The Good Tech Companies - Moxie Marlinspike: The Cypherpunk Pirate Who Built Signal

Episode Date: October 1, 2025

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/moxie-marlinspike-the-cypherpunk-pirate-who-built-signal. From sailing the seas to building Signal, Moxie Marlinspike shaped how we chat securely today. What part of his journey inspires you most? Check more stories related to web3 at: https://hackernoon.com/c/web3. You can also check exclusive content about #cypherpunks-write-code, #cypherpunk-rebellion, #moxie-marlinspike, #signal-messaging, #encrypted-messenger, #no-network-effect, #obyte, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @obyte. Learn more about this writer by checking @obyte's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Moxie Marlinspike is a cryptographer and creator of privacy-focused digital tools for everyone. His work led to the creation of the Signal app and the encryption protocol behind it.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Moxie Marlinspike, the cypherpunk pirate who built Signal by Obite. Did you know that your daily messages on chats like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are encrypted thanks to this man? Considered a late cypherpunk and anarchist, Matthew Rosenfeld, better known as Moxie Marlinspike, is a remarkable American cryptographer and creator of privacy-focused digital tools for everyone. Marlon Spike was born in the early 80s, grew up in Georgia, and moved to San Francisco as a teenager. His heroes by then were already the first cypher punks. He had an adventurous side, not only in computers but also in real life. In the early 2000s, he bought an old sailboat

with friends, fixed it up, and traveled through the Bahamas while documenting the trip in a film project called Holfast. His passion for sailing matched his curiosity about technology, where he was already making a name for himself by studying weaknesses in internet security systems. By the end of that decade, Marlon Spike had already shaken things up with research on SSL, the system meant to keep online browsing secure. He didn't just point out flaws. He also suggested ways to improve them, like with his project called convergence. He even created services like Google sharing, which allowed people to search the web more privately. His work caught the attention of big companies, and not long after, he ended up leading security efforts at Twitter, a role that

opened the door for wider recognition. After leaving Twitter, Marlon Spike turned more of his energy to building tools for communication. Over the years, his projects gained the trust of millions of people who wanted their conversations to stay private. Eventually, all of this effort led to something that became much bigger. The creation of the Signal AP panned the encryption protocol behind it. The no-network effect. The reason why Marlon Spike has been building numerous privacy tools is likely because of what he's dubbed the no-network effect, or a choice that it's not really a choice at all. Imagine you decide you don't want a smartphone. On paper, it's a choice you're free to make. But when your friends text each other instead of making plans in person, when boarding a

plane requires a digital code, and when group chats become the way people stay connected, that choice, feels less like freedom and more like exclusion. A tool starts as optional, but once everyone adopts it, stepping away means stepping outside of societies for them. Phones are a clear example. They replaced older ways of coordinating, like agreeing on a meeting spot and sticking to it. Now, if you don't have one, you're left behind because the old system has dissolved. The illusion of choice is there, you can refuse the device, but the cost is high, missed connections, social isolation, even reduced access to basic services. This matters for privacy because most of these technologies quietly trade convenience for surveillance. Now, fighting the no-network effect doesn't mean refusing

progress altogether, but demanding tools that let us participate without giving up control. Moxie's work, like creating secure apps, shows one way forward, build alternatives that let us stay in the network, the society, while keeping our privacy intact. Open Whisper Systems, with that idea of privacy in mind, back in 2010, Marlin Spike and roboticist Stuart Anderson launched a small startup called Whisper Systems. Their idea was simple but ambitious, create tools that could make smartphones far more secure and private. Among their creations was Text Secure, which allowed private text messaging and red phone, which enabled encrypted calls. They also built Whisper Core, a system to protect everything stored on a phone, and other apps like Whisper Monitor and Flashback. These

projects weren't just experiments, they were meant to give ordinary people stronger control over their data. Not long after, in 2011, Twitter acquired whisper systems. The company's main interest was bringing Marlon Spike's expertise into its own security team, and while some of the apps briefly disappeared, Twitter soon released both text secure and red phone as open source. This move opened the door for a wider community to step in, ensuring the software would continue to grow rather thanphate away. Marlon Spike himself left Twitter in 2013, but he wasn't done with the mission that had inspired him in the first place. That same year, he founded Open Whisper Systems, this time as a collaborative project powered by volunteers and small grants. It carried forward

