MobileCoin Raises $66M to Build Out Privacy-Focused Payments Tech

MobileCoin, a privacy-oriented and mobile-first cryptocurrency project, has raised $66 million in venture capital to build out its payments technology. 

Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research, Coinbase Ventures, BlockTower Capital and other investors participated in the oversubscribed Series B funding round, said MobileCoin founder and CEO Joshua Goldbard. 

Best known as the project advised by Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike, MobileCoin’s MOB token is already integrated in beta with the private messaging app. Another integration, with China’s Mixin Messenger, has yielded over 1 million MobileCoin transactions, Goldbard said.

With the Facebook-initiated libra (now diem) sputtering since its 2019 reveal and Telegram’s TON project sunk (officially, at least) by U.S. regulators, MobileCoin represents perhaps the last best hope of a crop of mobile-native payments projects conceived during crypto’s last bull run.

Goldbard told CoinDesk that MobileCoin is developing a cryptocurrency chatbot system, called MOBot, that will enable ecommerce payments within messaging apps.

Notably, it’s also in the process of developing a stablecoin, Goldbard said, which will likely be called MobileUSD, to reduce the risk of volatility during transactions. MOB was trading around $15.80 early Wednesday UTC with an unknown market cap, according to CoinGecko. Bankman-Fried's FTX is one of the few exchanges to list the token.

Goldbard declined to comment on the timeframe for MobileCoin’s stablecoin release.

Goldbard told CoinDesk that MobileCoin is dedicating the funding round to Toby Segaran, MobileCoin’s founding engineering manager and second employee, who passed away suddenly earlier this month.