Announcing Spark: A Web-Based Low-Security Burner Wallet

The team behind Trinity is today announcing a new wallet, Spark. Spark is a low-security, temporary web wallet, or “burner wallet”. The concept of a burner wallet was first established by Austin Griffith of the Ethereum ecosystem. The idea is that you use the wallet for small amounts of funds, for a short period of time, and then you “burn” it, wiping the seed and transaction history.  

In recent months, we have been experimenting with new frameworks and tooling.IOTA Labs is a new project within the IOTA Foundation to funnel our experimentation into something tangible. Whenever we create an experimental app, we will release it under IOTA Labs. Spark is the first app to be released under IOTA Labs and has served as a testing ground for some new ideas and tools. The results will feed into decisions around Trinity V2’s tech stack and functionality.  

Firstly, Spark makes use of the IOTA JavaScript account module. The account module introduced a new approach to tackling one-time use addresses in IOTA, using a payment request system. By specifying an expected amount and timeout on the payment request, we can ensure funds do not arrive on a spent address. When you couple payment requests with a chat system, as would be possible in Trinity V2, you have a very smooth peer-to-peer transaction system. It is important to note that reusable address solutions are also actively under research.  

The second area of experimentation concerns the tech stack. Spark is built withSvelte, a powerful JavaScript framework. Svelte is highly-performant and has learned from many of the drawbacks in other JavaScript frameworks. We have also experimented with tooling for cross-platform apps, and alternatives to Electron. We will share more on that soon.

To test out Spark, head to spark.iota.org (and spark-devnet.iota.org for the Devnet version). You can top up your spark wallet with funds using the latest version of Trinity— 1.2.0 (Simply scan a payment request QR or copy a link into Trinity). Create payment requests, send and receive tokens, try out the dark mode, back-up and burn. Easy peasy.  

The Spark repository is open source. Check out the code at github.com/iotaledger/spark-wallet.  

Please note:Trinity does not currently use the account module, so if you wish to move funds back to Trinity, you will need to export a SeedVault backup in Spark and add this as a new account in Trinity.

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As always, if you want to get involved with the development of Trinity or Spark, have any comments, questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to get in contact with the dev team on our Discord server.