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The Mobilecoin token, a private payment project, has surged sixfold in two weeks, and the founder of Signal has been accused of being part of the founding team

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A platform that has been recommended by Musk's "wall crack."

When the Canadian messaging app Signal Mobile announced Mobilecoin, an integrated private payment program that will allow you to use Mobilecoin for payments, the Mob token soared to as high as $66 -- up from $7.40 in March. According to Coingecko, MOB tokens are up 629% in the last 14 days and 855% in the last 30 days.

Moxie Marlinspike, one of Signal's founders, was publicly listed as a Mobilecoin technology adviser, but as more information came to light, There are indications that Marlinspike may have been more deeply involved in the project -- working on the project's early development as a suspected CTO.

Signal, a social platform recommended by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a tweet, experienced spikes in users and even service outages at the start of the year. In a time of heightened concern about user privacy, the founders of Signal have been accused of working on crypto-related projects as early as 2017. What's the truth? Signal Founder May Have Been More Than a Tech Adviser to Mobilecoin This article was compiled from the CoinDesk article "Signal Founder May Have Been More Than a Tech Adviser to Mobilecoin". See links to the original and reference articles at the end of the article.

An early version of Mobilecoin's technical document suggested that Marlinspike may be the former chief technology officer of Mobilecoin. Joshua Goldard, Mobilecoin's CEO, denies this.

Screenshots of Mobilecoin related files,source

He clarified that the 2017 white paper "was not written by [him or] anyone on the Mobilecoin team," and, according to a snapshot of the Mobilecoin home page from December 18, 2017 to April 2018, Marlinspike was one of three members of the "team" and, although he did not list title names, was not listed as an adviser until May 2018.

In other words, Mobilecoin was right to think that Marlinspike was a consultant on the project, but he was not directly involved in the project in an internal role, much less as CTO.

It seems natural for Mobilecoin to downplay such a close relationship, given that Marlinspike's motives are worth looking at if news of the two projects coming together has only recently emerged.

Is Marlinspike a former Mobilecoin CTO?

To make it clear that Marlinspike was not a former CTO, Gold shared with CoinDesk another document, dated Nov. 13, 2017, that contained the same contents as the other white paper, but did not list team members. He claimed that the white paper he presented was the real one. "Moxie was never the CTO, and our new book, The Mechanics of Mobilecoin, incorrectly links to this white paper."

The CEO described the unofficial white paper as almost identical to the "real" version, except for no mention of team members or pre-sales details of Mobilecoin. Gold says the "wrong" white paper was accidentally added as a footnote to the latest edition of the Koe compilationTechnical documentation. Koe is an anonymous encryption expert who recently joined the Mobilecoin team, and the document's footnote lists Marlinspike and Gold as co-authors of the paper.

"He just looked it up on Google... [and then] put it in as a footnote. It was an oversight.

However, CoinDesk's metadata analysis of the two documents showed that the "wrong" document was generated on December 9, 2017, while the "real" paper was generated two days later -- meaning Gold's explanation didn't add up.

Marlinspike did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his professional relationship with Mobilecoin.

The truth of the two documents

In December 2017, Wired published an article titled "The Creator of Signal Has a Plan to Fix Cryptocurrency," in which Marlinspike was identified as a "technical adviser," which also noted that "There are a lot of potential applications for Mobilecoin, and Gold and Marlinspike envision it first as integration with chat apps like Signal or WhatsApp."

In addition, Signal will be the first to experiment with Software Guard Extensions (SGX). This is a measure created to protect selected code and data from leaks and modifications) for Signal, and Mobilecoin's validator also requires this feature.

Signal's code, which has always been open source, changed about a year ago, with the Mobilecoin integration code added to its most recent test.

Mobilecoin availability and other details

In addition to information about the team, the Mobilecoin white paper, which the Mobilecoin team denied, also showed details of MOB's planned offering, such as a private placement, The team raised $30 million by selling 3,750 tokens (out of a total supply of 250 million) for $0.80 -- as confirmed by the Binance Labs funding that TechCrunch reported in 2018.

In January of this year, a user asked the Mobilecoin community about the total supply of the project. The aforementioned anonymous developer "Koe" responded that the total supply was 250 million pieces, the circulation was unpredictable, and there was no mining. Currently, Mobilecoin does not have a block browser for queries.

Screenshot Source:MobileCoin BBS

In addition, the white paper does not mention that users can earn MOB rewards by mining or payment verification.

In addition to investors buying in the secondary market, Mobilecoin Token Services, an affiliate of the Mobilecoin Foundation, is currently selling MOB to non-US markets, and investors can place orders via email.

Marlinspike and Signal

Marlinspike is a legendary software engineer and a big name in the "white hat" hacker community. He spent his early years as head of security at Twitter before leaving to start his own business.

Signal, a small startup run by a nonprofit that can replace Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Apple's iMessage, is currently funded by the Signal Technology Foundation, Relying entirely on "funds donated by investors".

The origins of the Signal app can be traced back to 2010, when a startup called Whisper Systems first launched two Android apps: One is TextSecure, an app that encrypts text messages, and the other is RedPhone, an app that encrypts voice calls.

In 2011, the company was acquired by Twitter, and the apps were officially released as free, open-source software.

In 2013, Moxie Marlinspike, one of the founders of Whisper Systems, left Twitter to form a startup called Open Whisper Systems, And continue to develop TextSecure and RedPhone features. In 2014, he merged the two apps and renamed them Signal.

In 2018, Marlinspike and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton formed the Signal Foundation, a nonprofit organization to continue developing the app and maintain its status as both free and open source software. Marlinspike and his fellow entrepreneurs see their mission as making end-to-end encryption the norm, and in the future it won't matter if Signal itself dies.

When WhatsApp announced some changes to its privacy policy earlier this year that meant it would share data with its parent company, Facebook, users briefly raised questions.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and some of the biggest names in the West Coast Internet community have all started Signal, Amway's flagship privacy-protection service, which has triggered a "mass migration" of overseas users: So many people started logging in to sign up for Signal that the company's servers were overwhelmed -- the New York Times reported that 1.3 million new users had signed up on Jan. 11 alone.