Founder Moxie Marlinspike is leaving Signal

Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike is leaving the company permanently. He had already been away as CEO of the encrypted chat app for a year and a half, but has now also left the board of directors, on which he was still a member. That entire council has been renewed.

Signal writes on Mastodon that the board of directors is being shaken up. Thereby Moxie Marlinspike is resigning immediately. Current Signal boss Meredith Whittaker and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton will remain in an interim period of unknown duration until they also step down from the board. Signal’s board will then consist of Amba Kak, a policy expert and lawyer, Jay Sullivan, who was previously a product manager at Twitter and Facebook, and Katherine Maher, the former CEO of Wikimedia.

Moxie Marlinspike will “focus on new opportunities,” Signal says, but it is not known what he will do. Marlinspike started Signal in 2014. The app used the custom TextSecure protocol for end-to-end encryption. Marlinspike was one of the leading advocates of encryption in chat apps. His influence on the world of encryption, and specifically on its application in mainstream apps, is very great. Marlinspike left the company as CEO early last year, but he remained on the board of the Signal Foundation, the foundation that manages the development of the app.