Company Name: Cake wallet
Founders: Vic Sharma
Founding date: October 2017
Headquarters Location: 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 of steelfocuses on making bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies easier and more private to use through Cake wallet.
Sharma believes that a product must be easy to use to be widely adopted, which is why usability is at the center of Cake Wallet's mission.
“The very broad mission of Cake Wallet is to bring cryptocurrencies to the masses, to allow people to send, receive, hold, exchange cryptocurrencies in and out easily like they would with Venmo or PayPal,” Sharma told bitcoin. Magazine.
The other main dimension of Cake Wallet's mission is privacy.
Sharma believes strongly in the idea of transactional privacy, something he came to value after experiencing how public bitcoin is by default.
Prioritize privacy
Sharma began acquiring and mining bitcoin in November 2013. (The ASIC miners he bought on eBay and ran in the basement of his office building back then were minting him 0.2 bitcoins per day at the time.)
In the mid-2010s, Sharma wanted to do more with his bitcoin than just HODL. I wanted to use it, and at the time, only illicit online markets accepted bitcoins.
“Back then, it was difficult to find anyone who accepted bitcoins,” Sharma began. “You had Silk Roadand then AlfaBay and other darknet markets, and I thought, 'Let me check this out.'”
After attempting to make a purchase on one of those dark web sites, Sharma was immediately notified that he had crossed a legal line.
“I sent bitcoin directly from my Coinbase account to the darknet address,” Sharma said.
“And, I kid you not, within seconds I received an email from Coinbase saying, 'Your account has been suspended, deleted, or terminated because you have violated some terms of service and you need to move your assets as soon as possible.' I was like, 'What the hell? How did they find out? There must be millions of addresses out there. Are they tracking millions of addresses?'” he added.
“That made me understand the transparent nature of bitcoin.”
Sharma's experience using bitcoin on a darknet market not only enlightened him on how public a bitcoin ledger really is, but also introduced him to Monero (XMR).
“There was another special 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.
It was in search of an answer to this question that Sharma dove deep into the Monero rabbit hole. His research led him to adopt the concept of conducting private transactions with cryptocurrencies.
And then he created Cake Wallet, an exclusive wallet for Monero in its early days.
Pie 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 over five years, Cake Wallet users had little ability to make private bitcoin transactions using Cake Wallet. The wallet did not have a Lightning implementation (Lightning offers more privacy than bitcoin's base chain), nor many other privacy-enhancing features (aside from allowing users to add or select the node they want to use within the wallet).
If a user wanted to make a private payment, it was more appropriate to use XMR.
But bitcoin transactions through Cake Wallet became somewhat more private (although still not as private as using Monero) in September 2024, when Cake Wallet became the first bitcoin wallet to implement Silent Payments.
Silent payments allow users to receive payments in bitcoins without revealing their public bitcoin address. They are like PO Boxes for public bitcoin addresses (static addresses that allow users to receive bitcoins without having to reveal their actual bitcoin address) and are great for anyone raising funds or accepting payments through a public bitcoin address.
“When I read about Silent Payments, I immediately liked it,” Sharma said. “I wish the bitcoin community was more excited about this, because I think it's a great feature, especially if you post an address publicly, whether for donations or payments.”
Because one of Cake Wallet's most notable features, Bird Pay, relies on users to post their address publicly, Silent Payments is a game-changer.
Introduced about a year ago, Bird Pay allows Cake Wallet users to send bitcoins (or other crypto assets) to a contact using nothing more than an x identifier.
The recipient simply has to add their bitcoin address, which can be a Silent Payments address, to their bio or a pinned tweet, and Cake Wallet can pull the information from there.
“CakeWallet will use the twitter API, extract the address and send you the payment,” Sharma explained, also noting that this same feature can be used through Nostr or Mastodon.
“There is a place where you should put your Silent Payments address,” he added.
Cause for concern
While the bitcoin and Monero communities have embraced the privacy that Cake Wallet offers, Sharma worries that the US federal government may not be as interested in it.
In an era where the government is cracking down on privacy-enhancing bitcoin and crypto services, including <a target="_blank" href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/bitcoin-fog-operator-sentenced-money-laundering-conspiracy”>bitcoin FogTornado Cash and Samourai Wallet, it seems difficult for anyone creating privacy-preserving cryptographic technology not to think twice about what's at stake.
“I'm concerned, and not because we're doing something wrong,” Sharma said. “But something could be misrepresented or interpreted to make it seem like we're doing something wrong.”
As a precautionary measure, Sharma has moved Cake Wallet's headquarters overseas, 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 that Cake Wallet does not violate any laws. While his lawyers have assured him that this is not the case, he is aware that biased interpretations of laws and legal guidelines could 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 transfer company, even though we're not,'” Sharma explained.
“We are not touching user funds. We don't have access to them. Although we create the app, once it is on the user's phone, it is generated on their phone, not on our servers,” he added.
“But they may come back and say, 'But it initially connects to your node.' Who knows? I'm just using it as an example, although from the beginning we give users the option of not connecting to our node.”
Stay on mission
Despite a worrying legal backdrop, Sharma and the Cake Wallet team plan to stay the course and remain mission-driven, focused on making bitcoin easy and private to use.
“We have stuck to our ethos,” Sharma said.
“The team will say to each other, 'No, we shouldn't include this feature because it violates this privacy or that privacy or might do so in the future.' “We have those debates internally all the time,” he added.
And since Sharma has never accepted venture capital money for Cake Wallet, the only people he and his team have to answer to, other than themselves, are their users.
“Since we are not beholden to a VC, an investment firm or an angel investor who is looking for a return, no one is above us. “We can do what our users want, what our community wants.”
