Cake Wallet is a free phone and desktop wallet made by Cake Labs, a company founded by Vikrant Sharma. It started in 2018 as a Monero wallet for iOS and now holds Monero, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Zcash, Ethereum and about a dozen other networks. Its code is open source.

Cake Labs says the wallet is self-custody: your keys stay on your device and Cake cannot move or freeze your coins. No independent audit has checked that claim. The exception is the Lightning balance, switched on by default for new Bitcoin wallets: money in it can be moved back to Bitcoin only with the signatures of the Spark network’s operators, as described below. The app’s privacy tools work only on certain networks: Monero hides the sender, receiver and amount of every payment, while Bitcoin, Ethereum and the other public blockchains show every transaction to anyone, and on those the wallet can only avoid adding more leaks.

Who Holds the Keys

Each wallet in the app has its own seed phrase, shown on screen when you create it, after you tick three warnings, and checked with a short quiz. Bitcoin, Zcash, Ethereum and the other networks use a standard 12- or 24-word BIP39 phrase. New Monero wallets use a 16-word format called Polyseed by default, and you can pick the older 25-word Monero seed or a BIP39 phrase instead. One BIP39 phrase can back a wallet on each network at once; Polyseed and 25-word Monero wallets cannot share it. Cake’s own guide warns that not every Monero wallet can restore a BIP39 Monero phrase; for those, the app shows the same wallet as a 25-word Monero seed or as private keys. For any wallet, including a Polyseed one, the Keys tab under Recovery & Keys shows its private keys, which you can write down alongside the phrase.

You can add a passphrase to a phrase, which turns it into a different wallet; a lost passphrase cannot be recovered. The app can also export an encrypted backup file of all your wallets, protected by a password, which you store yourself. There is no account, no master key and no reset. If you lose the seed phrase and have no backup file, nobody, including Cake, can recover your coins.

The app has no multisig. It can work with several hardware wallets over Bluetooth, USB or QR codes, but only for some networks on each device.

The Lightning Balance

Lightning is switched on by default for new Bitcoin wallets and gives you an address like yourname@cake.cash, which stays the same until you change it and is tied to your seed. It does not run on Bitcoin’s own Lightning channels: Cake uses Spark, a separate network reached through the Breez software kit. Every Spark transfer is co-signed by Spark’s operators, a small group of companies, and they see each transfer’s amount and the Spark addresses on both ends. Cake says it does not publish your Spark payments to public Spark explorers and leaves your Spark address out of your invoices.

The Spark software Cake uses can move funds back to Bitcoin without the operators, but in October 2026 WalletScrutiny, an independent wallet-review project, found that Cake Wallet never offers that option. Cake describes its Lightning as self-custodial; WalletScrutiny disagrees: the only way out of the Lightning balance is a withdrawal the operators sign. For that reason WalletScrutiny now rates the app custodial, while saying this does not concern Cake’s on-chain wallets. Cake’s own documentation calls the Lightning balance a spending balance and tells you to keep larger amounts on-chain. You can switch Lightning off in the privacy settings.

What Cake’s Servers See

A wallet does not download the blockchain itself; it asks a node. Out of the box, Monero, Bitcoin, Litecoin and Zcash wallets connect to servers that Cake Labs runs, so Cake sees your IP address, how far your wallet has synced and the transactions you send through it. Cake’s privacy policy says it receives this data but does not store it; by its own account, it has nothing to hand over. What else the server learns depends on the network. A Monero wallet scans the blockchain on your device, and Cake’s policy lists only the IP address, sync height and sent transactions as what its node receives. A Bitcoin or Litecoin wallet asks its server about each of its addresses, so the server learns which addresses belong to one wallet; Cake’s own guide says that whoever runs your node “can see your wallet’s queries”.

Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Tron and Solana wallets connect by default to public nodes run by other companies, such as PublicNode, NOWNodes, Chainstack and the BNB Chain project’s own nodes, which see your IP address and the addresses you query. The price feed works like Cake’s nodes and learns your IP address and which currency pair you look up; you can turn it off or route it over Tor.

