Glossary

This glossary explains, in plain language, terms you'll come across while using Cake Wallet and working with cryptocurrency. Terms are listed alphabetically, and where a topic has a fuller guide you'll find a Learn more link.

• Account (Monero) — A Monero wallet can hold multiple accounts, each with its own balance, transaction history, and set of subaddresses. Accounts let you separate funds — for example, personal and business — inside a single wallet. Learn more

• Block height — The sequential number of a block in a blockchain, counting up from the first block ever created. It works like a timestamp for the network, and Cake Wallet uses it to track how far your wallet has synced.

• Coin control (UTXO) — Bitcoin-style coins store your balance as separate chunks called UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs). Coin control lets you choose which UTXOs to spend in a transaction, which helps protect your privacy. Learn more

• Confirmation — A transaction gains a confirmation each time a new block is added on top of the one that includes it. More confirmations make a transaction harder to reverse, and many services wait for a set number before treating funds as final.

• Gas — The fee paid to process a transaction on Ethereum and other EVM networks such as Polygon, Base, and Arbitrum. Gas is paid in the network's native coin (for example, ETH on Ethereum), so you need some of that coin on hand to send tokens. Learn more

• Lightning address — An email-style address (for example, you@cake.cash) that lets others pay you over the Bitcoin Lightning Network for fast, low-fee payments. Learn more

• MWEB — MimbleWimble Extension Blocks, a Litecoin feature that lets you hold and send LTC more privately by hiding amounts and addresses. Learn more

• Network fee — The fee paid to a blockchain's miners or validators to include your transaction; it does not go to Cake Wallet. You can usually pick a fee priority (such as slow, medium, or fast) to balance cost against how quickly the transaction confirms. Learn more

• Node — A server that connects your wallet to a coin's network so it can check balances and broadcast transactions. Cake Wallet uses default nodes out of the box, and you can switch to your own for more privacy and control. Learn more

• Non-custodial — Cake Wallet is non-custodial: only you hold your seed phrase and private keys, so Cake can never access, move, or freeze your funds. This also means recovery is your responsibility, so keep your seed backed up.

• Payjoin — A collaborative Bitcoin payment in which the sender and receiver build the transaction together, breaking common blockchain-analysis assumptions and making payments harder to trace. Learn more

• Private keys — The secret values that prove ownership of your funds and authorize spending; anyone who has them controls the wallet. Monero splits this into a spend key (to send) and a view key (to see incoming funds), which is what makes view-only wallets possible. Learn more

• RBF (Bump fee) — Replace-by-fee, a Bitcoin feature that re-sends a stuck, unconfirmed transaction with a higher fee so it confirms sooner. In Cake Wallet it appears as Bump fee on a pending transaction's details. Learn more

• Restore height — The block height (or date) from which Cake Wallet begins scanning when you restore a wallet. Setting it close to when the wallet was created makes restoring much faster, while setting it too late can hide older transactions. Learn more

• Seed phrase — A list of words, also called a recovery phrase, that is a human-readable form of your wallet's private key; anyone with it can restore and spend your funds, so keep it secret and backed up. Depending on the coin, Cake Wallet uses formats such as Polyseed, BIP39, and Electrum. Learn more

• Silent Payments — A Bitcoin feature that lets you share one reusable address while each payment still arrives at a unique, unlinkable address on-chain, improving your privacy. Learn more

• Subaddress — A unique, unlinkable Monero address you can generate on demand within an account; using a fresh one for each payment keeps your main address private. Cake Wallet generates a new subaddress after each use automatically. Learn more

• Swap — Trading one cryptocurrency for another inside Cake Wallet through third-party exchange providers. A fixed-rate swap locks in the rate up front, while a floating-rate swap can settle at a somewhat different amount if the market moves before it completes. Learn more

• Tor — A network that anonymizes your internet traffic by routing it through multiple relays. Cake Wallet includes built-in Tor you can turn on to hide your IP address from the nodes and services it connects to. Learn more

• Trade ID — The unique code an exchange provider assigns to a swap so its status can be looked up and tracked. You'll find it at the top of a trade's details screen. Learn more

• Transaction ID — A unique string, also called a transaction hash, given to every transaction recorded on a blockchain; it's often needed to locate or prove a payment. Learn more

• URI scheme — A special link (for example, one beginning with bitcoin: or monero:) that opens Cake Wallet with payment or wallet-restore details already filled in. Learn more

• View-only wallet — A Monero wallet restored with only your view key, so you can watch incoming transactions without being able to spend. Note that a view-only wallet usually cannot display an accurate balance. Learn more

• Wallet group — A set of wallets in Cake Wallet that share one seed phrase, so you can restore several coins from a single backup. Only wallets with compatible seed types (BIP39) can belong to the same group. Learn more