Lea Thompson, marketing manager at Cake Wallet, came to the Cryptofocus booth at Bitcoin Amsterdam straight from the Orange Stage. When I asked how a wallet gets noticed on a crowded conference floor, she started with free money: Cake Wallet runs Lightning giveaways at conferences, and what she finds interesting about them, she told me, is that a lot of the people who take part have never set up a Lightning wallet before.
She had just moderated the 14:30 panel “Creating a Bitcoin Brand” with Alejandra Guajardo, Neil Jacobs and Randi Hipper, according to the Bitcoin Amsterdam agenda and a post by Cake Wallet. As the MC of the Orange Stage on Friday 6 November, I had introduced that session shortly before. Our conversation moved from first wallets to privacy and self-custody, and she kept coming back to the person who is new to bitcoin.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Lea Thompson is marketing manager at Cake Wallet, an open-source, non-custodial wallet founded in 2018. On Friday 6 November she moderated the Orange Stage panel "Creating a Bitcoin Brand". |
| 2She said a lot of people at Cake Wallet's conference giveaways have never set up a Lightning wallet, which the app added in February. The reasons she gave: no real moment to use it, some intimidation for newer bitcoiners, and fewer places that accept bitcoin than she would like. |
| 3She said self-custody "has taken a lot of hits the last month or two", with the Coldcard incident the biggest, and that people still see it as worth celebrating. |
| 4My read: every answer she gave started from the newcomer, and the hardest part she named, places to spend bitcoin, is the one no wallet controls. |
The full conversation runs just over 12 minutes.
What keeps newcomers off Lightning
Cake Wallet added Lightning this year. Version 6.0.0, dated 25 February in the Cake Wallet release notes, runs it on the Spark layer-two network through the Breez SDK, and Spark announced the integration on its own site. Since then, she said, the team has been doing “a real push” at bitcoin conferences to get people to set up their first Lightning wallet.
I asked whether those people never needed one or never had the chance. She thought it was a mix of both, leaning towards the first:
I think it’s actually maybe more that there wasn’t a real reason for them to before. Maybe they had thought about, oh, it might be fun to buy something in Bitcoin at some point, but there wasn’t a real moment where they’re like, yes, today’s the day I’m going to do that.
Lea Thompson, Cake Wallet
The second reason she gave was intimidation:
I think there’s also a little bit of an intimidation factor for someone that’s a little bit newer to Bitcoin. They’re like, Lightning, what’s that? How do I use it?
Lea Thompson, Cake Wallet
Helping people through the setup is the part of the booth she enjoys, because of the reaction that follows: “oh, that was it. That was easy.” Then she summed it up:
I think it’s a mix of lack of education on how easy it really is. But also maybe there’s just not as many places that accept Bitcoin right now as we’d like. And so it doesn’t come up as often.
Lea Thompson, Cake Wallet
Only part of that is in a wallet’s hands. A team can show at its booth how easy the setup is. A reason to pay depends on the places that accept bitcoin, and she was candid that there are fewer of them than she would like.
Read the thread on X
From mobile Monero to silent payments
Cake Wallet is older than its bitcoin features. When I asked about its milestones since 2018, she went back to the start:
Cake Wallet originally actually started as a Monero wallet and we were the very first mobile Monero wallet, which was a huge feat back then because back then Monero was, you know, you had to wait for it to sync and it was on desktop only. So, it really helped bring privacy options to a much easier, more mainstream audience.
Lea Thompson, Cake Wallet
The bitcoin side came later, and she described it as the same priority carried over. “Our team really does a lot with silent payments, Payjoin,” she said, adding: “We were the first to implement silent payments.”
Both tools deal with what a public blockchain gives away. With silent payments, specified in BIP 352, a receiver can publish one static address while each payment to it lands in a unique output that outsiders cannot link back to that address. Payjoin, whose newer asynchronous version is BIP 77, has the receiver add an input of their own to the payment, which undercuts the usual assumption that every input in a transaction belongs to one owner.
The rules behind those features, as she put them, are short: “we’re not collecting user data,” and “you don’t need an account to use Cake Wallet.” The developers, she said, are “building products that they want to use themselves.”
Is privacy still for criminals?
I put it to her that the market was showing more maturity, and asked what that changes for someone who markets a wallet. She started with how far bitcoin itself has travelled:
Bitcoin itself has become much more mainstream, and you can even talk to your mom, your grandma, and she might know what Bitcoin is right now, where even five years ago, that wasn’t so much the case.
