About

MobileCoin is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency designed to be used as digital cash on a phone. The MobileCoin protocol allows for easy key management and private near-instantaneous transactions. The four fundamental issues that MobileCoin aims to address are privacy, transaction speed, energy consumption, and optimization for mobile devices.

History

MobileCoin Inc. was founded in 2017 by Josh Goldbard and Shane Glynn. The company is venture-backed and based in San Francisco, CA. The MobileCoin protocol was open-sourced by the MobileCoin Foundation in April 2020 and the network went live on December 7, 2020. MobileCoin is focused on building a peer-to-peer payment network that enables privacy protected transactions to easily be utilized on one's phone. MobileCoin enables users to recover their keys with a recovery PIN in the case of application reinstalls or lost devices.

In April 2021, Signal, an encrypted communications application, announced the integration of MobileCoin payments into the app for users to send money to one another in a private manner. Concerns have been raised about this move regarding Moxie Marlinspike's, Signal founder, previous ties with the MobileCoin project. In early editions of the project's whitepaper, Marlinspike is cited as the Chief Technology Officer of the project, which the privacy and security community have cited as a conflict of interest. MobileCoin CEO, Joshua Goldbard, has claimed that Marlinspike only served as a technical advisor to the project, which is inconsistent with older versions of the project's whitepaper. For now, the payment feature is only available to Signal users in the UK on iOS and Android for beta-testing.

MobileCoin uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol which required all 250 million MOB, MobileCoin's token, to be created in the genesis block. There has been very limited information made public related to the circulating supply of MOB. From the same early version of the MobileCoin whitepaper discussed above, 15% of the supply was stated to be sold in a presale in order to raise $30 million in funding. This means that the remaining 85% of MOB were given to the MobileCoin Foundation which has resulted in additional concern about the project's decentralization. Goldbard has stated publicly on forums and reddit that the team is working with their lawyers to determine when information related to the circulating supply can be discussed. However, Goldbard has stated that more than 50% of the supply will be available to be purchased through their website in the near future.