Thread by @wheatpond

1/ While everyone’s paying attention to it because of some stupid trading BS, I figure I’d give an intro to what @mobilecoin has built, because it’s rather unique and imo will have a huge impact

2/ The idea behind the project is simple; Bitcoin rules but it’s poorly suited for private payments (I say this as someone with almost all of my net worth in BTC—it’s awesome for many things but using it to buy coffee is like driving an M1 Abrams to drop ur kids off at school)

3/ the folks behind @mobilecoin figured that if they created the tech to do payments in a way that felt just like @WeChatApp or @Venmo , and made SDKs for easy integration, many messenger apps would love to have a payments rail that preserved user privacy.

4/ They then spent the past three years toiling on that in complete silence. No media no promo, just building. This is obvious to anyone who watches their GitHub, but of course, no one does 😂

So the basics of the tech: rust implementation of Mazieres’ Stellar paper, transactions use monero style RingCT with an additional layer of privacy added by the nodes all using a Secure Enclave. This is very cool but the most interesting part imo is...

Fog, detailed here; github.com/mobilecoinfoun… . tldr; mobile devices don’t need to run a full node, but also don’t need to leak private data to a thin wallet provider.

The SDKs to integrate this into a messenger app or wallet went live recently, and a few wallets have already integrated, notably @MixinMessenger. I think we’ll see a lot more integrations in the near future, and I’m really excited to be able to send payments cross-platform!

full disclosure as usual; our fund is holding MOB and plans to be for the foreseeable future. We don’t wanna sell unless it’s buying Mars tickets from @elonmusk