Firm Identify: Cake Pockets
Founders: Vik Sharma
Date Based: October 2017
Location of Headquarters: Saint Kitts and Nevis (and employees is distant)
Variety of Workers: 14
Web site: https://cakewallet.com/
Public or Personal? Personal
When Vik Sharma isn’t serving because the CEO of Liberty Steel, he’s centered on making bitcoin and different cryptocurrencies simpler and extra personal to make use of through Cake Wallet.
Sharma believes {that a} product have to be user-friendly whether it is to be adopted extensively, which is why usability is on the heart of the Cake Pockets mission.
“The very broad mission of Cake Pockets is to carry cryptocurrency to the lots, to allow folks to simply ship, obtain, maintain, swap, on-ramp, and off-ramp crypto such as you would with Venmo or PayPal,” Sharma advised Bitcoin Journal.
The opposite main dimension of the Cake Pockets mission is privateness.
Sharma is a staunch believer within the thought of transactional privateness, one thing he got here to worth after experiencing simply how public bitcoin is by default.
Prioritizing Privateness
Sharma first began buying and mining Bitcoin in November 2013. (The ASIC miners he bought from eBay and ran within the basement of his workplace constructing again then have been minting him a cool 0.2 bitcoin per day on the time.)
By the mid-2010s, Sharma needed to do extra along with his bitcoin than simply HODL it. He needed to make use of it, and, at the moment, it was principally solely illicit on-line marketplaces that accepted bitcoin.
“Again then, it was exhausting to search out anybody that took bitcoin,” started Sharma. “You had Silk Road, after which AlphaBay and different darknet markets, and I assumed, ‘Let me verify this out.’”
After making an attempt to make a purchase order on a kind of darknet websites, Sharma was promptly notified that he’d crossed a authorized line.
“I despatched Bitcoin instantly from my Coinbase account to the darknet deal with,” stated Sharma.
“And, I child you not, inside seconds, I received an e-mail from Coinbase saying ‘Your account has been suspended or deleted or canceled since you’ve violated some phrases of service and it’s good to transfer your belongings ASAP. I used to be like, ‘What the heck? How did they discover out? There have to be hundreds of thousands of addresses on the market. Are they monitoring hundreds of thousands of addresses?’” he added.
“That woke me as much as the clear nature of Bitcoin.”
Not solely did Sharma’s expertise utilizing bitcoin in a darknet market enlighten him as to only how public a ledger Bitcoin really is, however it additionally launched him to Monero (XMR).
“There was this different particular coin on AlphaBay referred to as Monero, and I assumed ‘Why not Litecoin or Ethereum or no matter was large at the moment — why solely Bitcoin and Monero?’” stated Sharma.
It was in pursuing a solution to this query that Sharma went deep down the Monero rabbit gap. His analysis led him to embracing the idea of transacting privately with cryptocurrency.
And so he created Cake Pockets — a Monero-only pockets at its inception.
Cake Pockets And Silent Funds
Cake Pockets launched in January 2018. Roughly one yr later, Sharma added Bitcoin performance to the pockets, as properly.
Nevertheless, for over 5 years, Cake Pockets customers had little capability to transact privately with bitcoin utilizing Cake Pockets. The pockets didn’t have a Lightning implementation (Lightning affords extra privateness than the Bitcoin base chain), nor many different privacy-enhancing options (except for letting customers add or choose the node they wish to use inside the pockets).
If a person needed to make a non-public cost, they have been higher suited utilizing XMR.
However transacting with Bitcoin through Cake Pockets grew to become considerably extra personal (although nonetheless not as personal as utilizing Monero) in September 2024, when Cake pockets grew to become the primary bitcoin pockets to implement Silent Payments.
Silent Funds allow customers to obtain bitcoin funds with out revealing their public Bitcoin deal with. They’re like a P.O. Bins for public Bitcoin addresses — static addresses that enable customers to obtain bitcoin with out having to disclose their precise Bitcoin deal with — and so they’re nice for anybody doing fundraising or accepting funds through a public Bitcoin deal with.
“After I examine Silent Funds, I appreciated it immediately,” stated Sharma. “I want the Bitcoin neighborhood was extra obsessed with it, as a result of I believe it is a fantastic characteristic, particularly in the event you’re posting an deal with publicly, whether or not for donations or funds.”
As a result of considered one of Cake Pockets’s most notable options, Hen Pay, hinges on customers posting their deal with publicly, Silent Funds is a sport changer.
Unveiled roughly one yr in the past, Hen Pay permits Cake Pockets customers to ship bitcoin (or different crypto belongings) to a contact utilizing nothing apart from an X deal with.
The receiver merely has so as to add their bitcoin deal with, which could be a Silent Funds deal with, to both their bio or a pinned tweet, and Cake Pockets can fetch the data from there.
“CakeWallet will use the Twitter API, pull the deal with and ship the cost to you,” defined Sharma, additionally noting that this similar characteristic can be utilized through Nostr or Mastodon.
“There’s a spot the place it’s best to put your Silent Funds deal with,” he added.
Trigger For Concern
Whereas the Bitcoin and Monero communities have embraced the privateness that Cake Pockets affords, Sharma is worried that the U.S. federal authorities may prove to not be so eager on it.
In an period through which the federal government is cracking down on privacy-enhancing Bitcoin and crypto providers, together with Bitcoin Fog, Tornado Cash and Samourai Wallet, it appears tough for anybody who’s creating such privacy-preserving crypto expertise to not assume twice about what’s at stake.
“It does fear me — and never as a result of we’re doing something fallacious,” stated Sharma. “However one thing may very well be twisted or construed to make it appear as if we’re doing one thing fallacious.”
As a precautionary measure, Sharma has moved the headquarters of Cake Pockets abroad, from Florida to Nevis and Saint Kitts, one thing that Roger Ver suggested him to do.
He additionally discusses all updates to Cake Pockets with the corporate’s common counsel to guarantee that Cake Pockets isn’t breaking any legal guidelines. Whereas his attorneys have assured him he isn’t, he’s conscious that skewed interpretations of legal guidelines and authorized tips may doubtlessly trigger issues for Cake Pockets.
“For those who dig deep sufficient into the way in which the legal guidelines are written, they may say, ‘No, you are a cash transmitter enterprise, regardless that we’re not,’” defined Sharma.
“We’re not touching customers’ funds. We do not have entry to them. Although we constructed the app, as soon as that app is on the person’s telephone, it is being generated on their telephone, not on our servers,” he added.
“However they may come again and say, ‘Nevertheless it connects to your node initially.’ Who is aware of? I am simply utilizing that for example — regardless that we give the choice proper up entrance for customers to not hook up with our node.”
Staying On Mission
Regardless of a regarding authorized backdrop, Sharma and the Cake Pockets group plan to remain the course and to stay mission-driven, centered on making Bitcoin each straightforward and personal to make use of.
“Now we have caught to our ethos,” stated Sharma.
“The group will name one another out like, ‘No, we shouldn’t put this characteristic in as a result of it violates this privateness or that privateness or may sooner or later. Now we have these debates internally on a regular basis,” he added.
And since Sharma has by no means taken VC cash for Cake Pockets, the one folks that he and his group need to reply to, except for themselves, is their customers.
“Since we’re not beholden to a VC, funding agency or an angel investor who’s searching for a return, no person’s on high of us. We’re capable of do what our customers need, what our neighborhood desires.”