Company Name: Wallet Cake
Founders: Vic Sharma
Date established: October 2017
Head Office Location: St. Kitts and Nevis (and the workers are remote)
Number of employees: 14
Website: https://cakewallet.com/
Public or private? Private
When Vik Sharma is not the CEO Liberty Steelit aims to make bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies easier and more private to use Wallet Cake.
Sharma believes that a product must be easy to use if it is to be widely used, which is why usability is at the heart of Cake Wallet's mission.
“Cake Wallet's overarching mission is to bring digital money to the masses, to allow people to send, receive, hold, exchange, on-ramp, and off-ramp crypto like you would with Venmo or PayPal,” Sharma told Bitcoin. Iris.
Another key aspect of Cake Wallet's mission is privacy.
Sharma is a firm believer in the idea of transactional privacy, something he came to appreciate after experiencing just how fundamentally public bitcoin is.
Prioritizing 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 back then were giving him a cool 0.2 bitcoin per day at the time.)
By the mid-2010s, Sharma wanted to do more with his bitcoin than just HODL it. He wanted to use it, and, at that time, most were only illegal online markets that accepted bitcoin.
“Back then, it was hard to find anyone who accepted bitcoin,” Sharma began. “You had The Silk Roadand then Alpha Bay and other dark markets, and I thought, “Let me investigate this.”
After attempting to make a purchase on one of these darknet 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'm kidding you, within seconds, I got an email from Coinbase saying 'Your account has been suspended or deleted or disabled because you've hacked it some terms of service and you need to transfer your funds as soon as possible. I was like, 'What's the matter? How did they find out? There must be millions of addresses out there. Are they monitoring millions of addresses?'” he said.
“That woke me up to the transparent nature of Bitcoin.”
Sharma's experience using bitcoin in the darknet market not only enlightened him about the public nature of the Bitcoin ledger, but introduced him to Monero (XMR).
“There was this other unique coin on AlphaBay called Monero, and I thought 'Why not Litecoin or Ethereum or whatever was big at the time – why only Bitcoin and Monero?'” Sharma said. .
It was in pursuit of an answer to this question that Sharma went deep down the Monero rabbit hole. His research led to the adoption of the concept of private engagement with cryptocurrency.
And so he created Cake Wallet – a Monero-only wallet at launch.
Cake wallet and silent payments
Cake Wallet launched in January 2018. About a year later, Sharma added Bitcoin functionality to the wallet, too.
However, for over five years, Cake Wallet users have had little ability to privately transfer bitcoin using Cake Wallet. The wallet did not have an electronic implementation (Lightning offers more privacy than the Bitcoin coin chain), or many privacy-enhancing features (besides allowing users to use the node they want to side- to add or select the wallet).
If a user wanted to make a private payment, they were more suitable by using XMR.
But trading with Bitcoin through Cake Wallet became a bit more private (although still not as private as using Monero) in September 2024, when the Cake wallet became the first bitcoin wallet to be implementation. Quiet payments.
Silent Payments allows users to receive bitcoin payments without revealing their public Bitcoin address. They're like PO Boxes for public Bitcoin addresses — static addresses that allow users to receive bitcoins without having to reveal their Bitcoin address — and are great for anyone fundraising or accepting. payments through a public Bitcoin address.
“When I read about Silent Payments, I was immediately hooked,” Sharma said. “I wish the Bitcoin community would be more enthusiastic about it, because I think it's a great feature, especially if you're posting an address publicly, whether it's for donations or payments .”
Since one of Cake Wallet's best-known features, Bird Pay, relies on users posting their address publicly, Silent Payments is a game changer.
Released about a year ago, Bird Pay enables Cake Wallet users to send bitcoin (or other crypto assets) to a contact using nothing but an X handle.
The holder just needs to add their bitcoin address, which can be a Silent Payments address, to their bio or a pinned tweet, and Cake Wallet can get the information from there.
“CakeWallet will use the Twitter API, pull the address and send you the payment,” Sharma explained, also noting that this same feature can be used through Nostr or Mastodon.
“There's a place where you should put your Quiet Payments address,” he said.
Reason for concern
While the Bitcoin and Monero communities have embraced the privacy that Cake Wallet offers, Sharma is concerned that the US federal government may turn out not to be so fond of it.
In an era of government cracking down on Bitcoin and crypto privacy-enhancing services, including Bitcoin fog, Tornado Money and Wallet Samuraiit seems difficult for anyone who creates such crypto technology that preserves privacy without thinking twice about what is involved.
“It worries me – and it's not because we're doing anything wrong,” said Sharma. “But something could be twisted 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. Although his lawyers have assured him that it is not, he is aware 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 transmission business, even though we're not,'” explained Sharma.
“We don't touch customer money. We don't have access to them. Even though we built the app, once that app is on the user's phone, it's created on their phone, not on our servers,” he said.
“But they could come back and say, 'But it connects to your node first.' Who knows? I'm just using that as an example – even if we give users the option in advance not to connect to our node.”
Living on a mission
Despite the troubling legal background, 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 philosophy,” Sharma said.
“The team will call each other like, 'No, we shouldn't put this feature in because it violates this privacy or that privacy or it might be in the future. . We have these internal debates all the time,” he said.
And since Sharma never took VC money for Cake Wallet, the only people he and his team have to answer to, other than themselves, are the users.
“Because we're not looking at a VC, an investment firm or an angel investor looking for a product, there's no one on top of us. We can do what our customers want, what our community wants.”
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