Freedom Money In Your Private Chat

The new messaging app Radar launched on July 7, 2024, and it does something that sounds simple but has been technically difficult for years: it puts self-custodial Bitcoin Lightning payments directly inside Signal, the gold-standard private messenger. The founders, Vik Sharma and Seth For Privacy, built it because the technology finally got good enough to make payments feel frictionless while still letting users hold their own keys. The result is a tool that combines private speech with sovereign money in a single app, and the ambition is not just to serve Bitcoiners but to reach Signal's 100–150 million monthly active users who may not care about privacy ideology but do want a simple way to send value to people they already talk to.

Why Signal, Why Now

The decision to build on Signal rather than create a new messaging app was deliberate. As Vik explains, "you probably have four or five messaging apps on your phone right now" and getting people to download yet another one is a losing battle. Signal is open source, nonprofit, and the gold standard for private messaging—it already has a large, growing user base and a protocol that is cryptographically proven. The team also wanted to avoid the trap of building "for just Bitcoiners" and instead "make things for regular folks and put Bitcoin in there."