Vik Sharɱa - Cake Wallet & Radar Chat 🇺🇸 📡

Today we are launching @RadarChat, a messaging app that combines Signal's encryption with built-in Bitcoin Lightning payments, and because it's a Signal fork, you can keep messaging your existing Signal contacts from day one. No convincing friends to switch apps. The idea: you can already message someone privately, so why bounce out to Venmo or Cash App and hand your financial info to a third party every time you want to send money? Radar keeps both in one place. Send a message, send sats, all in the same conversation. What it does: ✅Works with your Signal contacts - it's a Signal fork, so the messaging side inherits Signal's encryption model and interoperates with the Signal network. ✅Private by default - Signal’s end-to-end encrypted messaging. ✅Bitcoin Lightning under the hood - fast, cheap settlement, non-custodial. Send within chats or externally.  You can just use it as your Bitcoin wallet! ✅Your seed phrase is encrypted and saved on Signal servers.  Lose your phone or app? Just restore Radar with our phone number as you normally do, and get your wallet back! (Although we still recommend that you write down your seed phrase) The privacy of Signal. The convenience of instant private Bitcoin Lightning payments. Backed by @egodeathcapital and built by the team that brought you @cakewallet It's live now. I'd love feedback from this community, so give it a try and tell me what works and what doesn't. You can download it now on the Apple App Store now and Google Play soon. Learn more at radar.chat!

@pete_rizzo_ Fun Fact: he worked at Intellivision, the gaming console, in the 70s and was hired to port games over from the Atari!

Trump's 2025 financial disclosure just dropped and the numbers are staggering. The sitting President of the United States personally earned $1.4 billion from crypto last year, more than every publicly traded US crypto company. That's more than Coinbase ($1.26B net income). More than CleanSpark, IREN, and Bitdeer combined. Meanwhile, companies like Core Scientific, Hut 8, Galaxy, and Bitfarms all posted losses. The breakdown: ~$791 million from World Liberty Financial (token sales, governance tokens) and ~$635 million in royalties from the $TRUMP memecoin through licensing deals. For context, the same memecoin that made Trump $635M has cost retail investors over $3.8 billion in trading losses. This is now creating a real political flashpoint. Senate Democrats are using the disclosure to push ethics provisions into the CLARITY Act, the bill that would define when crypto is a security vs a commodity. They want language explicitly preventing the president and his family from profiting off crypto while in office. The irony is thick. Trump went from calling Bitcoin a "scam" in his first term to running the most profitable crypto operation in America during his second. And now his financial disclosure is becoming the centerpiece of every political fight over crypto legislation in Congress.

It breaks my heart that so many people think “nice guys finish last.” People don’t get that kindness is the best strategy, the most underrated skill.

ARE YOU FOR OR AGAINST #BIP-110?

@kphur Thanks for this. People really should fix their own homes before criticizing others.

There's been a round of misinformation about Spark going around, so for the sake of setting the record straight, I'll briefly clear up a few things. For one, unilateral exit has been around since the early days of Spark. Many developers and users have used it. This has been demonstrated many times both here on X and during the process of integration by developers. Unilateral exit also does not require the SOs to be online when a user wishes to exit. When a transaction is received, users can save the unilateral exit information and later use those pre-signed, valid L1 Bitcoin transactions at any time on Bitcoin. There are existing Github issues to expose unilateral exits in a more intuitive way in the SDKs, but unilateral exits themselves have been functional for a very long time. Unilateral exits do require CPFP - this is used to ensure that the expected value for an attacker is negative. The typical user would perform a cooperative exit, which does not require any on-chain funds and is an atomic swap of on-chain funds in exchange for Spark funds. Unilateral exits are generally reserved for a worst-case scenario and can be sponsored by an L1 fund provider if needed. Second, the confusion around "Sparkcore". At Lightspark, we use a monorepo for our server code. This one service is called Sparkcore - the naming of which preceded the creation of Spark. Lightspark runs an SSP within this service. Our Lightning infrastructure uses both LDK and LND - both of which we contribute code towards. Sparkcore itself is not open sourced - that would mean open sourcing our entire server-side stack for every product we have built. The Spark network code, however, has always been open source - and that's the openness that matters, because it's the code that actually enforces the rules of Spark. The SSP is an optional, replaceable convenience role. A recent post claimed that APIs used for other products are part of the SSP. We have many products, and we have never been shy about describing UMA, which allows regulated entities to exchange information to process transactions over Lightning. This is not a Spark product. The SSP does not hold your seed phrase (that should never leave your device), the SSP cannot freeze your funds, and the SSP isn't even a required role to use Spark - it is the interop layer between Lightning and Spark and helps do swaps for exact denominations of leaves. Running an SSP is something we have talked with many partners about. The client chooses which SSP they wish to interact with (if any) - we cannot control if a client talks to a new SSP. Finally, privacy. I've discussed this many times in the past, so won't belabor the point again. Spark allows for transactions to be hidden from external visibility. As I've spoken about at length both here and at various conferences, we care deeply about making sure that there is true privacy, and we aren't satisfied with anything short of that. It's an ongoing effort to continue to further the research in this area. I'll leave it with this. In the network our critics operate, the default payment path is one where the operator colluding with any prior owner can double-spend the current holder - their own docs say so. Receiving over Lightning means trusting that the operator deleted a key - their own docs say so. If you don't come online every 28 days, the operator can take your funds. In their founder's own words: "In theory it could steal it." The automatic re-issuance of expired funds promised in March 2025 still hasn't shipped. Their operator's liquidity costs scale with payment volume, which by their own admission "will translate into user fees." And there is exactly one operator - their own docs tell everyone else: "Do not attempt to run an Ark server in production (yet!)." Spark has three independent operators, exits that don't expire, and no flow where a single operator can take user funds. Users can judge for themselves. Our users and the developers building on top of Spark care about bringing Bitcoin to more people. They value the ease of use and simplicity of Spark. They care that we have 3 independent SOs. They care that we are pushing for more and better functionality. And they value that we spend all of our time thinking about how to make Spark better each and every day. Ok, now back to building because that's what we do at Spark.

