Users of Mobilecoin are expressing concerns over ties between Signals founder and the cryptocurrency opacity surrounding the coins issuance and gains leading to the partnership announcement, which are suspicious and the aforementioned is the controversy that surrounds the integration of Mobilecoin.
Since launching as Open Whisper Systems in 2013 and re-branding two years later, Signal as an encrypted messaging application has been embraced by privacy and security-conscious community.
Issuing roughly 15% of its supply to private investors after supply was minted at launch, MobileCoin was founded in 2017.
Also, with Moxie Malinspike the Signal founder stated that they chose MobileCoin due to it requiring little storage space and providing fast transaction without sacrificing privacy on mobile devices. On April 4, the messaging app announced it had launched payment functionality through MobileCoin.
Signal’s decision to integrate MobileCoin appears to have been made some time ago, with Internet Archive’s Jonah Edwards noting the source code for the cryptocurrency integration was kept private for nearly 12 months before being published to GitHub.
With MobileCoin’s MOB token rallying roughly 450% from March 28 until April 3, and news of the Signal integration pushing prices up to $66 as of April 7, some observers are speculating the price may have been affected by investors with advance warning of the announcement.
that MobileCoins are not allowed to be sold or traded with U.S citizens, either through the site, or peer to peer within Signal.
MobileCoin also withholds information regarding how many coins are sold through the platform, with Goldbard stating: “With respect to how many coins were sold at buymobilecoin.com, we do not release this information out of respect for the privacy of our users.”