Cake Wallet review

This Cake Wallet review looks at a wallet that made its name doing one hard thing well, mobile Monero, and then grew into a broad privacy-first wallet without losing that focus. This review covers its Monero strength, its Bitcoin privacy tools, and the serious entropy bug in its past.

Cake Wallet at a glance

What Cake Wallet is

Cake Wallet is an open-source, non-custodial, privacy-focused wallet from Cake Labs, available on iOS, Android, macOS, Linux and Windows. Non-custodial means your keys and seed are generated on your device and never sent anywhere, so Cake cannot freeze or recover your funds, and there is no recovery if you lose the seed. There is no account and no KYC to use the wallet itself, which is central to its privacy pitch.

Monero and the privacy toolkit

Monero is the heart of it. Cake was one of the first mobile Monero wallets and remains the most recommended, scanning the chain locally so your view key stays on the device, and the same team ships a Monero-only app called Monero.com from the same code. Beyond Monero it covers privacy coins Zcash and Zano, plus Bitcoin, Litecoin and other chains. On Bitcoin, this Cake Wallet Monero review notes it was the first wallet to fully support Silent Payments, which give you a reusable private address without reusing a public one, and it offers Tor connections and custom nodes for stronger privacy. Shipped in 2018 as the first Monero app on iOS, Cake wraps Monero's privacy primitives, stealth addresses, ring signatures and RingCT, in a friendly interface that hides the complexity, and it has grown a large base of privacy-minded users over eight years. XMR syncing happens locally with background sync, so your view key never leaves the app, though connecting to a public remote node can leak IP-to-address patterns, which is why running your own node or using Tor matters; you can also pair a Ledger to keep the seed offline.

Coins, swaps and Cake Pay

Cake supports around sixteen native chains, from Monero, Zcash and Zano to Bitcoin, Ethereum and its layer-2s, Solana, Tron and more, with ERC-20, SPL and TRC-20 tokens. Built-in swaps route through no-account third-party providers, so you can trade without an exchange login, and Cake Pay lets you spend crypto on gift cards for many merchants with only an email, no ID. It also pairs with hardware wallets to keep keys offline for larger balances.

Security, and the Milk Sad bug

The code is fully open source, which is a genuine strength, but two things temper the security picture. Independent builders could not reproduce Cake's store binaries from source as of late 2024, and there is no published third-party audit, so you are trusting the open code rather than a verified build or auditor. And the history: the Milk Sad research showed that Cake versions before v4.1.7 generated weak-entropy Bitcoin wallets, roughly twenty bits instead of the intended strength, that were brute-forceable, and hundreds of bitcoin were drained from users who never moved their funds. It was patched in 2021 and never affected Monero, whose key path was separate, but it is a serious episode and the main reason the score is 7.4. Being a hot wallet, keys also live on an internet-connected device.

Cake Wallet vs the alternatives

For Bitcoin and Lightning ease, Muun is simpler but has no Monero. For Bitcoin coin control on desktop, Electrum is more powerful but Bitcoin-only. For a multichain beginner wallet, Exodus is friendlier but not privacy-focused and closed source. Cake's edge is being the best mobile Monero wallet while still covering Bitcoin privacy, which none of those match.

See our best crypto wallets roundup for the wider field.

Fees and value

The wallet is free and Cake adds no fee of its own; you pay only network fees, which on Monero are typically a fraction of a cent, plus the spread baked into in-app swaps and any partner markup on fiat buys. For a privacy-focused user, that is excellent value: best-in-class Monero, Bitcoin Silent Payments and no-KYC swaps at no wallet cost. The value only drops if you specifically need reproducible builds or an audited wallet, which Cake does not yet offer.

Who should buy Cake Wallet

Cake Wallet suits anyone who wants real privacy, especially Monero users, and who values open-source, no-KYC self-custody with Bitcoin Silent Payments on the side. It is the wrong pick if you require reproducible builds, a published audit, or a browser extension, in which case you should weigh those gaps against its clear privacy strengths.