Moxie Marlinspike steps down as Signal Director
Moxie Marlinspike steps down as Signal Director
According to a blog post published today by Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the massively popular encrypted communications app Signal has announced his resignation, which he claims has been in the works for several months.
While the move was unexpected, it appears to be linked to the rise of MobileCoin, a cryptocurrency startup that had Marlinspike on its board of directors as a technical advisor early in its development.
Since last spring, Signal, which has been around for eight years and has over 40 million monthly users, has been testing an integration with MobileCoin. One of MobileCoin's goals is to enable "near instantaneous transactions" over one's phone in order to provide privacy-protected payments. However, as Wired reported last week, a "much larger phase of that experiment has been quietly underway" since the middle of November, according to the publication. When Signal made the same feature available to all of its users, it did so invisibly, allowing them to send far more private digital payments to many millions of phones than they could with a credit card transaction—or even a Bitcoin transfer."
"There are more than a hundred million devices on the planet Earth right now that can turn on MobileCoin and send an end-to-end encrypted payment in five seconds or less," said Joshua Goldbard, the founder of MobileCoin, in an interview with Wired. "There are over a hundred million devices on the planet Earth right now that can send an end-to-end encrypted payment in five seconds or less."
The cryptocurrency must first be loaded into a wallet, and, as Wired points out, it is currently only available for purchase on a handful of smaller cryptocurrency exchanges, including FTX, and none of them currently offer it to consumers in the United States of America. In fact, FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, through his quantitative trading firm and cryptocurrency liquidity provider Alameda Research, is one of the MobileCoin investors, along with several others.
Even Americans, however, will be able to purchase MobileCoin in the near future, according to Goldbard, who cited recently signed agreements, such as one with cryptocurrency payment processor Zero Hash, that will allow residents of the United States to purchase the currency within the first few months of this year, according to Wired.
The company has also benefited from its global expansion, as evidenced by its recent Series B funding of $66 million at a valuation of $1.066 billion, as well as its current Series C funding round at a valuation that one source estimates to be "in the high single-digit billions of dollars."
The rapid growth of MobileCoin has also sparked concerns about Signal and Marlinspike, who has appeared to distance himself from the cryptocurrency. According to some Signal employees who spoke to reporter Casey Newton last year, the company's exploration of cryptocurrency was risky and an invitation for bad actors to use the platform, which appears to be the case.
Another, potentially more serious, but related, concern expressed by critics is that incorporating a privacy cryptocurrency into Signal could result in legal complications for the company. The cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, Matt Green, expressed concern about the potential for a sticky situation by flirting with this type of payment infrastructure in the face of so much legislation and regulation in an interview with Wired last week: "I'm very concerned they're going to end up in a sticky situation by flirting with this type of payment infrastructure in the face of so much legislation and regulation."
Certainly, this is a legitimate point of concern. It has been previously stated that the relationship between cryptocurrency and messaging apps has historically been fraught with difficulties due to wary regulators. Kin is a digital currency that users can use to make purchases within the Kik Messenger platform. Kik Messenger is a mobile messaging app that was founded in 2009 by a group of University of Waterloo students and introduced in 2009. A protracted legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission over the project ultimately resulted in the company being almost completely bankrupted. Following years of legal battles with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Telegram, a much larger messaging app than Signal — with over 500 million monthly active users — also abandoned plans to offer its own decentralized cryptocurrency to anyone with a smartphone, in a similar fashion to Signal.
It has even been difficult for Facebook to gain traction with its own cryptocurrency project, which resulted in longtime leader David Marcus announcing his resignation from the company in November.
Marlinspike's involvement in MobileCoin would not surprise us in the least, and we would be even less surprised if Marcus showed up in some capacity. Alternatively, this is not the case.
The responses to our requests for additional information from Goldbard and Marlinspike have been delayed until today. When asked if Marlinspike is considering taking over as CEO of MobileCoin (the company currently does not have a CEO), a source close to him responds that he is "not doing that" and is instead "taking a break from cryptocurrency."
Marlinspike writes in his blog post that he will continue to serve on Signal's board of directors while the company searches for a new chief executive officer. In the meantime, Signal's executive chair, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, will serve as the company's interim chief executive officer (CEO).