You can switch every network to another node, including your own, and Cake’s guide recommends running your own. For Bitcoin and Litecoin, the app needs an indexing server such as Fulcrum or electrs in front of your node. A new wallet can be pointed at your own node before it first connects anywhere. One exception: if your node cannot serve the extra data that Silent Payments scanning needs, the scan quietly goes to Cake’s own server while the rest of the wallet stays on your node.

Built-in Tor hides your IP address from nodes and services with one switch. Cake calls it experimental, since not every connection type goes through Tor yet, and syncing is much slower. Cake runs its own onion nodes for Monero, Zcash, Bitcoin and Litecoin.

Some lookups leak addresses to outside companies by default. On Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, BNB Chain and Tron, the app fetches your history from public block explorers, which learn the addresses you hold; each lookup has its own switch. Name lookups such as ENS send the name you are paying to that service. On Ethereum and Base, the app sends your signed transactions by default to Blink, a private relay, instead of the public waiting pool, to stop others from trading ahead of them; Blink sees them before they are confirmed.

Cake’s privacy policy says the app collects no usage data. Error reports go to Cake only when you choose to send them, and you can read them first.

Privacy by Network

Monero hides the sender, receiver and amount of every payment at the network level, so this privacy does not depend on Cake. The app adds subaddresses, a fresh one after each payment, and several accounts in one wallet.

On Bitcoin every transaction is public. Cake Wallet gives you a new address after each payment, coin control to choose and freeze which coins a payment spends, and Silent Payments: one reusable address whose incoming payments land at separate, unlinkable addresses on the blockchain. Payjoin, off by default, lets the sender and receiver both add coins to one transaction, which breaks the common assumption that all of a transaction’s inputs belong to the sender; it works only when both wallets support it.

On Litecoin, MWEB is an optional private side of the wallet where amounts and addresses are hidden; coins outside it stay public. On Zcash the app receives to shielded addresses by default, and coins sent to a public Zcash address are moved into the shielded pool automatically once they exceed 0.005 ZEC. Ethereum, Solana, Tron and the other networks in the app have no such feature, and their transactions are public.

Swaps and Buying

Cake does not run an exchange. A swap inside the app goes to an outside provider, such as ChangeNOW, Trocador or Chainflip, which receives your coins and sends the new ones to the address you choose. If you set swaps to Tor only, the app uses Trocador alone, so fewer pairs are available.

Buying and selling with ordinary money also run through outside companies: Robinhood Connect, DFX.swiss, Onramper, MoonPay and Kriptonim. Under their own rules they may ask for an email, a phone number, an ID document or a selfie, a process known as KYC. The wallet itself needs no account and no identity check; you can fund it by receiving coins from elsewhere instead.

Open Source and Audits

The code of the phone and desktop apps is public on GitHub under the MIT open-source licence. On the server side Cake publishes its own versions of the Monero node software and of electrs, a Bitcoin server, but only the documentation, not the code, of its price service. Cake does not offer reproducible builds, so you cannot check that an app from a store was built from the published code.

No independent security audit of Cake Wallet has been published. Cake takes vulnerability reports privately through GitHub or encrypted email and promises a reply within two business days. It may pay a reward at its own discretion, but it has no fixed bug bounty.

Incidents and Vulnerabilities

Cake Wallet’s incident history includes two flaws in the app itself. On 11 May 2021 Cake announced that Bitcoin wallets created by earlier versions of the app had been generated with too little randomness, which makes their keys guessable. Monero wallets were not affected. Version 4.1.7 switched to a stronger random number source, and Cake asked users to create new Bitcoin wallets and move their funds. In February 2024 the Milk Sad research team, which studies wallets with weak keys, warned that anyone still using a seed from those versions, in an old app or restored into a newer one, could lose their bitcoin. Since version 4.12.0, released in December 2023, the app warns when you open one of about 8,700 known weak wallets.

In September 2026 Cake published a medium-severity advisory: from version 6.1.2 to 6.3.0, an Ethereum payment link that named one network could be sent on whichever Ethereum-style network the open wallet used. Version 6.4.4 fixed it.

