Bringing culture and identity onchain with IRL
How IRL uses Privy to provision global, user-owned accounts through live events
Debbie Soon
|Jan 7, 2026
During Devconnect Buenos Aires, IRL powered a week of cultural activations across the city, from art exhibitions and nightlife to conferences and community gatherings. In total, 565 new users were onboarded to having a digital identity onchain, many for the first time, without a single mention of wallets, seed phrases, or crypto.
Powered by Privy’s embedded wallet infrastructure, IRL proved a shared thesis: when onboarding disappears, participation takes over. Culture, not crypto, became the gateway to onchain engagement, as well as the foundation for meaningful, ongoing participation.
What is IRL
IRL is a global loyalty network that turns checking into venues, attending events, and engaging with culture into ownership via IRL Points and tokens. By leveraging blockchain infrastructure, IRL enables programmable rewards and verifiable participation across a network of 40,000+ members spanning art galleries, nightclubs, festivals, and cultural spaces worldwide.
But onboarding people in-person comes with a distinct set of challenges:
Multi-minute signup flows fail in fast-moving environments
Crypto terminology alienates mainstream audiences
Seed phrases and key management introduce friction that breaks the user experience
At a concert, gallery opening, or club night, onboarding needs to happen instantly, or not at all. IRL needed infrastructure that could fade entirely into the background and not get in the way of guest participation.
Providing seamless onboarding with Privy
Privy provided IRL with an onboarding layer that matches the speed and energy of cultural spaces, while establishing a single, persistent global account for every user.
Across every IRL activation during Devconnect, Privy powered the same invisible flow:
Guests tap an IRL Touchpoint® (NFC chip) at the venue entrance
Via Privy, guests create an account or sign in using email, social login, or an existing wallet
Privy provisions a self-custodial crypto wallet that functions as the user’s global account. This acts as a durable identity for holding digital assets such as IRL Points, collectibles, rewards, and future access across venues, cities, and events
Guests immediately unlock event rewards, curated city guides, and digital experiences tied to their participation
Total time for setup was under 30 seconds, with no seed phrases, setup tutorials, or crypto explanations required.
For many attendees, especially local artists and creatives, this was their first global onchain account designed to travel with them wherever IRL shows up next.
One week, one invisible onboarding flow
Throughout Devconnect Buenos Aires, IRL and Privy powered a week of cultural activations spanning nightclubs, galleries, conferences, and community gatherings. Each had a single, consistent onboarding experience.
At the IRL Launch Party at Valerie’s Factory, Buenos Aires’ creative underground gathered for a night of music, art, and experimentation. Downstairs, DJs Millos Kaiser and Camila Isabel set the tone. Upstairs, the Café.exe exhibition presented by Artdao × Serpentine × Refraction reimagined the cyber café as a communal interface, featuring works by Alice Bucknell, Frenetik Void, Kevin Peter He, Kim Laughton, and others, alongside local installations including the now-viral Brainrot Room.
Every guest checked in at the door using Privy-powered onboarding. Accounts were created instantly, IRL Points were issued on the spot, and drink rewards unlocked throughout the night. Most attendees never realized they had created a self-custodial wallet; they only knew they had access to something exclusive.
The same flow scaled seamlessly to higher-throughput environments. At WalletCon, attendees checked in via IRL Touchpoint and Privy login to mint a generative artwork by Juan Pedro Vallejo, paired with a limited physical print (1 of 100), earning IRL Points and WalletConnect Foundation’s token $WCT in the process. All 100 artworks were claimed in under two hours.
From AI × Open Media Forum to Code × Culture to Pengu Sala, the experience remained unchanged. Whether someone was a developer at a Livepeer roundtable or a local discovering Buenos Aires nightlife for the first time, the interaction was always the same: tap, sign in, participate.
This consistency is critical to IRL’s long-term vision. As the network expands to thousands of venues worldwide, onboarding must stay invisible, reliable, and fast, and work equally well for both crypto-native and newcomers alike.
Why Privy + IRL works
In one week, IRL onboarded 565 new users using Privy-powered infrastructure, with most creating their first onchain account in under 30 seconds. But the real signal wasn’t account creation alone. It was what happened next.
Users collected artwork, redeemed rewards, explored curated city guides, and continued checking into venues well after Devconnect ended. Participation didn’t stop at the door. It accumulated, traveled, and carried meaning over time.
This works because IRL treats culture as infrastructure. Familiar behaviors like showing up, discovering spaces, and engaging with on-site activations became part of a portable digital identity rather than a one-off interaction tied to a single event or organizer.
Privy makes that possible by turning wallets into a global account layer that users can carry anywhere. The same account works across venues, cities, and borders, independent of any one platform. This means holding rewards, collectibles, and participation history can happen in a way that persists beyond a single moment.
In live cultural environments, there is no margin for friction or failure. Onboarding has to be instant, but the identity it creates has to be durable.
Together, IRL and Privy point to a model for mainstream onchain adoption:
Start with experience, not explanation
Let wallets fade from view while ownership remains
Use participation users already understand to build identity that compounds
The result is deeper, more durable onchain participation that is grounded in culture, and made more valuable because it follows people wherever they go.
What’s next
IRL is now scaling this model globally by partnering with festivals, venues, and cultural institutions to issue a single, portable onchain identity that persists across different organizers and cities. Each interaction builds on the last – allowing the value of participation and rewards to compound over time.
For events, brands, and consumer-facing activations, this signals a broader shift: wallets are becoming the global account layer for user identity and value, independent of any single app or event. With Privy, these accounts can be issued instantly, without requiring users to understand crypto or manage keys, while remaining flexible enough to support new incentives, experiences, and integrations as products evolve.
Privy is excited to continue powering the underlying wallet infrastructure, so IRL can focus on scaling partnerships and activating communities. The result is a system the events industry can reuse anywhere: one account per user, created in seconds, and designed to last.
