Moxie Marlinspike Steps Down as Signal CEO - Threatwire
Added 2022-01-11 19:30:06 +0000 UTCBy Shannon Morse, ThreatWire
First off is some big news that it seems like no one is talking about. Moxie Marlinspike is stepping down as CEO of Signal. Marlinspike has been the company CEO for about a decade, and he wrote in a blog post yesterday that he’s decided to step down while still remaining on Signals board. Signal will search for a new CEO and WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton is serving as interim CEO until a replacement is found.
Marlinspike mentions in his blog post that up until four years ago he was basically the bottleneck - something that often happens to businesses - he was writing the code and was the only person on call who could fix things. So he worked to change that, and now Signal has 30 people taking on all the different jobs. Marlinspike has put himself in a position where he can finally take some time off work and not be on call 24/7. So he decided to replace himself as CEO, which comes as a surprise to us but not totally unexpected since he’s been working on other endeavors as well.
One of those is MobileCoin, of which Marlinspike is their earliest technical advisor, and Signal started testing integration with MobileCoin to bring crypto transactions to the platform. Folks residing in the US haven’t had access to MobileCoin yet, but that could change in the upcoming months.
Adding cryptocurrency payments had attracted scrutiny because it could give regulators a reason to be even more anti- E2E encryption, since it could be used for money laundering.
Marlinspike built something important and valuable and he deserves some time off. Whether or not that has anything to do with the current payment platform possibilities is yet to be known.
