Cake Wallet

Cake Wallet is an open-source, non-custodial multi-currency crypto wallet for iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, and Windows. It is the most prominent open mobile wallet for Monero and a credible general-purpose alternative for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and a long tail of chains — all from one Flutter app.

Why it matters

• The Monero reference on mobile. Cake Wallet is the wallet most Monero users install first. It implements subaddresses, multiple accounts, restore-height based scanning, view-key-only wallets, and batch sends — the features that make XMR usable on a phone. The same codebase ships a stripped-down Monero-only app called Monero.com under the same repository.
• One app, many chains. Beyond Monero the wallet supports Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin (with MWEB), Ethereum and EVM chains (Polygon, Arbitrum, Base), Solana, Tron, Nano, Zano, and Decred. Each chain gets its own dedicated Dart plugin package — cw_monero, cw_bitcoin, cw_evm, cw_solana, cw_tron, cw_nano, cw_zano, cw_decred, cw_dogecoin, cw_wownero, cw_zcash, cw_mweb, cw_bitcoin_cash — so adding a chain is a matter of dropping in another package rather than forking the UI.
• Non-custodial by construction. Seeds and view keys never leave the device. The wallet supports its own exchange flow (built on partner providers), buy/sell with fiat on-ramps, Tor-only connections, custom node URLs, OpenAlias, Unstoppable Domains, Yats, and FIO for human-readable addresses — all without any account signup.

How it works

The repo is a Flutter monorepo. The user-facing app lives in lib/ and is a single Flutter target that consumes the cw_* packages as path dependencies. Each cw_* package follows the standard Flutter plugin shape: Dart code in lib/, platform glue in android/, ios/, macos/, linux/, and windows/. The shared core (cw_core) defines the wallet interface that every chain-specific package implements, and cw_shared_external bundles the native dependencies — Boost, OpenSSL, libsodium — that the per-chain plugins link against.

The Monero plugin is the most interesting because Monero's wallet2 does not run on Dart. cw_monero consumes a Dart shim called monero from the mrcyjanek/monero_c repository, which in turn wraps monero-project's wallet2_api.h C interface; the actual FFI calls go through a platform plugin (cw_monero_plugin.cc, CMakeLists.txt) compiled per platform. Subaddress derivation, key image generation, and transaction construction all happen in that C/C++ layer; the Dart side just orchestrates scan passes and balance queries. The Bitcoin-family packages (cw_bitcoin, cw_litecoin, cw_bitcoin_cash, cw_dogecoin, cw_mweb, cw_zcash) reuse the bitcoin_base / blockchain_utils Dart forks in pubspec_base.yaml plus hardware-wallet bindings (ledger_flutter_plus, trezor_connect, bitbox_flutter) for air-gapped signing.

State management is MobX; persistence is Hive with a code-generated adapter layer. Networking is dio plus web_socket_channel for chain daemons that push; socks5_proxy gives Tor support. The dependency tree is heavily customised — most crypto primitives pull from cake-tech/* forks (bech32, web3dart, nostr_tools, qr_flutter, cake_backup) rather than upstream packages, which makes the project robust but means dependency_overrides in pubspec_base.yaml is long and worth reading before bumping.

Caveats

• Heavy fork surface. Almost every cryptographic package is a cake-tech or community fork. The result is a wallet that ships the patches it needs but is harder for an outside contributor to reason about; bumping a major dependency is non-trivial.
• Buy/sell/exchange is partner-mediated. The in-app exchange and fiat on-ramp features rely on third-party providers and require KYC at their end even though the wallet itself is non-custodial. The Monero-only flow can route through Tor; the partner-mediated flows cannot.
• Build complexity. Compiling Monero's wallet2 across five platforms needs Boost, OpenSSL, libsodium, CMake, and per-OS toolchains; CI publishes signed APKs, IPAs, MSIX, and AppImage artifacts but local builds from cw_monero/linux/ are not turnkey.

Deployment notes

# Mobile — install from the official stores
# iOS:     https://apps.apple.com/app/cake-wallet/id1334702548
# Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cakewallet.wallet
# APK:     https://github.com/cake-tech/cake_wallet/releases

# Linux (AppImage)
# https://github.com/cake-tech/cake_wallet/releases  (cake_wallet.AppImage)

# Build from source — Flutter 3.x + the native deps above
git clone https://github.com/cake-tech/cake_wallet.git
cd cake_wallet
flutter pub get
flutter run -d linux   # or android, ios, macos

Minimum: iOS 13+ or Android 6+ for the mobile builds; macOS 11+, a recent Ubuntu LTS, or Windows 10/11 for the desktop builds. Monero sync from genesis wants ~50 GB; a restore_height cuts that to roughly the wallet's age.

Integration tip: if you are cataloguing open wallets, treat Cake Wallet as the "more chains" entry next to single-chain peers like BlueWallet (Bitcoin/Lightning). The cw_* package split is also a useful reference for anyone designing a pluggable, multi-chain Flutter wallet — the cw_core interface is the contract every chain has to satisfy.