Company name: Cake wallet
Founders: Vic Sharma
Date of establishment: October 2017
Location of the head office: Saint Kitts and Nevis (and the staff is remote)
Number of employees: 14
Website: https://cakewallet.com/
Public or private? Private
When Vik Sharma is not serving as CEO of Freedom languagehe aims to make bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies simpler and more private Cake wallet.
Sharma believes that a product must be user-friendly if it wants to be widely accepted. That’s why usability is central to Cake Wallet’s mission.
“Cake Wallet’s very broad mission is to bring cryptocurrency to the masses, to enable people to easily send, receive, hold, exchange cryptocurrency, on-ramp and off-ramp like you would with Venmo or PayPal, ” Sharma told Bitcoin. Magazine.
The other primary dimension of the Cake Wallet mission is privacy.
Sharma is a big believer in the idea of transactional privacy, something he came to value after experiencing how public bitcoin is by default.
Prioritize privacy
Sharma first started acquiring and mining Bitcoin in November 2013. (The ASIC miners he bought from eBay and ran in the basement of his office building at the time earned him as much as 0.2 bitcoin per day.)
In the mid-2010s, Sharma wanted to do more with his bitcoin than just HODL. He wanted to use it, and at the time it was mostly only illegal online marketplaces that accepted bitcoin.
“Back then, it was hard to find anyone taking bitcoin,” Sharma began. ‘You did Silk Roadand then AlphaBay and other darknet markets, and I thought, “Let me check this out.”
After attempting to make a purchase on one of those darknet sites, Sharma was promptly told he had crossed a legal line.
“I sent Bitcoin directly from my Coinbase account to the darknet address,” Sharma said.
“And I’m not kidding, within seconds I got an email from Coinbase saying, ‘Your account has been suspended, deleted, or canceled because you have violated some terms of service and you need to move your assets as quickly as possible. I thought, ‘What’s going on? How did they find out? There must be millions of addresses. Are they tracking millions of addresses?” he added.
“That woke me up to the transparent nature of Bitcoin.”
Sharma’s experience using Bitcoin on a darknet marketplace not only gave him insight into how public a ledger Bitcoin actually is, but it also introduced him to Monero (XMR).
“There was another specialty coin on AlphaBay called Monero, and I thought, ‘Why not Litecoin or Ethereum or whatever was big at the time — why just Bitcoin and Monero?’” Sharma said.
In seeking an answer to this question, Sharma went deep into the Monero rabbit hole. His research led him to embrace the concept of private cryptocurrency transactions.
And so he created Cake Wallet – a Monero-only wallet from the ground up.
Cake wallet and silent payments
Cake Wallet was launched in January 2018. About a year later, Sharma also added Bitcoin functionality to the wallet.
However, for more than five years, Cake Wallet users had few options to privately transact with bitcoin using Cake Wallet. The wallet did not have a Lightning implementation (Lightning offers more privacy than the Bitcoin base chain), nor many other privacy-enhancing features (aside from allowing users to add or select the node they want to use in the wallet).
If a user wanted to make a private payment, XMR was better suited.
But Bitcoin transactions through Cake Wallet became a little more private (although still not as private as using Monero) in September 2024, when Cake Wallet became the first Bitcoin wallet to be implemented. Silent payments.
Silent Payments allows users to receive Bitcoin payments without revealing their public Bitcoin address. They’re similar to public Bitcoin address mailboxes – static addresses that allow users to receive Bitcoin without having to reveal their actual Bitcoin address – and they’re great for anyone raising money or accepting payments through a public Bitcoin address.
“When I read about Silent Payments, I immediately liked it,” says Sharma. “I wish the Bitcoin community was more excited about it because I think it’s a great feature, especially if you post an address publicly, whether for donations or payments.”
Since one of Cake Wallet’s most notable features, Bird Pay, relies on users posting their address publicly, Silent Payments is a game changer.
Unveiled about a year ago, Bird Pay allows Cake Wallet users to send bitcoin (or other crypto assets) to a contact using nothing more than an X handle.
The recipient simply needs to add their bitcoin address, which can be a Silent Payments address, to their bio or a pinned tweet, and Cake Wallet can retrieve the information there.
“CakeWallet will use the Twitter API, get the address and send the payment to you,” Sharma explains, also noting that the same feature can be used via Nostr or Mastodon.
“There is a place where you have to enter your address for silent payments,” he added.
Cause for concern
While the Bitcoin and Monero communities have embraced the privacy that Cake Wallet offers, Sharma is concerned that the US federal government might not be so keen.
In an era when the government is cracking down on privacy-enhancing Bitcoin and crypto services, including Bitcoin fog, Tornado money And Samurai walletit seems difficult for anyone developing such privacy-preserving crypto technology not to think twice about what is at stake.
“I’m concerned about it – and not because we’re doing anything wrong,” Sharma said. “But something can be twisted or interpreted in a way that makes it look like we’re doing something wrong.”
As a precaution, Sharma moved Cake Wallet’s headquarters abroad, from Florida to Nevis and Saint Kitts, something Roger Ver advised him to do.
He also discusses all Cake Wallet updates with the company’s general counsel to ensure Cake Wallet is not breaking any laws. Although his lawyers have assured him that this is not the case, he is aware that skewed interpretations of laws and regulatory guidelines could potentially cause problems for Cake Wallet.
“If you dig deep enough into the way the laws are written, they might say, ‘No, you’re a money transmitter company, even though we’re not,’” Sharma explains.
“We don’t touch users’ money. We don’t have access to it. Even though we built the app, once that app is on the user’s phone, it is generated on their phone, not on our servers,” he added.
“But they might come back and say, ‘But it connects to your node in the first place.’ Who knows? I’m just using that as an example, even though we immediately give users the option not to connect to our node.”
Stay on mission
Despite a troubling legal background, Sharma and the Cake Wallet team plan to stay the course and remain mission-driven, focused on making Bitcoin both easy and private to use.
“We have stayed true to our ethos,” Sharma said.
“The team is calling each other out like, ‘No, we shouldn’t add this feature because it violates this privacy or violates that privacy or could do so in the future. We are having these debates internally all the time,” he added.
And because Sharma never took venture capital money for Cake Wallet, the only people he and his team are accountable to, aside from themselves, are their users.
“Since we are not dependent on a venture capital fund, an investment firm or an angel investor looking for returns, no one is sitting on top of us. We can do what our users want, what our community wants.”