Moxie Marlinspike, creator of the open messaging app Signal and co-inventor of the Signal protocol, also used for end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp, has announced his resignation as CEO of Signal Messenger LLC, which oversees the development of the Signal app and protocol. Brian Acton, co-founder and head of the Signal Technology Foundation, a non-profit organization who once created the WhatsApp messenger and successfully sold it to Facebook, will take on the duties of interim CEO until a new leader is selected.
It is noted that four years ago all processes and development were entirely tied to Moxxi and he could not even remain without communication for a short time, since he had to solve all the problems himself. The dependence of the project on one person did not suit Moxxi, and over the past few years, the company has managed to form a backbone of competent engineers, as well as delegate all development, support and maintenance functions to them.
It is noted that the workflows are now established so much that recently Moxxi has practically ceased participation in the development and all work on Signal is carried out by a team that has shown the ability to keep the project afloat without his participation. According to Moxxi, it would be better for the further development of Signal if he passes the post of CEO to a worthy candidate (Moxie is primarily a cryptographer, developer and engineer, not a professional manager). At the same time, Moxxi does not completely leave the project and remains on the board of directors of the adjacent non-profit organization Signal Technology Foundation.
Additionally, we can note a note published a few days ago by Moxie Marlinspike explaining the reasons for the skepticism that the future belongs to decentralized technologies (Web3). Among the reasons why decentralized computing will not dominate are the reluctance of ordinary users to maintain servers and run handlers on their systems, as well as the great inertia in the development of protocols. It is also mentioned that decentralized systems are good in theory, but in reality, as a rule, they become tied to the infrastructures of individual companies, users are tied to the working conditions of specific sites, and client software is only a binding over external centralized APIs provided by services such as Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase and Etherscan.
As an example of the illusory nature of decentralization, a personal case is given when Moxxi's NFT was removed from the OpenSea site without detailing the reasons under the general pretext of violating the rules of the service (Moxxi believes that his NFC did not violate the rules), after which this NFT became unavailable in all crypto wallets on the device , such as MetaMask and Rainbow, which work through external APIs.
Source: opennet.ru