Shift : Offline, Gasless and Private Payments for Devcon 8

Devcon Improvement Proposals (DIPs)
1

Title: Shift : Offline, Gasless P2P Payments for Devcon 8

Authors: Shift Foundation , Madhav Khandelwal (tg: @madhavyu), Prath (tg: @rugmebb)
Resources Required: Physical space at venue (a Shift loading desk near registration), on-site operations coordination, and communications support. No engineering resources requested from the Devcon team.

:brain: What do you suggest?

Give Devcon 8 a private, gasless, offline way to pay inside the venue, whatever the network is doing. Large venues like this are notorious for network congestion during big gatherings, when thousands of devices saturate the connectivity that on-chain payments depend on.

Shift is digital cash on a secure-hardware card. Value lives in the card’s secure element, and two cards settle a payment directly between themselves — no validator, no network round-trip, no gas. The hardware itself prevents double-spending. Because the payment never touches the network, a tap works whether connectivity is great, terrible, or absent. Attendees load a card with ETH or stablecoins once (at a Shift desk near registration, on reliable connectivity), then pay participating booths by tapping. On the receiving side, a booth doesn’t need special hardware: the Shift app turns any existing NFC smartphone into a point-of-sale where the buyer taps their card to the phone and the amount is read and settled or the booth can use a dedicated Shift POS device. Either way, booths receive directly and can bridge their funds back to their preferred network anytime.

:bullseye: Motivation & Rationale

  • How does this improve the attendee experience?

    At a packed venue, the two payment options both give something up. Fiat terminals work but reintroduce intermediaries, fees, and a banking dependency. On-chain payments are open and self-custodial but depend on the network being responsive — and under the device density of an event this size, that’s exactly when crypto checkout gets slow, expensive, or stuck. Shift keeps the open, self-custodial, crypto-native properties while removing the network from the moment of payment: settlement is direct, instant, gasless, and private. It doesn’t compete with a booth’s own chain or wallet — it replaces the clunky, network-dependent checkout that crypto-accepting booths already struggle with.

  • What Ethereum use case does it showcase?

    At an Ethereum conference where tickets are purchasable in ETH on L1 and booths frequently accept crypto, a crypto payment that stalls is a pointed failure: the transaction meant to show Ethereum working in the real world, failing in the room where the ecosystem is watching. Shift would be a live demonstration of ledgerless settlement: value moved directly between two pieces of secure hardware, with double-spend prevented by the hardware rather than by a validator network. It delivers cash-like properties: no double-spend, no fee, transaction privacy — with secure hardware available today, on a roadmap inspired by the long-standing cryptographic goal of unforgeable “quantum money.” For many attendees, a tap that moves value with no network and no gas will be their first tangible experience of what the hardware can make possible.

:hammer_and_wrench: Implementation

  • **How it works?

    1. Load (online, at registration)**
    The attendee receives a Shift card and loads it once with ETH or stablecoins, where connectivity is reliable. This is the only step that touches the network.

    2. Carry in
    Value now lives on the card’s secure element — like a hardware wallet. No further connectivity is needed to spend.

    3. Pay (offline, at the booth)
    The attendee pays a participating booth by tapping. The booth receives on either its own NFC smartphone running the Shift app as a point-of-sale, or a dedicated Shift POS device. Settlement is card-to-endpoint and direct: sender decrements, receiver increments. No network, no gas.

    4. Settle (online, anytime)
    Users withdraw or bridge funds whenever they like, or keep the card as a hardware wallet for private, direct P2P transfers between users.

  • Have you done this before at another event?

    Shift has been piloted with real users, settling live card-to-card payments outside a lab. It has not yet run at an event at conference scale and we’d rather prove it to you in person than ask you to take our word for it.

    Proof before scale. We propose a live, in-person pilot with the Devcon team at a Road to Devcon event ahead of Mumbai: you make real offline, gasless payments on Shift cards yourself. If it works to your satisfaction, we deploy full-venue at Devcon 8.

    This de-risks the decision completely. You approve full rollout only after seeing it settle in your own hands.

    To everyone who’s reading this,

    Shift is a step on the road to quantum money. If you care about privacy-preserving payments and Shift sounds interesting to you, we’d like you to try it firsthand. Reach out and we’ll ship a card to you to try.

    And to the Devcon team: we’d be glad to have you experience Shift before anyone else. Reach out on [Twitter/X].

:gear: Operational Requirements & Ownership

Scope: a live in-person pilot with the Devcon team at a Road to Devcon event, then a full-venue deployment at Devcon 8. Our cards are mass-production ready, so scale is not a constraint — we can equip every participating booth and issue attendee cards at the volume the event needs. We’ll right-size the exact booth count and card quantities with the team.

  • What it takes to run at Devcon 8

    • A Shift loading desk near registration, where attendees receive and load cards on reliable connectivity.

    • A way for each participating booth to receive payments. Two options: (a) the booth installs the Shift app on a phone it already owns. The buyer taps their card to the phone and it acts as the card reader, or (b) Shift provides a dedicated POS device.

    • A dedicated Shift operations team on-site for the full event.

  • Who will be responsible for running it on site?

    Shift owns this end to end: card manufacturing, on-site staffing, the payment operation, and support. If anything goes wrong, our people are on the ground to resolve it. We’re asking Devcon for partnership, not engineering resources.

    What we ask of Devcon

    • Official payment-partner status for Devcon 8.

    • Space for the loading desk near registration.

    • Communications support so attendees and booths know the option exists.

    • Financing: we’re open to designing the right model together rather than proposing numbers here.

  • What other projects could this integrate with?

    Shift is a payment layer, not a competing chain, so it sits alongside whatever a booth already uses. We’re glad to integrate with other Devcon 8 activations and with booths running their own ecosystems.

:link: Links & Additional Information

Shift Protocol Whitepaper : https://www.shiftfdn.com/whitepaper.pdf
Shift Foundation Website : https://www.shiftfdn.com/
Telegram Links for POCs : 1] @rugmebb 2]@madhavyu

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