Signal adds a payments feature with a privacy-focused cryptocurrency

Is your backend open source, or not?

Haven’t seen the git updated in a while.

Effectively not anymore. Here is a very recent german article about it: https://www.golem.de/news/crypto-messenger-signal-server-nic...

No updates in the repo for over a year and no answers from the team. The whole crypto currency thing is also a red flag for me. Matrix seems to be the better option by now...

Just what are they trying to do? They are a non-profit which would make a money grab somewhat impractical. Are they worried they are going to get successfully forked or something?

Their unquestioned faith in Intel SGX is somewhat pathetic to be fair.

If anything, Threema is the best alternative.

Last commit 5 days ago: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

This is either the mandela effect (I know for a fact that the server was stuck on "April 2020" for at least 6 months), or Signal intentionally hid development and then revealed it all when they realized it was bad PR.

No, they just pushed today. They presumably didn't want to talk about MobileCoin before it was ready.

I saw that not too long ago myself. Purely speculation here, but perhaps they opted not to publish any commits until they had a chance to have their MobileCoin implementation audited? Just wish they had been more forthcoming about why they were not pushing commits.

Old news: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

No, you're absolutely right. The repo had indeed been stuck on "April 2020". I last checked it two days ago.

Wayback Machine for March 11: http://web.archive.org/web/20210311053716/https://github.com...

No, it really is not. Matrix or XMPP.

How could they pump the coin overnight if they were forthcoming about their roadmap?

XMPP has issues on Android and iOS: the app needs to be running and connected to the server at all times to fetch new messages. iOS explicitly disallows this from what I understand, and on Android you are at the mercy of your OEM's battery optimizations unless you specifically keep the app running by pinning it or if the app has persistent notifications. Either way, not something that is easy to explain to normal users, meaning pain points arise very soon.

Matrix is a little more promising, but Element (at least on matrix.org servers) is slow, especially at scale.

Any chat app would have issues with battery optimizations. Solution is usually to use the mobile OS vendors push notification infrastructure. Work on that in XMPP started around 2015 and most popular clients and servers should have some support by now. It's tricky to make something nice while the platform is working against you tho, especially while those push notification systems use/d XMPP themselves.

Any reasons why not? It ticks all the boxes for me: https://threema.ch/en/

No self hosting, so not federated/decentralized.