Company Name: Cake wallet
Founders: Vic Sharma
Establishment date: October 2017
Headquarters location: Saint Kitts and Nevis (and staff are remote)
Number of employees: 14
Website: https://cakewallet.com/
Public or private? private
When Vic Sharma is not CEO Liberty SteelIt has focused on making Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies easier and more private to use Cake wallet.
Sharma believes a product must be easy to use if it is to be widely adopted, which is why ease of use is at the center of Cake Wallet’s mission.
“The very broad mission of Cake Wallet is to bring cryptocurrencies to the masses, to enable people to send, receive, hold, swap and exchange cryptocurrencies as easily as you would with Venmo or PayPal,” Sharma told Bitcoin. magazine.
Another core dimension of Cake Wallet’s mission is privacy.
Sharma is a strong believer in the idea of transaction privacy, something he came to appreciate after experiencing the reach of Bitcoin virtually.
Prioritize privacy
Sharma first started acquiring and mining Bitcoin in November 2013. (ASIC miners he bought on eBay and worked in the basement of his office building at the time were mining 0.2 Bitcoin per day for him at the time.)
By mid-2010, Sharma wanted to do more with his Bitcoin rather than just store it. He wanted to use it, and at the time, only online illicit markets accepted Bitcoin.
“At that time, it was difficult to find anyone who would accept Bitcoin,” Sharma began. “You had Silk Roadand then Alphabay And other dark web markets, and I thought: “Let me check this out.”
After trying 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 a 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 violated some terms of service and you need to move your assets as quickly as possible.'” I was like, ‘What the heck? How did they find out about that?’ “There must be millions of addresses out there. Are they tracking millions of addresses?”
“It woke me up to the transparent nature of Bitcoin.”
Not only did Sharma’s experience using Bitcoin in the dark web market enlighten him to how widespread Bitcoin is on the ledger, but it also introduced him to Monero (XMR).
“There was another private currency 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 his quest to answer this question, Sharma delved deeper into the Monero rabbit hole. His research led him to embrace the concept of dealing specifically with cryptocurrencies.
Thus he created Cake Wallet – a Monero wallet just in its infancy.
Cake wallet and silent payments
Cake Wallet was launched in January 2018. About a year later, Sharma added Bitcoin functionality to the wallet as well.
However, for more than five years, Cake Wallet users have not had the ability to privately transact with Bitcoin using Cake Wallet. The wallet did not have a Lightning implementation (Lightning offers more privacy than the Bitcoin main chain), nor many other privacy-enhancing features (apart from allowing users to add or select which node they want to use within the wallet).
If the user wants to make a private payment, it is more convenient to use XMR.
But transacting Bitcoin via 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 enables users to receive Bitcoin payments without revealing their public Bitcoin address. They’re similar to mailboxes for public Bitcoin addresses — fixed addresses that allow users to receive Bitcoin without having to reveal their actual Bitcoin address — and are great for anyone fundraising or accepting payments via a public Bitcoin address.
“When I read about silent payments, I was immediately impressed,” Sharma said. “I wish the Bitcoin community was more excited about it, because I think it’s a great feature, especially if you’re publishing an address publicly, whether for donations or payments.”
Since one of Cake Wallet’s most notable features, Bird Pay, hinges on users posting their addresses publicly, Silent Payments is a game-changer.
Unveiled about a year ago, Bird Pay enables Cake Wallet users to send Bitcoin (or other crypto assets) to a contact using nothing more than an X handle.
The recipient simply has to add their Bitcoin address, which can be a silent payments address, to either their bio or a pinned tweet, and Cake Wallet can fetch the information from there.
“CakeWallet will use the Twitter API, pull the address and send the payment to you,” Sharma explained, also noting that this same feature could be used via Nostr or Mastodon.
“There is a place where you should put the silent payments address,” he added.
Cause for concern
While the Bitcoin and Monero communities have embraced the privacy offered by Cake Wallet, Sharma is concerned that the US federal government may not be so keen.
In an era when the government is cracking down on privacy-enhancing bitcoin and cryptocurrency services, including… Bitcoin fogAnd Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet, it seems hard for anyone creating such privacy-preserving encrypted technology not to think twice about what’s at stake.
“This does worry me, not that we are doing anything wrong,” Sharma said. “But something can be distorted or interpreted to make it seem like we’re doing something wrong.”
As a precaution, Sharma moved Cake Wallet’s headquarters abroad, from Florida to Nevis and St. Kitts, something Roger Ver advised him to do.
It also discusses all updates made to Cake Wallet with the company’s General Counsel to ensure that Cake Wallet does not violate any laws. While his lawyers assured him that it was not, he realizes that skewed 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 don’t touch users’ money. We don’t have access to them. Even though we created the app, once that app is on a user’s phone, it’s created on their phone, not on our servers,” he added.
“But they might come back and say, ‘But it connects to your node first.’ Who knows? I’m just using that as an example — even though we previously give the option to users not to connect to our node.
Stay on task
Despite the troubling legal backdrop, Sharma and the Cake Wallet team plan to stay the course and remain mission-driven, with a focus on making Bitcoin easy to use and private.
“We stuck to our spirit,” Sharma said.
“The team will call out to each other and say, ‘No, we shouldn’t put this feature in because it violates this privacy or that privacy or might violate it in the future.’” “We have those discussions internally all the time,” he added.
And because Sharma never took venture capital money for Cake Wallet, the only people he and his team have to answer to, other than themselves, are their users.
“Because we’re not beholden to a venture capitalist, venture firm, or angel investor looking for a return, no one is above us. We’re able to do what our users want, and what our community wants.
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