We just launched Burner Machine at San Francisco Blockchain Week 2019. It’s a web app that lets you launch anonymous, self-terminating virtual machines and pay with cryptocurrency. No signup, no identity, no credit card. Choose a machine type, pick a location, send some ETH (or DAI, USDC, etc.), and you get a cloud VM for three hours for about a dollar.

The problem we’re trying to solve: the cloud is controlled by three companies (AWS, Azure, GCP), and you can’t use any of them without handing over your identity. We wanted to build something where the payment itself is the authentication. You send crypto to an ephemeral wallet generated in your browser — when the transaction confirms, the machine spins up. No MetaMask required, though you can use it if you want.

The flow is three steps: pick your machine type (Linux or Windows), choose a datacenter location (Oregon, Singapore, Dublin, Mumbai, São Paulo, and more), and pay. The confirm screen gives you a QR code and an address. Once the transaction lands on-chain, the machine starts provisioning. We added a little mini-game to play while you wait for it to boot.

Burner Machine is built on top of Ocelot, a decentralized cloud computing platform we built over the last couple years. The bigger vision is to fork the cloud — keep the hardware but replace the operating system with something open and permissionless.

We handed out seed phrase cards at the conference — each one good for a free VM. The front has a Burner Token, the back has your 12-word seed phrase. Type it in to burnermachine.com and get a machine.

Thank you to Lon Lundgren for building Ocelot and for his talk at SF Blockchain Week where we exhibited Burner Machine.