Binance Labs Leads $30 Million Fundraising for MobileCoin

MobileCoin, a privacy-centric cryptocurrency project, has recently secured $30 million in a Binance Labs-led fundraising event. Binance Labs is a blockchain startup incubator associated with the leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance.

MobileCoin announced the fundraising event in a blog post on Tuesday and revealed that the entire amount is denominated in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Moreover, due to the association with Binance, there is a chance that the exchange will list the coin soon, which, otherwise, is a rigorous process.

Commenting on the fundraising event, a representative of Binance Labs stated: “As one of the market leaders in the space, our mission at Binance Labs is to help advance blockchain technologies and grow our collective crypto ecosystem. A mobile-first, user-friendly cryptocurrency, like MobileCoin, plays a critical role in driving mainstream cryptocurrency adoption. The MobileCoin team and Binance Labs share a common vision and we are proud to be a supporter of what they are doing.”

A promising project

MobileCoin has a promising development team working on the project, which includes the founder of encrypted messaging app Signal Moxie Marlinspike as its technical advisor and Shane Glynn, a former product counsel at Google, who is now responsible to ensure MobileCoin’s compliance with crypto regulations.

The creators describe it as a “fast, private, and easy-to-use cryptocurrency that can be deployed in resource-constrained environments to users who aren’t equipped to reliably maintain secret keys over a long period of time, all without giving up control of funds to a payment processing service”.

The project uses Stellar Consensus Protocol to record its transactions and is aiming to create an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform like WhatsApp and Signal – two apps which use Marlinspike-developed Signal protocol.

In MobileCoin whitepaper, which was published on December 2017, the team noted: “MobileCoin is designed so that a mobile messaging application like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Signal could integrate with a MobileCoin wallet.”

Controversies?

However, the involvement of Marlinspike with MobileCoin was brought into question by Jackson Palmer, creator of DogeCoin and a prominent figure in the cryosphere. Moreover, the project does not have a GitHub repository, which is odd for blockchain-based projects.

Take it with a grain of salt, but word on the street is that @moxie is barely involved with the actual development on this thing. The lack of a Github repo / any open source code doesn’t seem like his style. https://t.co/7zvz8lLQOd

— Jackson Palmer (@ummjackson) April 24, 2018

Binance’s expansion

Binance is also trying to spread its reach worldwide and in different sectors. Recently, the crypto exchange partnered with Ugandan Blockchain organization Crypto Savannah to aid in the economic development of the east African country.