Introducing: Radar

Written By Adam Gebner

We are thrilled to announce our investment in Radar - the first app to bring private messaging and self-custodial Bitcoin into one seamless experience.

Your messages. Your Bitcoin. Together, at last.

The Problem Nobody Solved

The two most personal things you do every day - who you talk to and what you do with your money - still live in separate apps, built on opposite principles.

Want to send a private message? One app. Want to send Bitcoin? Another app. Copy the address, paste it, switch back, repeat. The messengers people trust for privacy can't move value. The apps that move value are mostly custodial, surveilled, and slow to settle. Nobody had put private communication and open money in the same place, self-custodial by default, with the keys on the user's own device.

Radar is different.

The Solution

Radar is chats and sats in one place: end-to-end encrypted messaging with self-custodial Bitcoin built in at a tap. Messages run on the Signal protocol. Payments settle instantly over Bitcoin’s Lightning network. And the keys never leave the device - Radar never holds the user's money, so no one can freeze, seize, or lose it but them.

The result is simple to describe and hard to build: you send sats like you send a text. No switching apps, no copy-pasting addresses, no handing your keys to anyone.

Radar is also built on Signal's trusted messaging network, which means the people a user already talks to come with them. No rebuilding a contact graph. No new account necessary. It's a rare thing in a new consumer app - a network effect on day one.

Free and Open, by Design

Radar reflects a set of commitments we care deeply about at ego death capital:

  • No ads, no trackers. Radar doesn't sell ads and doesn't track users. Chats and payments are nobody's business but their own.

  • Self-custodial. Your keys, your coins. Radar never takes custody.

  • Open source. Every line is open to inspect, audit, and build on - no black boxes, no "just trust us."

  • Backing Signal. Radar gives back financially to the protocol it relies on. Signal's mission to keep private messaging alive is one Radar shares.

This is what it looks like when privacy and sound money aren't features bolted onto a growth funnel, but the product itself.

The Team

Radar is made by the team behind Cake Wallet - the open-source, privacy-first crypto wallet trusted by more than 2 million people, operating as Radar Chat, Inc.

This is a team that has already shipped the hard things Radar depends on. Under CEO Vikrant Sharma and COO Seth for Privacy, Cake pioneered privacy-by-default on Bitcoin at consumer scale - deploying Silent Payments and Payjoin when almost no other mainstream wallet would, and, most recently, self-custodial Lightning that finally makes near-instant payments practical without turning bitcoin into an IOU or asking users to babysit channels. Radar is the natural next step: the same conviction that made Cake Wallet a home for sovereign money, now extended to sovereign communication.

Why We Invested

Radar stood out to us for several reasons:

  • The right team for the hardest problem. End-to-end encrypted messaging and self-custodial Lightning are each difficult to ship well. This team has already proven it can do both, at scale, without compromising on privacy or custody.

  • Bitcoin-native by design. Lightning is the settlement rail, not a marketing line. Value moves over the most secure, neutral monetary network there is - no new token, no custodial float.

  • A network effect from day one. Because it's built on Signal's network, Radar arrives with users' real contacts already reachable, sidestepping the cold-start problem that kills most new messengers.

  • A category, not a feature. "Chats and sats in one place" is a new primitive. When messaging and money share one trust model, adoption compounds on both sides at once.

Why Now

The case for private, sovereign communication has never been more urgent. Governments across the democratic world are actively pressuring messaging apps to weaken or backdoor end-to-end encryption, while the dominant platforms monetize the metadata of who talks to whom. At the same time, self-custodial Lightning has finally crossed the usability threshold: instant settlement, human-readable addresses, and no channel management, now real for ordinary users rather than hobbyists.

Encryption solved private speech. Bitcoin solved open money. Radar puts them in the same place - both, together, for everyone, with no middleman in the middle of either one. Today, that app is real, and it's in your hands.

We're proud to back the Radar team.

Your messages. Your Bitcoin. Together, at last.

Learn more:

- ego death capital

Adam Gebner
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