The token of the privacy payment project MobileCoin has skyrocketed 6 times in two weeks. The founder of Signal is said to have been a member of the founding team.

Recently, the encrypted instant messaging application Signal mobile version announced the integration of the privacy payment project MobileCoin, supporting the use of MobileCoin for payment. After the news was announced, the MOB token quickly soared to a high of US$66 - the price was only US$7.4 in March this year. According to Coingecko data, the MOB token has risen by 629% in the past 14 days and 855% in the past 30 days.

Public information shows that Moxie Marlinspike, one of the founders of Signal, is a technical consultant for MobileCoin, but as more information is discovered, there are signs that Marlinspike may be more deeply involved in the project - suspected to be involved in the early development of the project as CTO.

As a social platform recommended by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Signal experienced a surge in users and even service interruptions at the beginning of the year. At a time when user privacy is under great concern, the founder of Signal is accused of starting the development of encryption-related projects as early as 2017. What is the truth? The main part of this article is compiled from the Coindesk article "Signal Founder May Have Been More Than a Tech Adviser to MobileCoin". The original article and reference articles can be found at the end of the article.

An early version of MobileCoin’s technical document suggests that Marlinspike may be the former chief technology officer of MobileCoin, but MobileCoin CEO Joshua Goldard has denied this.

Screenshot of MobileCoin-related documents, source

He clarified that the 2017 white paper “was not written by [him or] anyone on the MobileCoin team,” and that a snapshot of MobileCoin’s homepage from Dec. 18, 2017 to April 2018 showed Marlinspike as one of three members of the “team,” though no title was listed and he was not listed as an advisor until May 2018.

In other words, MobileCoin is right to consider Marlinspike as a project consultant, but he is not directly involved in the project in an internal role, let alone as a CTO.

It seems natural that MobileCoin would downplay this close relationship, as if the news of the integration of the two projects had only recently been released, then the question of Marlinspike’s motivations is worth paying attention to.

Is Marlinspike the former CTO of MobileCoin?

To prove that Marlinspike is not the former CTO, Gold shared with Coindesk another document dated November 13, 2017, which is the same as another white paper, but does not list the 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 linked to this white paper."

The CEO believes that the unofficial white paper is almost identical to the "real" version, except that it does not mention team members and MobileCoin's pre-sale details. Gold said that the "wrong" white paper was added as a footnote to the latest technical documents compiled by Koe. Koe is an anonymous cryptography expert who recently joined the MobileCoin team. In the footnotes of the document, Marlinspike and Gold are also listed as co-authors of the paper.

“He just Googled it … (and then) put it as a footnote. It was an oversight. I didn’t notice it when I reviewed the book before it was announced.”

However, a metadata analysis of the two documents by CoinDesk showed that the “wrong” document was generated on December 9, 2017, while the “real” paper was generated two days later - which means that Gold’s explanation does not make sense.

Marlinspike has not yet responded to questions about his professional relationship with MobileCoin.

The truth behind 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 considered to have served as a “technical advisor” and mentioned that “MobileCoin has many potential applications, and Gold and Marlinspike first envisioned it as an integration with chat apps such as Signal or WhatsApp.”

In addition, the article also pointed out that Signal will experiment with using Software Guard Extensions (SGX) for Signal for the first time, which is also required by MobileCoin's validators.

It is understood that Signal's code has always been open source and changed about a year ago. The integration code of MobileCoin was added in Signal's most recent test.

MobileCoin supply and other details

In addition to information about the team, the white paper denied by the MobileCoin team also shows details of MOB's planned issuance, such as the private placement financing in which the team sold 3,750 tokens (total supply of 250 million) at a value of $0.8 to raise $30 million - this was also confirmed by TechCrunch's report in 2018 that the project had received funding from Binance Labs.

In January this year, a user inquired about the total supply of the project in the MobileCoin community. The anonymous developer "Koe" mentioned above responded: the total supply is 250 million, the circulation is unpredictable, and there is no mining. Currently, MobileCoin does not have a corresponding block browser for query.

Screenshot source: MobileCoin Forum

In addition, the white paper does not mention that users can obtain corresponding MOB rewards through mining or payment verification.

In addition to 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 shot in the “white hat” hacker circle. He worked as a security director at Twitter in his early years, and then left to start his own business.

Signal is a small startup run by a nonprofit organization. The app is an alternative to Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage. The company is currently funded by the Signal Technology Foundation and relies 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 was TextSecure, which encrypted text messages, and the other was RedPhone, which also encrypted voice calls.

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

In 2013, Moxie Marlinspike, one of the founders of Whisper Systems, left Twitter and founded a startup, Open Whisper Systems, and continued to develop the features of TextSecure and RedPhone. In 2014, he merged the two applications into one and renamed it Signal.

In 2018, Marlinspike and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton formed the nonprofit Signal Foundation to continue developing the app and keep it free and open source. Marlinspike and several of his co-founders believe that their mission is to make end-to-end encryption the norm, and that it won't matter if Signal itself dies in the future.

Earlier this year, WhatsApp announced some changes to its privacy policy, meaning that the app would share data with its parent company Facebook. As soon as the news came out, it aroused doubts among users.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and some big names in the West Coast Internet circle have begun to promote Signal, which focuses on privacy protection capabilities, triggering a "mass migration" of overseas users: countless users began to log in and register for Signal, and the company's servers were instantly overwhelmed - according to the New York Times, on January 11 alone, Signal had 1.3 million new users registered.