Macadamia Wallet brings bearer ecash transfers to iPhone, limited to EU users

Macadamia Wallet, the first fully native iOS application built on the open-source Cashu ecash protocol, is rolling out a feature that lets users receive bearer ecash transfers from any device to an iPhone. The catch: it’s EU only, at least for now.

The announcement, made on August 30, signals a meaningful step forward for interoperability among privacy-focused digital wallets. Bearer ecash tokens work like digital cash in the most literal sense: whoever holds them owns the value, no identity verification required.

What bearer ecash actually means

The Cashu protocol, which Macadamia is built on, uses a concept called blind signatures. In plain terms, a mint (essentially a token issuer) can verify that a token is legitimate without ever knowing who holds it or what they’re spending it on.

These tokens live off-chain, meaning they don’t clog up Bitcoin’s main network. When a user wants to “cash out,” the tokens get melted back into Bitcoin via Lightning, which handles settlement in near-real time.

The new cross-device transfer feature means that someone using a different Cashu-compatible wallet, like Minibits, can now send bearer tokens directly to a Macadamia user on iPhone. Previously, moving tokens between different wallet implementations was clunkier than it needed to be.

Macadamia’s growing feature set

In September 2025, the wallet integrated with iMessage, letting users send ecash tokens through Apple’s native messaging platform. The wallet also supports NFC, meaning tokens can theoretically be transferred by tapping two phones together. Combined with multi-mint functionality, which lets users hold tokens from different issuers within a single wallet, Macadamia has been assembling a surprisingly complete toolkit for a beta product.

Multi-mint support is particularly noteworthy. In the Cashu model, mints are the entities that issue and redeem tokens. Relying on a single mint creates a single point of failure and a trust bottleneck. By supporting multiple mints, Macadamia lets users distribute their risk, somewhat analogous to keeping accounts at multiple banks.

Given that the wallet is still in beta, with the team explicitly recommending users keep transaction amounts small, caution seems to be the operating principle.

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