Firm Title: 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 by way of Cake Wallet.
Sharma believes {that a} product should be user-friendly whether it is to be adopted broadly, which is why usability is on the heart of the Cake Pockets mission.
“The very broad mission of Cake Pockets is to convey cryptocurrency to the plenty, 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 major 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 wished to do extra together with his bitcoin than simply HODL it. He wished to make use of it, and, at the moment, it was largely solely illicit on-line marketplaces that accepted bitcoin.
“Again then, it was arduous to search out anybody that took bitcoin,” started Sharma. “You had Silk Road, after which AlphaBay and different darknet markets, and I believed, ‘Let me examine this out.’”
After making an attempt to make a purchase order on a type 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 handle,” 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 you must transfer your property ASAP. I used to be like, ‘What the heck? How did they discover out? There should be thousands and thousands of addresses on the market. Are they monitoring thousands and 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 truly is, however it additionally launched him to Monero (XMR).
“There was this different particular coin on AlphaBay referred to as Monero, and I believed ‘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 12 months later, Sharma added Bitcoin performance to the pockets, as properly.
Nonetheless, for over 5 years, Cake Pockets customers had little potential 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 (apart from letting customers add or choose the node they need to use inside the pockets).
If a consumer wished to make a non-public fee, they have been higher suited utilizing XMR.
However transacting with Bitcoin by way of 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 handle. 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 handle — and so they’re nice for anybody doing fundraising or accepting funds by way of a public Bitcoin handle.
“After I examine Silent Funds, I preferred it instantly,” stated Sharma. “I want the Bitcoin neighborhood was extra keen about it, as a result of I feel it is a terrific function, particularly if you happen to’re posting an handle publicly, whether or not for donations or funds.”
As a result of one among Cake Pockets’s most notable options, Hen Pay, hinges on customers posting their handle publicly, Silent Funds is a sport changer.
Unveiled roughly one 12 months in the past, Hen Pay allows Cake Pockets customers to ship bitcoin (or different crypto property) to a contact utilizing nothing apart from an X deal with.
The receiver merely has so as to add their bitcoin handle, which is usually a Silent Funds handle, to both their bio or a pinned tweet, and Cake Pockets can fetch the knowledge from there.
“CakeWallet will use the Twitter API, pull the handle and ship the fee to you,” defined Sharma, additionally noting that this similar function can be utilized by way of Nostr or Mastodon.
“There’s a spot the place you need to put your Silent Funds handle,” 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 wherein 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 know-how to not assume twice about what’s at stake.
“It does fear me — and never as a result of we’re doing something incorrect,” stated Sharma. “However one thing might be twisted or construed to make it appear as if we’re doing one thing incorrect.”
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 basic counsel to be sure that Cake Pockets isn’t breaking any legal guidelines. Whereas his legal professionals 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.
“In case you dig deep sufficient into the way in which the legal guidelines are written, they may say, ‘No, you are a cash transmitter enterprise, although we’re not,’” defined Sharma.
“We’re not touching customers’ funds. We do not have entry to them. Though we constructed the app, as soon as that app is on the consumer’s cellphone, it is being generated on their cellphone, 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 — although 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 staff plan to remain the course and to stay mission-driven, centered on making Bitcoin each simple and personal to make use of.
“Now we have caught to our ethos,” stated Sharma.
“The staff will name one another out like, ‘No, we shouldn’t put this function 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 people who he and his staff should reply to, apart from themselves, is their customers.
“Since we’re not beholden to a VC, funding agency or an angel investor who’s in search of a return, no person’s on high of us. We’re capable of do what our customers need, what our neighborhood needs.”
