Radar: Instant Bitcoin in Every Chat

Radar is a Signal-compatible, end-to-end encrypted messenger with bitcoin built in. It's the latest product from the team behind Cake Wallet, who brought instant bitcoin to nearly two million users with the Breez SDK earlier this year.

Radar is a new company, but it's built on the belief that has driven Cake from the start: crypto only works when it's simple enough for everyday people to use. And the app people already live in is the messenger. Photos, videos, documents, dinner plans, all of it already moves through chat, but money has always been the missing piece.

Radar slots that piece in without asking anyone to download another app. It runs on Signal under the hood, so existing contacts are already reachable and chats stay end-to-end encrypted.

Sending bitcoin to a friend has long meant living in two experiences. The request happens in a chat, the payment happens in a wallet, and the person sending has to shuttle between them: copying the address, pasting it, checking it again, and then hopping back to the conversation to ask whether it has arrived. The money, and the talk about the money, never share a screen.

But closing that gap is harder than it looks. The Cake team learned it firsthand two years ago, when they built a Lightning integration in Cake Wallet, worked at it, and scrapped it, because the user experience wasn't good enough to ship. Running a traditional Lightning setup hands teams the liquidity and channel management, unworkable for a team building a messaging app. Radar needed payments as simple as sending a message.

Radar integrated the Breez SDK to power bitcoin inside the messenger. Sending bitcoin now works like sending anything else. Open a chat, tap, done. It settles instantly, the funds are non-custodial from the first sat, and nobody sits in the middle holding a balance.

The team that once scrapped a Lightning integration for poor UX had nothing to scrap this time. No liquidity to source. No channels to open and close. No payment infrastructure to build or babysit. That freed the engineering effort to go where it matters: building a world-class messaging app.

The first audience is ready-made: Cake Wallet users who already trust the team, and bitcoiners who finally get one place to message and pay friends, splitting a dinner or settling a shared taxi in the same conversation where the plan was made. The bigger prize is everyone else. People who would never download a crypto wallet may instead download a messenger, and find themselves using bitcoin with no setup at all.

Making crypto simple has carried Cake to nearly two million users. Radar pushes the idea further: nobody has to go looking for bitcoin anymore, because it's already in the chat.