MobileCoin, a privacy-oriented and mobile-first cryptocurrency project, has raised $66 million in venture capital to build out its payments technology.Â
Sam Bankman-Friedâs Alameda Research, Coinbase Ventures, BlockTower Capital and other investors participated in the oversubscribed Series B funding round, said MobileCoin founder and CEO Joshua Goldbard.Â
Best known as the project advised by Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike, MobileCoinâs MOB token is already integrated in beta with the private messaging app. Another integration, with Chinaâs Mixin Messenger, has yielded over 1 million MobileCoin transactions, Goldbard said.
With the Facebook-initiated libra (now diem) sputtering since its 2019 reveal and Telegramâs 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 cryptoâs 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, itâs 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-Friedâs FTX is one of the few exchanges to list the token.
Goldbard declined to comment on the timeframe for MobileCoinâs stablecoin release.
Goldbard told CoinDesk that MobileCoin is dedicating the funding round to Toby Segaran, MobileCoinâs founding engineering manager and second employee, who passed away suddenly earlier this month.