Signal CEO and Founder Moxie Marlinspike has announced that will leave his position after almost a decade of work in the company. The person in charge of occupying his position will be Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp and until now CEO of the company.
The information was provided by Marlinspike himself through a post on the official Signal blog. The letter specifies that Acton will continue as CEO of the company until a permanent replacement is found.
From chopping code alone, to being in charge of 30 people
Although Marlinspike is retiring from office, he claims that will continue to support the project from the board of directors. In the post itself, he assures that ‘the objective of making Signal grow and sustain’ without him being involved would have been impossible four years ago, since according to Marlinspike, he wrote all the Android and server code, he was the only person on duty for it. service, facilitated all product development, and last but not least, it also directed its workers. In fact, the executive affirms that the laptop had to be taken anywhere in an emergency, and that occasionally he found himself sitting on the sidewalk and in the rain “trying to diagnose a degradation of service”.
The company now has 30 workers, from engineers to designers and other staff members. From the post, Marlinspike assures that the company has grown faster than he could have ever imagined, and that all the ‘exciting work’ will be released soon. The executive is optimistic about Signal’s potential in the next decade.
Signal has been gaining more and more followers, peaking in popularity in 2021
Signal was the union of RedPhone and TextSecure, two encrypted calling and messaging apps that in 2014 pooled their resources to create Signal. After all these years, the app has changed considerably, aiming at the ‘accessibility of private communication’.
Last year the app received a large wave of new usersThanks in part to the exile of many of WhatsApp users due to the company’s new policies, and also thanks to Elon Musk’s campaign of support for Signal on Twitter. In fact, between January 7 and 8, Signal received more than 100,000 new users.
The app now allows payment through MobileCoin cryptocurrency globally, a feature that is still in beta and that will progressively reach more and more users.