00:00 - Hello, I'm Seth Simmons, and welcome to a special episode of Opt Out. Opt Out's a show where I sit down with passionate people to learn why privacy matters to them, the tools and techniques they found and leveraged, and where we encourage and inspire others towards personal privacy and data sovereignty. Wondering what mobile Monero wallet I use and recommend, and why I chose to take on Cake Wallet as a sponsor? This episode, we're sitting down with Vic Sharma, owner of Cake Wallet, the newest sponsor of Opt Out.

Welcome on to Opt Out, Vic. - Hey, Seth, thanks for having me on. - Yeah, really, really glad to finally get to sit down and chat a little more and let my listeners get to know you. I mean, we've known each other for a good while through the Monero community, but I'm glad to be able to take you on as a sponsor. I've talked to people about this a lot in the past, directly, talked to my wife about this, but just the staunch and passionate work that you do in the community, you've poured funds, you've poured time into driving the Monero ecosystem forward and the privacy ecosystem forward.

So I'm really grateful for that, and I'm glad to have you jumping on. Obviously, I use Cake Wallet as my kind of main spending wallet. It's the hot wallet I use on my CalXOS phone, and I really enjoy that experience. And just as I've been using Cake and giving suggestions and finding little bugs here and there, you and your team have been really receptive to those. So it's been a great experience so far. But for those listeners who aren't familiar with you, would you mind just introducing yourself?

- Sure, yeah. So I'm the founder of Cake Wallet. And also, I mean, this is something I don't talk about much in the crypto, in the Monero community. But I'm actually the executive director of a large steel company here in the US. So I've always been in the steel business on my own with my dad. And then recently, I guess about four or five years ago, I became the executive director of this steel company. And the purpose was that they wanted to expand into the US and actually help that company expand.

We have 2,500 employees now, over 3 million tons of melting capacity. So it's a sizable, good-sized steel company. I don't talk about it much, but sometimes people ask. So I thought, let me just get it out there. The steel company is Liberty Steel. We've got, I think, eight locations in the US. So that's kind of my, I hate to use that term, real job. But anyway, so Cake Wallet, yeah. So I'm the founder of Cake Wallet. Cake Wallet was in development 2017 and we launched in 2018.

- Awesome. Yeah, I didn't actually know that you were still doing the steel company. I've heard you mention it, I think, a couple of times in the past on other podcasts you've gone on, but didn't know that was still a thing. Good to know there. - Yeah. - And what was it that woke you up to the need for personal privacy? - I wouldn't say it was one single event. I think it's been a journey. I think for a lot of people, it's a journey. But if there had to be one single event that hit me personally, you know, a lot of people talk about Facebook giving up data and Instagram and WhatsApp and all that.

Now everything's connected and they do cross marketing. And in some ways, big tech knows you better than you know yourself. - Mm-hmm. - But again, still, you know, you don't really bother with it. I still use Facebook. I still use Instagram. But what really woke me up about cryptocurrency, Bitcoin specifically, was when I got kicked out of Coinbase. Like you, I'm a tinkerer. I like to experiment with things. So I thought, let me actually try to buy something with Bitcoin.

And I bought something off the dark web, something very innocent, antibiotics. I've talked about it. I'm open about it. And they immediately, Coinbase immediately kicked me off. I got an email saying, you've violated our terms of illicit use, blah, blah, blah. And we're shutting down your account. Please move your Bitcoin. So that kind of woke me up to the reality that Bitcoin is completely traceable. And, you know, right away I questioned, how did they know?

How did they know where I'm sending the Bitcoin? Are they keeping track of these thousands of millions of addresses, which are marked as high risk addresses? I guess they are. And then of course, later on, I learned about chain analysis and, you know, just went down the rabbit hole. But what was interesting at that time, when I was on this darknet market, I saw that the only other coin that was accepted was Monero. And that's what got me interested into Monero and privacy at that time.

But let me just say this. I mean, even before Cake Wallet, we had built some other privacy apps. I don't know if you ever saw them or if you remember them. They've both been taken off because we just don't have the time. One was a email client behind a calculator screen. I know, of course, regardless of what email you're using, that that side, of course, can still be compromised. But at least on your device, somebody can't grab your phone and start reading your emails.

