The latest Signal betas are rolling out today. Inside, you’ll find performance enhancements, a slew of bug fixes, improvements to the mute settings, and if you’re in the United Kingdom, you’ll see support for Signal Payments – a new feature that enables you to send and receive privacy focused payments as easily as sending or receiving a message. This is a beta feature in a beta build, but for those in the United Kingdom living life on the edge, please help us test and give feedback.

How it works

We want payments in Signal to be fast, private, and work well on mobile devices. The first payments protocol we’ve added support for is a privacy focused payments network called MobileCoin, which has its own currency, MOB.

Signal Payments makes it easy to link a MobileCoin wallet to Signal so you can start sending funds to friends and family, receive funds from them, keep track of your balance, and review your transaction history with a simple interface. As always, our goal is to keep your data in your hands rather than ours; MobileCoin’s design means Signal does not have access to your balance, full transaction history, or funds. You can also transfer your funds at any time if you want to switch to another app or service.

If you want to give it a spin and let us know what you think, it’s possible to convert to/from MOB on FTX and other exchanges soon. We’re starting in the United Kingdom, but will expand the beta as we get more feedback.