Squarelink EventPass: Mainstream Adoption of Crypto through Events
At ETHDenver in February 2019, Austin Griffith released his proof of concept for the Burner Wallet — a crypto wallet, preloaded with funds, used to create pop-up economies at events. Burner Wallet makes retail payments or interactions as simple as scanning a QR code.
At Squarelink, we’re super excited about any tech that enables non-crypto users to get involved in the space, so Burner Wallet was a huge inspiration for us. One limitation with the Burner Wallet solution was that wallets aren’t meant to be incredibly secure, so long term use is not encouraged (hence the name “Burner”).
We wanted to augment the Burner Wallet solution in two ways:
- Create a physical wallet that someone could scan/import and instantly have gain its exclusive and secure ownership — a wallet that could be used worry-free far beyond the duration of an event.
- Create a fully end-to-end service for event organizers to quickly bootstrap their crypto economy — everything from card printing, wallet generation, account funding, fiat off-ramping, to building a custom cryptocurrency.
What resulted: Squarelink EventPass
What is EventPass?
EventPass is a tool for organizers to easily build an event-wide economy and quickly onboard people into an environment where they can explore blockchain and crypto in the most pain-free way possible — all integrated directly into the Squarelink Wallet platform.
Every attendee receives a card with a QR code that, when scanned, imports a wallet into their Squarelink account that has been pre-funded with the currency created for that event.
Attendees can use their new wallet to purchase basically anything at the event. Vendors (namely food trucks) can request transactions via Squarelink’s PoS system (not proof-of-stake) and an attendee just has to scan and confirm to get going.
We made a few UI tweaks and built out an extendible PoS system — but these core offerings generally follow suit with Burner Wallet’s user experience.
EventPass Security
To offer wallets that people could trust enough to use beyond the duration of the event, we had to make a few adjustments to the account creation and import strategies. There are two main points of failure in Burner Wallet’s security approach: CDNs Logging Private Keys in URLs (Bezos has all of your Burner keys in a drawer in his desk now) and Having Your Private Key in Plaintext on a Physical Object That Could Easily Be Stolen or Lost.
To get around both of these, we approached the problem similarly to Squarelink’s core authentication protocol. Each wallet we generate is accompanied by a “server key” that is stored in our databases and encrypts the wallet’s private key. The resulting cipher is recorded on a physical object (plastic card) and the wallet’s private key itself is deleted entirely.
When an attendee scans their EventPass, they’re really retrieving the server key corresponding to the ciphertext on their card. The wallet is then decrypted and the server key is deleted.
With this split key approach, we preserve the non-custodial nature of the Burner Wallets while adding on A TON of much needed centralized protections to each card:
- Once someone scans a card, they own it. Nobody else can scan it. We (Squarelink) don’t even have access to the original private key. You can feel safe tossing it on the floor.
- While cards are in transport, production, or just before the event starts — we can disable access to the server keys and ensure each wallet’s integrity when the event starts.
- We can make sure that attendees are only able to import one card so one person doesn’t wind up with $1000 to spend on food (obviously more of a plus for event organizers).
For Event Organizers
We wanted to make it as easy as possible to create these “pop-up economies” but there’s a lot that goes into it — creating the physical cards/objects, generating wallets, funding them, fiat off-ramping for merchants, getting merchants set up to accept crypto payments, creating and deploying a new currency, attendee check-in, etc.
So we decided to launch EventPass as a service that does it all — end to end (“Point… click… economy?” — I’ll come up with a tagline later).
We were incredibly lucky to get ETHGlobal to try out this service for our first go-around at ETHBoston (September 6–8, 2019). Big shoutout to their team!
If you’re interested in using EventPass or discussing it further, feel free to ping me on Telegram @theAlexPatin and/or follow me on Twitter @theAlexPatin!
Looking forward to having you all try it out at ETHBoston! Peace.
Acknowledgements
Big shoutout to Austin Griffith and the Burner Wallet Collective for their hard work to make blockchain more accessible!
