The security of your funds is as important as you earn them, investing and multiplying them. People often forget the basic security measures when trying to trade or mint NFTs. You don’t realize it but there are scammers and bad actors trying to steal your funds or drain your wallets and once you make a small mistake, your entire funds from the wallet can get drained in a few seconds.
That’s where it becomes very important to save your tokens and NFTs in a vault, or a wallet that you don’t use to mint or connect to random websites. That’s where the term Burner Wallet comes in. What is it? It is just another crypto wallet, like the ones where you have your tokens and assets. It is nothing different, but it has nothing but enough tokens for doing a few transactions.
There are several free projects, or even paid ones that don’t go the launchpad route to launch their NFT mints, and it isn’t easy to trust anyone because the website could be a potential scam, and as soon as you connect your wallet to that website, you could lose your assets. The burner wallet is something where you have like enough amount for a few transactions so the maximum loss you would face is only that much when you interact with the website or with a smart contract that wasn’t supposed to do what it is doing.
A few things to keep in mind.
How do I open a burner wallet?
It’s no different from the regular wallet. People use the specific name for it because it is easier to talk about it in terms of security. As soon as you hear the word “Burner”, you should remember that it is a temporary one. So, if you are talking about Aptos itself, if you have a Martian wallet, just click on “Add account” and a new wallet will be created in a few seconds. Transfer minimum funds from your main wallet, and interact with any minting site only with this newly created wallet.
Should I keep changing my burner wallet always?
It’s always wise to do that every few interactions, because look, in the world of Crypto and NFTs, you can see websites gaining access to the transfer of your funds and might do it later as well when you aren’t interacting with the website. Once you are done minting an NFT on a random website, it’s best to send the NFT to your main wallet, and then go to Connected Sites in the Settings of the wallet, and revoke the access. But if you want to keep changing burner wallets, you can do it.
Should I use burner wallets on even trusted launchpads?
I don’t. But you can be different. I use my main wallet there on launchpads like Topaz, Souffl3, and BlueMove because I have enough trust in them to always transact, trade and minting won’t be any different and it makes it easy for me when I am doing multiple mints. But, if you are going through the Whitelisting process on projects, it’s probably good to submit your burner wallet and mint from there itself and move the NFT to your main wallet. It’s all about the trust you have in the websites and launchpads.
How much amount should I have in my Burner wallet?
For example, if we are on Aptos, I’d keep 0.1 APT and be good to go for a few transactions. Depends from chain to chain, but Aptos, Solana, Polygon, etc. have a very less fee compared to ETH.
