Ethereum’s Newest 40 Users and thoughts on the next 10,000: A Quick Burner Wallet Case Study

Seattle is a high tech city. Home to mammoths like Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing, its population is well versed in the constantly evolving culture around technology. This is why I wanted to revive the Ethereum meetup — it is places like Seattle that can help take Ethereum to the next level. There is so much talent, intellect and passion, the only thing I felt was lacking when I moved there was more cohesive local community.

Ethereum meetups in Seattle restarted in January 2019 after about a year hiatus. So far they have been focused mostly on people and projects in the local community building dapps and developer tooling. These meetings have been a great place for those who are interested in learning more to start to familiarize themselves as well as get to meet like-minded people. It has been a first step in building community. But for us to really get to know one another better and get to know others, shared experiences are the important next step. We need to get people to start really USING the tools that are being built on Ethereum.

I had gotten to use the burner wallet developed by Austin Griffith a few times over the past 4 months and knew, like many others, that it was something special. It was amazing to see the ease and speed of the application itself, as well as its ability to go global — cypherpunk speakeasies have been held in Colorado, New York, Paris, Laramie, Tegulcigalpa, and probably more. I felt it was time for Seattle to join the club.

Seattle Cypherpunk Speakeasy Case Study

For more detailed descriptions of how the burner wallet works, there is a plethora of reading here, here, here, here, here and you should also probably follow @austingriffith on Twitter to keep up with his latest developments. To explain briefly though, the burner wallet is a website that abstracts out most of the complexity of “traditional” crypto wallets from the user. All you need to do is scan a QR code and BOOM, xdai, which is the equivalent of $1, is sitting on your phone ready to be used. We played with this application for our last meetup.

The event was a smashing success. First of all, we had an all star roster of speakers:

• Kurt Barry from MakerDAO gave us a primer on stablecoins and more specifically dai.
• Boris Mann spoke on the importance of open source development and “non-code” contributions to Ethereum.
• Brooklyn Zelenka educated us on how Fission is making IPFS usable for application developers.

Coordinating the event was also a community driven initiative. Community members sourced bar locations, found a sponsor, designed the graphic for the wallet, worked the door, donated a Ledger for a raffle, and helped troubleshoot the tech (shoutout to Seth Goldfarb, Anastasia Mackert, Ken Hodler, Alvaro Jimenez and of course, Austin Griffith).

Some of the feedback we got from the event included:

“Literally the easiest app onboarding ever”

“So cool this is actually money”

“Beer actually tastes better when you buy it with crypto”

And my favorite from one of the bartenders:

“You nerds seem really cool!”

Lots of attendees had never actually used crypto before. While loading up the wallets and paying for drinks was easy and fun, what’s really cool about the burner wallet is how you can move the crypto off of it. It only takes one step to change xdai to dai, and one more to exchange it to ETH which opens up a whole new crypto economy and culture to users. This functionality spurred attendees to think through what else lies beyond the burner wallet. This is the opportunity that every technologist wants — get people onboarded easily and hook them on other functionalities and the future more generally.

The next 10,000:

Last Tuesday we onboarded ~40 new people into the Ethereum ecosystem using the burner wallet. Whether its through the burner wallet or other technologies, here’s what I think we need to do to onboard the next 10,000:

• Experiential learning is super important. Lots of meetups that I’ve been to focus on presentations that are aimed at education that may or may not have a call to action at the end. But when you can get people creating, playing, or in some other way intimately interacting with the tech we will see mass adoption much faster.
• Support builders that are bringing about the next paradigm. Austin is a force to be reckoned with. Not only has he himself gotten a ton people to use crypto, he has enabled others to do the same. These are the kinds of people that we as a community need to build up to enable them to do what they do best.
• Get outside of the crypto bubble. The Ethereum community is an awesome and diverse group. But it is also still fairly small. Community builders should be focused on both nurturing the groups that exist but also working to expand their reach.

These are the principles that I plan to live by in growing the Ethereum community, and I hope others will join me.

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