When Signal integrated MobileCoin last year (in the UK), there was a lot of uproar here on HN – some well-founded ("Why equip a slick and lightweight standalone app for privacy-preserving messaging with payments, a feature that adds bloat and will likely attract government regulation and oversight?"), some less so ("The Signal developers are just scamming everyone"). Given WhatsApp's move toward a WeChat-like app now, I think some of the criticism against Signal/MobileCoin needs to be reconsidered: Moxie et al. might have seen that coming (which I guess wasn't too difficult in light of WhatsApp's involvement in payments in India) and they are possibly just trying to stay competitive in the long term.<p>Addendum: Not that I'm a huge fan of the idea of crypto payments in Signal – I am not. But if the market (and especially the network effect of messaging apps) dictates it, what can they do? Moreover, I'm sure the Signal people looked into whether it'd be better/possible to move the payments feature into a second, optional app but there might have been architectural or security reasons not to do so(?)