crypto, or is that market just sort of a front for criminal activity like why some retailers see a spike in gift card sales? There is a massive trillion dollar market around gifting dollars on gift cards today, but you can typically only use them on Visa and Mastercard networks. We think gifting stablecoins is a better way to do that. Gifting dollars on gift cards today is only supported by 99.9% of retailers. How many retailers accept USD II? It turns out that many people don’t spend the gift cards designated for specific retailers, but rather trade or sell them for cash in their local market. Looks interesting, would suggest going with Solana over Ethereum though, especially in 2024. Solana is heavily centralized and doesn't offer any scalability advantage over the new breed of onchain Ethereum rollups like Base. Not opposed to doing a Solana variant! Ethereum is more widely adopted and vastly more robust/decentralized. Spent more than 4x as much on my Ledger, and it's far from perfect and def not ideal for gifting crypto. I'm personally supportive of any company/product that wants to make managing crypto easier, safer, and cheaper. Kudos on the launch! You avoid a seed phrase, but how? I thought it was "not your keys not your coin". My understanding is someone who wants secure crypto needs to cryptographically safely generate a seed phrase. For signigicant amounts of money you will want that backed up. I guess if this is like a $50 gift card people are treating it like that and might accept if it gets lost then shrug. Burner comes with a pre-generated key or you can request that it generate a new key with entropy you supply (in part, it's hashed with entropy from multiple sources). In both cases you always need to trust the hardware, but this is true with any hardware wallet. I would always recommend using a multisig for storing large amounts of funds regardless of the wallet vendor. This is a bit like a gift card. Not the worst idea! I have been waiting 10 years to buy a coffee with crypto BTW. Any concern about conceptual namespace collision? The mobile app Burner is a completely different product (not to mention it fits in with the common definition of the term) We considered this, but thus far I’ve only had someone ask me if I’m a Burning Man participant after seeing the logo. I like it and will sign up for one. What funding did you get to launch this? I cannot find the About etc, however I did find the pages slow to load, so maybe I missed it? This is a really cool execution of an idea that's been floating out there a while. Next you just need a bitcoin one in the shape of a coin! Coins get you into more trouble than cards :) What’s in it for you? Are there fees involved for the end user to send a gift? If so, how much is it? >That’s why we’ve created USD II – the perfect stablecoin to give with Burner. It’s backed 1:1 with U.S. Dollars held in reserve by our partner, Bridge. Ah shit, here we go again. Why would I use this? The same reason one would use any other stablecoin like USDC, you want to send dollars to someone. The added benefit is that you don’t need to be worried about sending ETH as well to use USD II. Put another way, if I gift you a Ledger with USDC today, you as a possible crypto newbie need to work out how to get ETH to move that USDC. > Put another way, if I gift you a Ledger with USDC today, you as a possible crypto newbie need to work out how to get ETH to move that USDC. Or I could just gift them ETH instead of USDC You can’t even use an existing stable coin? Not interested. You can! We just don’t feature it in the gift card “optimized” mode since we do not subsidize the gas costs for existing stablecoins. Why wouldn't I gift using a paper wallet? Good question. We’ve spoken to a lot of people who have done this, and more often than not the recipient in the midst of some life event doesn’t imbue a QR code with value (and loses it/throws it away). hmm. maybe give cash instead then Maybe, but our first customers are people who want to gift crypto. And when your site dies is the crypto gone? No, great question. We offer an open source SDK library that can interface with chips today (https://github.com/arx-research/libhalo) and will open source the web app. Both would allow you to interact with Burner entirely offline as well if you use it for cold storage — libHaLo can easily be used with an off the shelf NFC reader through its CLI interface. Half offtopic note, but maybe you want to know: uBlock origin seems to have a beef with your site - by default it applies enough filters that only a brown background remains. Hmm, thanks for the report. I use uBlock origin as well but I might have it in some more permissive state... Same here.