Ok if you like that one, i modified this one that someone sent me earlier today.

Well at least we know he was alive until July 7th.

@JBeverly28 @EricSpracklen No there was a fake edited one going around. Believe me, I’m no fan of Mitch.

@EricSpracklen grok says fake x.com/i/grok/share/e…

DEBATE: Do you think this picture is AI or real?

@EricSpracklen ChatGPT says it’s real

@MAGACult2 Well Mitch is not dead it seems after that pic

NOT THE THIRD WE WANT.

we've always been transparent that Spark can see transaction details but don't share them, and that it provides good privacy from third-parties. I know you’re upset that all these wallets went with Spark instead of whatever you wanted, but everyone went with the best tech at the time. A simple DM from you would’ve been great to talk this over but you write as if we are doing something malicious, which doesn’t sit right with me. I wish you the best in whatever it is you’re doing.

@vikrantnyc @sethforprivacy Have you been transparent that when users are using Radar chat that their data is being logged and recorded by Sparkcore?

Of course I did my due diligence before we ever integrated Spark, found the same thing Matthew did below and hit the panic button internally. But unlike him I didn’t take to X to attack competitors and potential integrators, but instead was able to quickly confirm in private that it had nothing to do with Spark (the L2) in any way. Wasn’t difficult at all and was resolved with a few conversations with Spark/Lightspark and others in the space. Lightspark (not Spark) offer custodial services and this is only related to those and isn’t even an ongoing partnership of Lightsparks. I have been EXTREMELY vocal for years now about the tradeoffs with Spark (and both Ark implementations at the same time), and am all for digging into tradeoffs, but this is going far beyond that. Very frustrating that someone I know well and who works for a team I’ve been constantly shouting out, praising, and pushing people towards would stoop to completely fake news to try and win over users. I love the tech that @secondhq have built, but it’s a terrible look to be rampaging with falsehoods for weeks on end and not disclosing or sharing any of their own systems tradeoffs. I’m tempted to dive into the mudslinging and call out the major tradeoffs in Bark, but I’ll leave that off for now unless forced or unless someone reasonable wants to learn more.

Get Monero

If Bitcoiners spent half as much time building as they do tearing down other projects or builders in the space, we’d have a hell of a lot better ecosystem today. Everyone loses when infighting consumes so much of our time.

@xNZNKMT Please contact support.

@vikrantnyc Hey trying to restore my cake wallet on radar it tells me it’s been restored but wallet screen stays the same

As I tweeted before, it’s better to work on improving your own project rather than trying to tear others down. If there’s better tech out there then yes we will switch as we always do what’s best for our users.

@Kruwed @gmk6977 @matthewvuk2 you’re just making stuff up. Go learn how things works and have an understating then make arguments.

@vikrantnyc @gmk6977 @matthewvuk2 Why would anyone give a "100 privacy score" to a wallet that sends the user's transaction history to third parties? Or confiscates their money because they were flagged by chainalysis?

The "Sparkcore" SSP is building a profile on you: it logs every payment you make and the pubkey of every lightning node you pay to. It has a CHAINALYSIS integration inside that registers who you pay and runs "RISK SCREENING" on your txs with a 3rd party. Not very private...

@boyacaxa I see. No use arguing with you because you don’t know what any of that means. Nice try. Like Roy said… you’re an idiot.

@vikrantnyc When you sell yourself as private: x.com/i/status/20764…

@boyacaxa I’m not sure it’s the full truth. Also We do no KYC! So there’s that.

@vikrantnyc Lol... Competitors cant share the truth. Or KYC policy its also an attack?

@boyacaxa Always honest!

@vikrantnyc Your dev in social media got a lesson about how Spark works. Be humble and be honest! x.com/i/status/20300…