So it's just, you know, you've seen those pictures or files behind calculator. But surprisingly, even today, there's no email client behind a calculator screen. So Cake Wallet wasn't the first attempt at privacy that we tried. So we had that app, the email client app behind a calculator. We also had another app called Photo Locker. Actually, the company Cake Wallet used to be named Photo Locker. And we changed the name to Cake Technologies. Photo Locker was an anonymous picture posting social media type thing.

But it was kind of modeled after Yik Yak. Were you familiar with Yik Yak? No, I don't think I know that one. Yik Yak was an app where you can have conversations within a geographical area anonymously. So let's say you're at a conference and you can reduce your radius to, let's say, half a mile or a quarter mile. And then you'll only be talking to people at that conference or within that vicinity, which is pretty cool. So you could have, let's say somebody's presenting something on stage, you can have conversations without revealing who you are.

So I wanted to take that a step further and do it for photographs, for pictures. So the idea was, I guess, more activism, I would say, that if you see some injustice going on in your region, you can post a picture anonymously and you can adjust your radius to whatever, a few thousand feet to a quarter mile or 10 miles or whatever. So, you know, the idea was you could, when you live here in an area, you can see what's happening immediately around you in an anonymous way.

Now I was actually very excited about that concept, but it just needed a lot of marketing to get that going. And as you know, people don't care that much about privacy, it seems, you know. When we put the app out there, the first thing people said was, well, how can I send a picture to my grandmother, for example? That wasn't the purpose. She's close by, you can. Anonymously, you know. And I still think that's a good idea. I mean, someday I'd like to return to that.

But so, the reason I'm bringing all that up is, like I said earlier, privacy was a journey. And, you know, it started with other apps as well. And then, of course, when I came across Monero, which is all about privacy, that led me to create Cake Wallet. Yeah, and why was it that when you built out Cake Wallet and starting in 2017, why did you choose to focus on Monero specifically? Was that more of kind of your Coinbase interaction that you had or were there other reasons that you chose that?

Oh, 100% the Coinbase interaction. And then, you know, seeing on the darknet that the only other coin that was being accepted is Monero. You know, not Ethereum, not Dash, not Verge, not, you know, all these other coins. And Bitcoin, of course. Sorry. Go ahead. Not saying, you know, of course, they accept a Bitcoin because that is most accessible, most well-known. But this little unknown coin called Monero. And I just, you know, started watching YouTube videos and read as much as I could.

You know, whatever I'd find back in those days on the web was written by Justin. And, you know, it said University of Minnesota. I thought it's like, okay, it's probably some professor or Ph.D. students. And later on, I find out he's an undergrad. And he made some good diagrams, you know, explanatory diagrams on how to use Monero. So I read as much as I could and just liked everything about it. I played around with other so-called privacy coins and realized they're not private at all.

And Monero was it. And.

10:00 And it really motivated me to make it accessible. At that time, there was an Android app. And the funny thing is we didn't even look to see what's there. We just built it in a vacuum. Because if I knew I looked to see what's going on, and if I heard, oh, somebody's building an app, and you think, oh, somebody's already building it, let me not do it. So I just didn't want to know. I didn't want to know what else is going on out there. I didn't go on the Monero subreddit.

Just stayed away from everything, because I didn't want any distraction or talk myself out of doing it. And yeah, so that's why Monero and why Cake. Yeah, definitely. Definitely understandable. And I know that there was no iOS Monero wallet at that point. So you were the first to give access to Monero for iOS users, which is a pretty big thing then. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't realize a big thing. I don't know if you saw my recent post about Doug. You know, I thought, OK, yeah, this is fun.

You know, this is a good thing. It'll make Monero more accessible. But only when I met Doug, he started explaining why this is so important. Yeah. Yeah. And what is it about Cake Wallet? Is it just Monero inclusion? Or what is it that you view as making it a good tool for users who want to reclaim personal privacy? Well, the first thing that it has Monero, that in itself is the number one thing where you can have financial privacy on how you store and how you spend your Monero.

But in addition to that, Cake Wallet and Seth, I mean, I think you've heard me use this term, which maybe I've coined. Who knows? I like using it. I call it a true blockchain wallet, right? Where, you know, Cake Wallet is just accessing the blockchain, right? What makes it better than other wallets is everything happens on your phone. So your view key is not being sent anywhere. That might be getting logged. So it does have some advantages. You can connect your own node in Cake Wallet.

