IOTA Releases Spark: New Web Wallet On The Market

IOTA releases Spark, a new web wallet that is easily set up in a few seconds and can also be just as easily erased in the same amount of time. The announcement referred to the app as a burning wallet and for the IOTA News today we can read that:

 “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.”

According to the announcement, the main feature of the wallet is its privacy. Once a Spark wallet is burned, the transaction history is erased as well forever. The burning doesn’t remove from IOTA’s ledger but it does remove the data from the wallet itself. Anyone that can use your smartphone cannot see your transactions or steal your funds. IOTA releases the wallet with a basic feature interface commonly found in most mobile wallets. One screen allows the payments to be sent to another address through a QR code or a hyperlink. Spark offers a request from the users that want to receive the funds and also includes a market price chart for time frames.

The settings include a way to switch between currencies and languages as well as to back up the wallet and to restore the data to the IOTA trinity wallet. Of course, the settings page offers the main feature which is to destroy the wallet with is protected with a red coded screen to prevent accidental deletion. Spark can be used for real spending but is currently only experimental. According to the announcement:

 “IOTA Labs is a new project within the IOTA Foundation to funnel our experimentation into something tangible. Spark is the first app to be released under IOTA Labs and has served as a testing ground for some new ideas and tools.”

Spark offers a simple way to use it with a single-use address. Thanks to the JavaScript account model of IOTA, the wallet ensures that funds will never arrive at an address that has been used to spend the funds. Spark is not intended for use as a highly secure wallet and is still important to avoid reusing IOTA addresses for security reasons. IOTA is not the first project to offer this kind of service. Austin Griffith created Burner Wallet for Ethereum which has a similar interface and features but the wallets from Ethereum’s larger ecosystem offer dApp plugins and have a built-in ERC20 token swap.