Key Takeaways
- In an interview with CCN, Cake Wallet CEO Vikrant Sharm said the charges against Roman Storm create a culture of fear for privacy tool developers.
- Storm was charged with money laundering charges for his role in developing Tornado Cash.
- The threat of legal action hangs over developers working with technologies like privacy coins.
Privacy and crypto have long been synonymous, but as the technology has entered the mainstream, the pro-privacy crowd often finds itself at ideological odds with authorities.
As privacy-focused cryptocurrency projects come under heightened scrutiny, Cake Wallet CEO Vikrant Sharma says developers remain ever-presently fearful of regulatory overreach.
Developers Looking Over Their Shoulders
Speaking after the recent trial of Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm, Sharma acknowledged the chilling effect such cases have had in the broader ecosystem.
While he believes there are key differences between Cake Wallet and Tornado Cash, primarily because Cake doesn’t generate user fees and only functions as a facilitator for peer-to-peer swaps, Sharma is still wary of a crackdown.
“You’re always looking over your shoulder, even though we’re doing nothing like mixing or profiting from mixing,” he said. “The way the laws are applied just randomly, it seems at times that fear is always there.”
Privacy Coins
While decentralized platforms like Monero are generally resistant to censorship, the apps and services built around them are increasingly threatened by the atmosphere of fear generated by legal challenges.
Against this backdrop, many crypto exchanges have delisted privacy coins, and even peer-to-peer platforms that only connect buyers and sellers have been forced to shut down.
Sharma pointed out that Cake Wallet was originally developed as a Monero wallet. The privacy coin remains central to its offering today, driving an estimated 60%- 70% of usage.
However, he noted that the share has declined from nearly 100% a few years ago as support for other cryptocurrencies has grown.
Private Crypto Beyond Monero
While Cake has diversified away from Monero, a focus on privacy is still central to its thesis.
For example, it recently introduced support for silent Bitcoin payments. This privacy-enhancing feature allows a receiver to use a single, static address to receive payments while creating unique on-chain addresses for each transaction.
Meanwhile, the platform was one of the first to integrate Litecoin’s Mimblewimble upgrade, which lets users conceal the addresses and amounts involved from everyone except those involved in the transaction.
By adopting new privacy features, “we’ve definitely won a lot of Bitcoin and Litecoin users over,” Sharma claimed.
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James Morales is CCN’s blockchain and crypto policy reporter. He has been working in the news media since 2020, writing about topics such as payments, banking and financial technology. These days, he likes to explore the latest blockchain innovations and the evolving landscape of global crypto regulation.
With an educational background in social anthropology and media studies, James uses his platform as a journalist to explore how new technologies work, why they matter and how they might shape our future.
