What is Burner Wallet in Crypto & NFTs and why should you use it?

The safety of your funds is as important as earning them, investing and multiplying them. People often forget the basic safety precautions when trying to trade or create NFTs. You don’t realize it, but there are scammers and bad actors trying to steal your money or empty your wallets, and when you make a small mistake, the entire funds from your wallet can be drained in a matter of seconds.

This is where it becomes very important to store your tokens and NFTs in a vault, or a wallet that you don’t use to create or connect to random websites. This is where the term Burner Wallet comes in. What is it? It’s just another crypto wallet, like the ones where you hold tokens and assets. It’s nothing different, but it has nothing but enough tokens to make a few transactions.

There are several free projects, or even paid projects that don’t go the route of launching their NFT coins, and it’s not easy to trust anyone because the site can be a potential scam, and as soon as you connect your wallet to it website, you may lose your assets. The burner wallet is something where you have enough funds for a few transactions, so the maximum loss you will face is only so much when you interact with the site or with a smart contract that was not intended to do what it does.

A few things to keep in mind.

How do I open a burner wallet?

It is no different from the regular wallet. People use the specific name for it because it’s 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’re talking about Aptos itself, if you have a Mars wallet, just click “Add Account” and a new wallet will be created in a few seconds. Transfer minimum funds from your main wallet and interact with all coin sites only with this newly created wallet.

Should I always change the burner wallet?

It’s always a good idea to do it with a few interactions, because see, in the crypto and NFT world, you can see sites accessing the transfer of your funds and can do it later even when you don’t interact with the site. When you’re done creating an NFT on a random site, it’s best to send the NFT to your main wallet, then go to Connected Sites in your wallet settings and revoke access. But if you want to keep switching burner wallets, you can.

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 trust them enough to always trade, trading and coining will be no different and it makes it easy for me when I do multiple mints. But if you go through the Whitelisting process on projects, it’s probably fine to submit the burner wallet and coin from there yourself and move the NFT to your main wallet. It’s all about the trust you have in the websites and launchpads.

How much should I have in my Burner wallet?

For example, if we are on Aptos, I want to keep 0.1 APT and be good to go for a few transactions. Depends on chain to chain but Aptos, Solana, Polygon etc have very less fee compared to ETH.