Lea Thompson, Cake Wallet
For a company built around privacy, the change she cares about is in how privacy is seen:
Especially as a privacy-focused company, it’s very encouraging to see the narrative start to shift from privacy being something that’s for criminals into something that’s just kind of more commonly accepted as a value system. Obviously, we still have a long way to go. Clearly, people give up their data all day long, all day long.
Lea Thompson, Cake Wallet
She did not oversell the shift. As more people notice how much data they hand over, she expects them to go looking for privacy tools, and she wants Cake Wallet to have them ready when they do.
Marketing beyond the echo chamber
Marketing is her job, so I asked what she is working towards. Her answer was about who is arriving: “how many people that are outside of our normal, maybe echo chamber, that are getting more interested in Bitcoin and are finding Cake Wallet.”
Those newcomers shape her side of the work. For a self-custodial wallet, she called education “a huge area” of focus, aimed at people who feel intimidated by bitcoin, and she mentioned a Cake Wallet series called the Custody Sessions that explains the technical side of self-custody in plain terms.
She has been in bitcoin “for about 10 years” herself, and she described wallet design from the newcomer’s side: someone setting up a wallet should never be left wondering which button to press. “I think that’s an important thing that Bitcoin companies should be thinking about,” she said.
Self-custody after the Coldcard incident
Cake Wallet is non-custodial, so I asked what “not your keys, not your bitcoin” means for the product. “It’s the core of what we do,” she said, and that core comes with homework for the user, starting with “make sure you save your seed phrase”. Then she widened the lens:
There’s been a lot happening in the industry lately on both the custodial hack side, but also the non-custodial side with supply chain attacks with hardware wallets, data leaks, things like that. There’s been a lot of, self-custody has taken a lot of hits the last month or two, obviously the Coldcard incident being the biggest one.
Lea Thompson, Cake Wallet
The Coldcard incident is the one TRM Labs calls the largest hardware wallet exploit of 2026. According to TRM, a build configuration error made seed generation on affected Coldcard firmware fall back on a weak software random number generator. Attackers have drained about 1,816 BTC in at least four waves since 30 July, a figure TRM calls preliminary, and seeds created on the vulnerable firmware stay at risk even after an update.
What she finds refreshing is that the idea has survived the bad news. People, she said, still hold on to the idea that self-custody is “still something worth looking into and still worth celebrating and focusing on”. In self-custody nobody else can replace a weak seed or a lost backup, so the education she keeps mentioning is part of the security.
Why she wants bitcoin to feel fun
My last question was what she wanted visitors to remember about Cake Wallet once they left the venue. “I think that Bitcoin can be fun,” she said, and she explained it through the opposite feeling:
I think that sometimes it’s when you’re just at home on X by yourself, reading all the bad news, it can be a little bit alienating. It can feel like things are heavy.
Lea Thompson, Cake Wallet
The counterweight, for her, is the room itself: “connecting with other bitcoiners being in person getting to be part of that energy is so important”. She hoped visitors to the Cake Wallet booth went home feeling “all right, we’re in this together, we’re doing okay”.
Her Lightning story ends in the same place. A conference can supply the first moment she described, the setup at a booth and the “that was easy” that follows. The question to watch is how many of those first-time users make a second payment at home, and by her own account there are not yet as many places to make it as bitcoiners would like.
Read next
- All our interviews from Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026, recorded on both days at the SugarFactory.
- Alejandra Guajardo of Miss Bitcoin sat on the “Creating a Bitcoin Brand” panel that Lea Thompson moderated, and talks about friends who “have a block” about bitcoin.
- Pooya Gohardani of Keystody looks at bitcoin custody from the side of a European customer who was turned away.
- Ryan “Phunky” Haczynski of Buy The Cat on memes as a way in for exactly the people outside the echo chamber she wants to reach.
- Cake Wallet is at cakewallet.com and on X; the company behind it is Cake Labs.
I recorded the interview with Lea Thompson at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026, at the SugarFactory in Halfweg, on 6 November 2026. Quotes are verbatim, with filler removed. Cryptofocus is a media partner of Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026; I moderated a panel there on 5 November and am the MC of the Orange Stage on 6 November. Nothing here is financial advice.
