Burner wallets: the case for a disposable trading wallet

The short answer

Every new mint, launchpad, or unfamiliar site you connect a wallet to is a wallet you're trusting with a signature you haven't fully audited. A burner wallet contains a capped amount of capital, is used for exactly that kind of exposure, and is treated as fully expendable. If it gets drained, the loss is bounded by design—because you decided the cap before you needed it.

This is a position-sizing discipline dressed up as a security practice. It doesn't stop a drainer from working. It stops a drainer from reaching your savings.

Setting one up correctly

• Generate a genuinely new wallet. A new seed phrase, not a sub-account or "new wallet" inside the same seed if your wallet app derives them from one root phrase—check whether your wallet's accounts share a recovery phrase before assuming they're isolated.
• Fund it with a set amount. Decide the number before you start trading, not after a position is already open. Treat top-ups as a deliberate decision, not a reflex.
• Use it for the risky part only. New launchpad mints, unfamiliar dApps, claim pages, and anything you found through a link rather than a bookmark.
• Sweep winners out promptly. Move realized gains to a separate wallet you don't use for signing new contracts—see compartmentalization.

When to rotate

A burner isn't necessarily single-use, but it should be rotated—replaced with a freshly generated wallet—on a schedule that matches your risk appetite, not left running indefinitely while it accumulates approvals and dApp connections you've forgotten about. Rotating clears out old delegate approvals automatically, since a new wallet starts with none.

A reasonable trigger: rotate after any session where you connected to more than a handful of new sites, after any suspicious pop-up or unexpected signature request, or on a fixed calendar cadence if you trade daily.

Primary and official sources