Bitcoin in Your Signal Chat – Radar’s Bold Move with Seth for Privacy | SLP754

**Stephan Livera** (0:00)
Hi, everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, rejoining me on the show is Seth for Privacy. Seth is coming from the team at Cake Wallet, and recently they've got this new app called Radar.Chat, or Radar Chat.
So, Seth, welcome back to the show, and let's start with why. Why build a Bitcoin messenger now?

**Seth for Privacy** (0:19)
Yeah, absolutely excited to be back. It's been a while. I think our last chat was the fungibility talk that we did a few years ago. But the why, honestly, behind Radar. We've been thinking about this for a while. Initially, it just started as an idea of like, hey, we have some features in Signal that we want to improve and work on. Let's just make an alternative client. But as we started to explore and then deploy Lightning for Cake Wallet, and we did that via Spark, using the Breeze SDK, we just realized it had gotten to the point in terms of user experience that you didn't have to, you have to deal with all of the caveats that came with Lightning in the past. And the user experience was so good, you could start to put it in places where users who aren't necessarily like Bitcoin ideologues, people who aren't going to be willing to put up with the pain that has come with Lightning over the years, they'll still want to use this.
And so that was the start of why the...
Like the real reason is this idea of all of our private messaging is in one place and all of our payments are in a totally separate place is not a complex thing. Like it's weird that those have stayed so separate for so long. Obviously, we've had WeChat Pay, we've had Facebook Messenger has payments, Cash App has light messaging stuff. But those all rely on a central custodian. They all rely on banks and are all KYC platforms. They're very privacy invasive and they don't have the private messaging aspect that Signal does. So for us, it was really just bringing together those two things where the people that you already chat with, you should be able to pay them directly. You shouldn't have to ask them for a cash tag and go pay them in Cash App. You shouldn't have to ask them for a lightning invoice and go find your lightning wallet and pay it that way. And then do this copy, paste, send, repeat, switch apps thing. It's just about shifting that UX flow and making it something where Bitcoin can become just a normal part of everyday life rather than something that you go out of your way to use. That's a huge focus for us at Radar.

**Stephan Livera** (2:11)
And how does the app work for a normal user? Can you talk us through that?

**Seth for Privacy** (2:16)
Yeah, so we've very intentionally kept the core of what makes Signal fantastic. So Radar is built on Signals, Messaging, Network, and Protocol. So all your contacts and chats come with you. So for the average user, it feels very similar to using Signal in the everyday chat side of things. And then you just notice there's a little Bitcoin button at the bottom, right where you would put in the text for the message you want to send. Tap that, enter an amount, hit send, done. That's all you have to do to actually send payments directly within a chat.
And that's kind of the beauty of it. It's stupid simple. The idea is that this shouldn't be something that requires a lot of hoops to jump through, or requires someone to even understand anything about how Bitcoin works.
Similarly to how right now, all of this is self-custodial. Users' keys, they can back up as a seed phrase, but they also get backed up automatically encrypted in a way that only they control to their Signal profile. So they also don't necessarily have to back up their seed phrase. Obviously, it's always best to do that. But for those users who are new and are not Bitcoin native, having a backup there natively by default is really important for us.

**Stephan Livera** (3:20)
Is there any clash if you already have Signal? Like, I guess what I'm asking is, do you have to give up your Signal username, or is it a separate Signal username, or like how portable is it to come over from Signal as it is now to Radar?

**Seth for Privacy** (3:34)
Yeah, so we're totally Signal compliant. So you can bring your existing Signal account and log into it in the Radar app. You would want to make a backup first. So like the Cloud backup, specifically that Signal has been deploying over the past six months or so work really well. They're called like backups beta in the settings. If you do that, you save your recovery key that it gives you. When you actually go to set up Radar, you'll just say that you're migrating from Signal. You'll enter that recovery key, it'll restore the backup, and you'll be off to the races. So the goal is definitely that you can keep your existing Signal account, your existing Signal contacts, your Signal username. None of that changes.