SO excited to reveal Radar to the world today! We’ve been working on all of the moving parts of this launch for many months, but the core of Radar is simple. Why are the two most private things we do every day - who we talk to and what we pay for - always disconnected and surveilled? Radar solves this by building on top of Signal’s amazing messaging protocol and network while implementing payments over Bitcoin. All of your existing Signal contacts come with you, but everyone who joins Radar can send and receive payments at a tap. This combination makes sending money to friends and family, supporting an activist or journalist, or funding a political dissident as easy as sending a message. No need to juggle separate apps, and now we can get Bitcoin into the hands of people who just simply want a good way to transfer value. No custodians, no banks, just permissionless freedom money. It's been a blast getting to break out beyond "just" the wallet space, and build a tool that we see a huge need for from human rights groups to "normies" and everything in between. I'll break down more on the why we made the choices we did throughout the week on a host of podcasts, so keep an eye out for those if you want to dive deeper! In the meantime, take a minute and go check out @Radar 🫡 View quoted note →

Replies (36)

Based Truth's avatar
Based Truth 3 days ago
Radar, another tool for the elite to surveil, this time with a facade of privacy, courtesy of the same players who brought you Facebook and Google.
I do think this will be both your biggest success and your biggest mistake. Signal is less metadata resistant than SimpleX, so it will lock in Bitcoiners to Signal. With Breeze it's a custodial model that will give insights into payment flows.
The only way forward is to give users a way to run their own infrastructure. Like nostr, like simplex.
The Breez + Spark SDK isn't custodial. Spark is a sidechain that does real time submarine swaps for Lightning so the user doesn't have to deal with managing channels and liquidity, so it's not strictly speaking a "true Lightning wallet", but it's not custodial. You hold the keys.
Spark isn't an IOU like wrapped BTC. It's backed by actual Bitcoin that's been pegged in on the native Bitcoin blockchain. Very similar to Lightning itself. Personally I'd only hold small amounts on it. But I also treat normal Lightning the exact same way. In both cases you hold BTC in an L2, backed by real BTC locked on L1, but with a different network and trust model.
To restore your cake wallet and put your address in profile 1. Restore: Settings -> wallet -> restore existing wallet. 2. Attach to profile. Profile—> edit profile—> enter lightning address Bonus, you can use your cake wallet key to send zaps ans your cake receiving address to receive.
Cowboy Bob's avatar
Cowboy Bob 3 days ago
Incredibly awesome! This brings zapping to the normies‘ world. Already nudged friends and family. Thank you, Seth, for this nice piece of work. After initial hickups, it worked finde (never had a Signal-Backup and I wanted to switch from Signal to Radar on the same device).
Thomas 's avatar
Thomas 2 days ago
I see a good opportunity to orange pill with this.
🔥 GAME CHANGER! Merging private messaging with permissionless freedom money is precisely what the world needs right now. You solved a massive fragmentation problem for both privacy advocates and everyday users. Incredible work to the whole team! 👏
Congrats, Seth! The only downside I see is that we are still relying on the centralized Signal servers, so not the best in case of censorship issues or restrictions due to Orwellian government regulations…
@Seth For Privacy this is amazing! One issue: when you invite regular Signal user to payments, it shows them MobileCoin which I’m sure isn’t compatible with LN/Radar. Not sure if it’s possible to detect and instead invite them to Radar first? Or at least disable on sender side, ie “this person is on Signal so they can’t use payments”. I just think the current way is confusing.