What else? Yeah, I think the node case is a really big, big piece. It's not, I know a lot of people think of mobile wallets as light wallets and that they offload the work or compute or, in Monero's case, view keys to another server. That someone else owns to do all the heavy lifting. And then they just do the light stuff locally. But Cake Wallet is actually, it's a full Monero wallet in the sense that you access Monero through a normal Monero node, no light wallet server or nothing like that.

So like I run it against both my own personal node and I have a public node that I host for the Monero community. And both those, you just plug in the address in Cake and you utilize that full node without having to reveal any information about the things that you're doing within Cake Wallet to that node operator themselves. Right. Right. And you know, the term light wallet in other cryptocurrencies, you only have two types of, you have a full, you have a full wallet, which downloads the whole blockchain and you, or you have a light wallet.

But in Monero, it seems there's three types of wallets, right? I mean, you have like a GUI, which downloads the whole blockchain or you connect to a node. And I don't know, do you call it a light wallet? No, but I guess the light wallet in the Monero world is more like what my Monero is doing. Yeah. As far as I know, that's the only light wallet app and implementation that exists right now. I know there's a lot of work going on around a light wallet server implementation that VT nerd, a Monero community member has built out.

Exactly. That hopefully will get built out. And that will hopefully be an option in Cake and other Monero wallets in the future to run your own light wallet server and connect to that. But the actual server implementation side has been pretty exclusive to my Monero so far. But hopefully that will increase because it's a great option if you're running your own node is the key for me. Right. Right. So, yeah, we talk about that all the time. Actually, we need to have a light wallet option, either connect to your own node or somebody else that's running a node server.

So that's definitely something we're looking at. Yeah. Yeah. That'd definitely be great to see. And what was it that made you decide to partner with the show here, partner with Opt Out and support us financially? Number one, I'd like to support as many Monero projects out there that I can. You know, whether it's just CCS development, funding requests, you know, I'd like to get involved in those. Or like what Doug is doing with Monero Talk and Doug and Cindy are doing Monero Talk Monerotopia where they're encouraging discussion and initiating discussions on Monero and privacy.

And when it comes to you, what I like what you're doing is you're actually guiding and actually teaching people rather than... And there's a space for everyone. Don't get me wrong. Everybody has, you know, can do different things in the Monero space. But what I like what you're doing is you're actually giving guides, you're giving instructions on how to do the things that you're talking about, the things that you're promoting, which I think goes a long way.

I mean, I read your guides and instructions as well. So I'm very much supportive of what you're doing with that because I think that's what it really comes down to. You can talk about something all you want, but really sitting down and teaching people how to do it. That's worth a lot. Yeah, I think something I've really enjoyed too about starting this podcast in particular is the majority of my work outside of this has been Monero-centric. But I've really enjoyed with Opt Out kind of getting to learn how Monero fits into the rest of the toolkit of someone who's pursuing personal privacy.

It's been really cool to hear from different people that I've interviewed in the past and people in the community around Opt Out how Monero fits into their toolkit. And I think it's been a really cool way to pull in my previous Monero experience and the current guides and blog posts that I make about Monero into kind of the broader privacy space where there should be such a good relationship between Monero as digital cache and a tool for privacy and the rest of the kind of privacy ecosystem community.

So I've enjoyed being able to kind of combine those two things into one place rather than keeping it like Monero only or other privacy tool only. I think it's been a really, really fun crossover to see. Yeah, definitely. And I think your style of discussion is very great. It's non-confrontational. It's friendly. It's informative. So, you know, all these reasons I reached out to you to ask you if we can sponsor your show. Yeah. And thank you for that.

It's definitely going to be a huge help. Let me do some more around the show. Help me focus on episodes and hopefully expand a bit in the future for sure. And then last question I had for you is what are some future plans for Cake Wallet that listeners should know about? We want to stay as much as possible to our privacy roots. And in some ways, you know, we kind of got away with that by adding Bitcoin and Litecoin. But, you know, again, the goal of that was for users to be able to convert to Monero money, you know, get more Monero to make it easier to convert to Monero.

Getting back to the privacy, I mean, for, you know, on the Monero front, as you see, we're continuously adding new features. We added batch sending, for example. But getting back to the privacy, you know, I'm actually looking at maybe like a Samourai implementation for Bitcoin and Cake Wallet. I know a lot of the Monero community supports Samourai, the whole Whirlpool thing. That would be amazing to see. Yeah. So, I mean, right now we're finishing off some things right now, just doing some upgrade and modification under the hood type of stuff.