the development of text secure and red phone, eventually merging them in November 2015 under a single new name, Signal. From there, the story began to reach an even bigger audience. The Signal Protocol, grew out of previous software like text secure, but its foundation came from another cypherpunk breakthrough, off-the-record messaging, OTR, designed in 2004 by Ian Goldberg and Nikita Borasov. OTR introduced ideas like forwards ecracy and deniable authentication, and Marlinspike reworked them into protocols that fit the realities of mobile networks, intermittent connectivity, and multi-device use, making encrypted messaging truly practical on smartphones. At its core, the signal calls mixes several advanced methods for encryption, including the double-ratchet algorithm and

ephemeral prekeys, to make conversations private even if someone manages to steal old keys. This means thought if one message gets exposed, past and future chats stay safe. The protocol became the backbone of the Signal app, which offers encrypted calls, texts, and media sharing across mobile and desktop. In 2018, Marlon Spike co-founded the Signal Foundation with Brian Acton, receiving $50 million in funding to ensure the project remained independent and open source. As of early 2025, Signal had over 70 million active users and Morethan 220 million downloads, a sign of its global reach. Besides, Signal's influence extends far beyond its own app. WhatsApp, Google

messages, Skype, and Facebook messengers, secret conversations, all adopted the Signal protocol, bringing secure communication to billions of people worldwide. It also gained public attention when Edward Snowden recommended it as a trustworthy tool for journalists and activists, while some governments criticized its strong encryption as a threat to surveillance powers. This mix of praise and pushback highlighted how a cypherpunk vision reshaped not just technology, but also global debates about privacy. Centralization in Web3, Marlon Spike has also given his two cents and two daps about the crypto space. Web the third of maybe a loose, fuzzy term to refer to the crypto-related software in general, but Marlon Spike may have had a point in using it, even if

he's talked specifically about Ethereum. The truth is, his observations could be extrapolated to other networks as well. He noted that while the idea of returning to a decentralized Internet IS attractive, in practice, many people don't want to run their own infrastructure. This leads to reliance on intermediaries, even in supposedly decentralized systems. Ethereum highlights the issue. Most users and apps interact with it through a few. companies like Infura and Alchemy. That means control is consolidating into a handful of centralized services, which undermines the promise of Web3. Even wallets like Metamask depend on these providers, so when platforms censor or change something, it can disappear from your wallet view despite

still existing on-chain. However, we must consider that centralization creeps in not only because of convenience but also because of how a network is designed. The architecture itself shapes how much power users really have. In Ethereum's case, technical limits push people back toward trusted intermediaries. Other networks, however, take different paths. Obite, for instance, is built on a directed acyclic graph, DAG, and has no miners, validators, or other middlemen deciding what transactions go through. This gives individuals a higher level of autonomy and censorship resistance. At this point, no system achieves perfect decentralization, though. Crypto still leans on centralized exchanges and wallets to bridge with the traditional world. But it's a serious effort at giving people

more control. As Marlon Spike himself once wrote, we should never cease, even if all the banks burn and the dams of the world overcome crashing down. It's what allows us to resist the institutionalization of our desires, the creeping bureaucracy, the language of patriarchy, or whatever we might find. Asterisk read more from the Cypher Punk's write code series, Tim May and Cryptoanarchism. Way die and B Money, Nick Sabo and Smart Contracts, Adam Back in Hashgash, Eric Hughes in Remailer, St. Jude in Community Memory, Julian Assange and Wikileaks, Hal Finney and RPOW, John Gilmore and F, Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin Core, Gregory Maxwell and Bitcoin Core, Gregory Maxwell and Bitcoin Core, David Chom and Ikash, Vinai Gupta and Matarium, Jim Bell and Assassination Politics, Peter Todd and Bitcoin Core, Len Sasamun in Remailers, Eva, Galperin against Stalkerware, Seulet Dreyfus and Free Speech, John Callis and Privacy Tools, Bruce Schneier against blockchains, Ian Goldberg and Netscape, Amir Taki and Dark FI, Zucco Wilcox and Zecash, featured vector image by Gary Killian, free pick photograph of

Moxie Marlinspike by Christopher Michel, Wikimedia. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.