Cake Wallet

Cake Wallet is a free, open-source wallet for iPhone, Android, Mac and Linux that holds many coins and is best known for Monero. It is non-custodial (“only you hold your private keys and seed phrase, and Cake never takes custody of your funds”), “100% open source under the MIT license,” and charges nothing to send or receive (Free (open source) (as of Oct 28, 2026, cakewallet.com)). On Cole’s list it is the phone wallet, next to Sparrow on the desktop: the natural home for Monero, with privacy features for Bitcoin too (silent payments, PayJoin and built-in Tor). Nothing here is financial advice.

What it holds

Monero, Bitcoin (with Lightning since version 6.0 in February 2026), Litecoin, Zcash (since January 2026), Ethereum and its tokens, and a growing list of other chains, including Solana, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, BNB Smart Chain, Tron, Bitcoin Cash, Nano, Zano and Decred. The same team also publishes Monero.com, a Monero-only version of the app.

The privacy features

For Monero:

• The view key stays on the device, so no service learns which incoming payments are yours.
• Subaddresses and accounts give every payer a different address.
• Your choice of node, a restore height for faster syncing, and a proxy setting for Monero nodes that works with Tor and I2P.

For Bitcoin:

• Silent payments (BIP 352) since May 2024: publish one reusable address without the payments to it being linkable on-chain.
• PayJoin since May 2025: the receiver contributes an input, which breaks the “all inputs belong to the sender” assumption that chain analysis leans on.
• Coin control, automatically generated fresh addresses, and batch sending.
• Built-in Tor, added as an experimental feature in June 2025 and upgraded since, alongside a Tor-only connections privacy setting.

For Litecoin, it supports MWEB, Litecoin’s optional privacy extension. Hardware wallets work too: Ledger, BitBox and Trezor, including Trezor for Monero since June 2026. The Bitcoin page explains what each Bitcoin technique does and does not hide.

Setting it up privately

1. Install it from the official source: the App Store, Google Play, F-Droid, Accrescent or GitHub releases. Cake publishes its Android signing certificate fingerprint so an APK can be verified, the same habit as checking a signed release with PGP.
2. Create the wallet and write down the seed it shows, on paper, offline. Whoever has the seed has the money.
3. Pick your node. For Monero, your own node is best; if it runs at home, the phone can reach it from anywhere over Tailscale. A remote node cannot see amounts or recipients, but the Monero FAQ notes its operator “is able to see from what IP address a transaction comes from”; if you use one, reach it over Tor.
4. Turn on Tor-only connections in the privacy settings, so the app’s traffic goes over Tor.
5. Receive to fresh addresses. Let the app generate a new subaddress (Monero) or address (Bitcoin) for each payer, or share a silent payment address for Bitcoin.

Swaps and purchases

Cake has a built-in exchange for dozens of pairs and can buy and sell crypto with cards and bank transfers. Those features run through third-party providers, which, as Cake says, “carry those providers’ rates,” and which set their own rules. A swap is a hop where another company sees both sides, so treat it the way you would an exchange account when privacy matters.

Proving a Monero payment

Because Monero hides amounts and recipients, a merchant cannot check your payment on the blockchain the way they could with Bitcoin. Monero has a way to prove one payment without exposing anything else, and Cake’s docs walk through it:

1. Open the sent transaction in Cake Wallet and copy three values: the transaction ID, the recipient address and the transaction key.
2. Give them to whoever needs proof, or check them yourself on Cake’s Monero explorer under “I sent Monero,” which returns a receipt for the amount sent to that address in that transaction.

The transaction key “only reveals this one payment — it does not give access to your wallet or funds.” The catch is that the key and the recipient address exist only on the phone that sent the payment, recorded at the moment it was sent. A wallet restored from its seed on another device, or rescanned, no longer has them, so a payment you may need to prove later should be documented before you wipe or restore anything. Cake’s docs also include a guide to hardening the app on a phone, worth reading once.

Gotchas

• Backups in the cloud. Cake can back up wallets to an external location or to iCloud. Keep the seed itself offline anyway; the Monero FAQ’s warning is “If you backup your seed in the cloud, you’ll be poorer soon.”
• Restore height. Restoring a Monero wallet from a height after its first transaction can hide older funds; when in doubt, pick an earlier height and wait for the scan.
• Many coins, many networks. Each chain has its own fees, address formats and failure modes. Double-check which network a token is on before sending.
• Privacy features are per coin. Silent payments and PayJoin are Bitcoin features; Monero is private by default; Ethereum and most other chains here are fully public.
• Updates matter. The release notes are long lists of sync, Tor and hardware wallet fixes. Keep the app current.