And we're adding YATS, because, you know, Nivian's a good friend of mine. And it's just a fun, interesting project. So, we're going to implement YATS. Right after we finish that, we're going to look at the Samourai implementation. Big thing for me is going to be decentralized exchange. So, you know, we're looking at the Comet atomic swaps, see if that can work on mobile. There are some challenges with that to work on mobile. Number one being that the wallet always has to be on and listening.

And that's kind of, not kind of, it is difficult to do on iOS. I know on Android it may be possible. So, that's something we're looking at. But that's definitely the future for Cake Wallet, I think, the decentralized or atomic swaps. Okay.

20:00 Another thing we're looking at is ThorChain. You're familiar with that, I know. So that uses a different model. That uses a more of a Uniswap type of liquidity pool model. And there has to be a lot of work has to be done for Monero to be able to work with ThorChain, not only on the ThorChain team side, but also on the Monero side. And on the Monero side, I'm leaning towards not doing a CCS. I mean, we've never asked the community for money or anyone for money, in fact, for any kind of funding.

So that's something I'm willing to fund on our own. And that would just be our contribution to the Monero space, Monero ecosystem, you can call it. So, you know, we've had discussions with Sarang and Diego and all that, even the new Justin, Justin Berman. But there's some things that have to be done on the ThorChain side. So I'm actually very excited about that. Yeah, I think it can be a kind of a middle ground. Because if you think of like existing services like Change Now or SideShift, they're custodial, but they're quick swaps.

So there's a fairly short custodial period. And obviously, at least those two have good reputations in the space. But atomic swaps are kind of the far end of the spectrum where they're completely non-custodial, completely trustless. But that also introduces the complexity of needing to have service watching both the Monero and Bitcoin blockchains, making sure that everything goes properly, handling refunds if necessary. There's a lot more that's involved.

And that, like you mentioned, has to be actually run on the wallet side. So I know that adds a lot of complexity there. Whereas ThorChain kind of fits into the middle. Exactly. They've had some issues in the past with implementation and their approach. So hopefully they can rebuild and get that working. But it's kind of, it's still custodial, but less custodial than swap services. And it has a little bit better liquidity than atomic swaps and a little simpler approach there.

So I think it could be a good middle ground, especially for those just wanting to swap. Like I wouldn't recommend putting funds in there for liquidity or anything, especially not yet. But it could be a good tool for swap. So I'm curious to see what comes out of that. Yeah, yeah. So I think the big things to recap is privacy for Bitcoin. And we've had discussions with the Samourai people. They're really good guys, very friendly. Yeah. And we've actually made them aware of that, that we'd like to work with them to get them into cases.

And they're very, very open to it. So we're excited about that. So yeah, we're considering a lot of stuff. I mean, a lot of people ask us to add WowNero. The true Bitcoin. Sorry. I just said the true meme coin. Yeah. And we get that request maybe every other day. We get a message in Twitter or our support winner or in Telegram. What are you adding? What are you adding? So who knows? And what's the best place for listeners who want to learn more about Cake Wallet to check out?

And then how can they support what you're doing with Cake Wallet? Yeah. Many, many ways. You can go to Cake Wallet.com, our website. We have a Reddit, r slash Cake Wallet. We have a Telegram, Cake underscore Wallet. Twitter. We're always tweeting out hints and topics and news about Cake Wallet. So you can learn there as well. You can reach out to us. You can reach out to me even. I love talking to people about Cake Wallet and about Monero. I love hearing from people what features they want.

So that would be a good way to support us. We definitely want to build what everybody likes to use. So we love hearing about features you want or bugs you find. That's a good way to support us. We do have a donation address. We don't push it. But if you want to donate, fine. That's a good way to support. Yeah. I would say those are the best ways to reach us. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for jumping in for this special episode of Opt Out. Really glad to chat with you and just to let the listeners learn a little bit more about you.

Thanks for coming on, Vic. Great. No, thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Opt Out. If you did, please take a moment and subscribe to the podcast. Or if you're already subscribed, share it with one friend or family member this week. As always, you can check out the links to our guest content and contact info, as well as links to all of the tools we discussed in today's episode in the show notes or at optoutpod.com.

Now get out there and opt out this week.