Payments are in beta testing in Signal

As you know, interest in cryptocurrency has grown as an alternative payment infrastructure, and some projects are developing with confidentiality in mind. Many have noted that there is the potential to build a cross-border payment network and a privacy model to ensure that data remains with the user.

Much of the "energy" in the cryptocurrency space seems to have been channeled in other directions, such as asset speculation / financing.

Just as GIPHY must work well in Signal, any cryptocurrency wallets must work well in Signal. here are some landmarks:

- Integration is "no custody": signal not to have access to your keys or funds - that information remains associated with your own wallet.
- Private data: all your data remains in your hands, rather than being visible to others.
- Fast transactions: it may only take a few seconds to send a transaction.
- Functional on mobile: without having to download and scan all ongoing transactions to find yours.
- Simple experience: in most other ways, the experience should be the same as something like Venmo.
- It can reach hundreds of millions of people.

Projects like Zcash are designed for privacy, but are not yet fast enough or mobile-oriented enough. Transactions can take tens of minutes and even with shortcuts to speed up an individual transaction, subsequent transactions can be blocked. It also requires all customers to scan all transactions made by all other customers to identify those relevant to them.

Projects like Lightning do not have very strong guarantees of confidentiality, especially in a situation where Signal would be both the input channel and the output channel and would also have difficulty scaling hundreds of millions of people today. who have relatively small balances.

For now, Signal has started with MobileCoin because its design currently offers fast, private, scale transactions in a way that is easily integrated by Signal.