Ownership and Jurisdiction

Cake Wallet’s terms of use name Cake Labs LLC, a company formed in Nevis, and say disputes fall under Florida law. The App Store lists the developer as Cake Technologies, LLC. Cake Labs also makes the Monero.com wallet, the Cake Pay service and Cupcake, its own app for signing transactions offline. Cake’s privacy policy says it may have to give authorities the details you send it yourself, such as an email address when you contact support.

Apps and Networks

Cake Wallet runs on Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac and Linux. The phone apps get every feature. Windows builds are paused during a redesign promised for late 2026, and only old releases without recent security fixes remain. The Mac and Linux apps have no Zcash; Lightning works on phones and Macs only, and Litecoin MWEB on phones only.

Wallets in the app cover Monero, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, Zcash, Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum, Base, BNB Chain, Solana, Tron and a few smaller networks. Lightning runs through Spark, as described above.

Price

Cake Wallet is free, and Cake charges no fee to send or receive; you pay only the network fee. Swap and buy providers build their own spread or fee into the quote you see before you confirm.

Pros and Cons

The code of the apps is open source under the MIT licence
Works with your own node on every network, and has built-in Tor and Cake-run onion nodes
Bitcoin privacy tools: coin control, Silent Payments and Payjoin
Private sides of Litecoin and Zcash are built in: MWEB for Litecoin, shielded addresses for Zcash
Seed phrases in standard formats, with an optional passphrase and an encrypted backup file
Free, with no fee from Cake to send or receive

By default Monero, Bitcoin, Litecoin and Zcash wallets use Cake's servers, and other networks use public nodes of other companies; both see your IP address
The Lightning balance, on by default, can be withdrawn only with the Spark operators' signatures
No published independent security audit and no reproducible builds
Bitcoin wallets created by versions before 4.1.7 had guessable keys
Block explorers learn your addresses on Ethereum-style networks and Tron unless you switch them off
No multisig, and the Windows app is paused

Our Rating

Cake Wallet suits people who hold Monero alongside Bitcoin and want privacy tools for both in one phone app, and who are ready to switch to their own node and Tor rather than keep the defaults. It does not suit anyone who needs multisig or an independently audited wallet, or who wants to keep more than spending money in its Lightning balance.

Key Custody & Recovery7.0/10
Cake Labs says only you hold the keys to your on-chain wallets, and they can be restored elsewhere from a standard phrase or from the private keys. An optional passphrase and an encrypted backup file are available, but there is no multisig, and losing the phrase means losing the funds. The Lightning balance, switched on by default for new Bitcoin wallets, can be moved back to the Bitcoin blockchain only with the signatures of the Spark network's operators.
Network & Metadata Privacy7.5/10
By default Monero, Bitcoin, Litecoin and Zcash wallets connect to servers Cake Labs runs, which see your IP address and, for Bitcoin and Litecoin, the addresses your wallet follows; Cake's privacy policy says it does not store this. Ethereum-style networks, Tron and Solana use public nodes run by other companies by default. You can switch to your own node, turn on built-in Tor, and use coin control, Silent Payments and Payjoin for Bitcoin, MWEB for Litecoin and shielded Zcash. Block-explorer lookups for Ethereum-style networks and Tron are on by default and hand your addresses to those explorers.
Security & Transparency5.0/10
The app's code is public under the MIT licence, but no independent security audit has been published and the store builds cannot be checked against the code. Bug reports have a private channel with rewards at Cake's discretion and no fixed bounty. In 2021 Cake disclosed that Bitcoin wallets created by early versions used weak randomness and asked users to move their funds.
Usability & Chain Support8.0/10
Cake Wallet covers the networks it is built around: Monero with subaddresses, accounts and background sync, and Bitcoin with Lightning, Silent Payments and Payjoin, plus Litecoin MWEB and shielded Zcash. The phone apps get every feature; the Windows app is paused, and the macOS and Linux apps lack Zcash and some Bitcoin features.
Price & Value9.0/10
The app is free, and Cake charges no fee to send or receive. Swaps and purchases inside the app cost the spread or fee that the outside provider builds into its quote.

Overall7.1/10

Key Custody & Recovery 30% · Network & Metadata Privacy 25% · Security & Transparency 20% · Usability & Chain Support 15% · Price & Value 10%

See our rating methodology →