While more established privacy-focused cryptocurrencies like Zcash and Monero have been more widely used and arguably better tested, Marlinspike says Signal chose to integrate MobileCoin because it has the most seamless user experience on mobile devices, requiring little storage space on the phone and needing only seconds for transactions to be confirmed.

Honey offers PayPal, and its other payment app Venmo, a way to get in front of that—or, as PayPal’s press release put it, “to reach consumers at the beginning of their shopping journeys.” In other words, a way to help you find products, not just pay for them.

I could see a public API endpoint that was returning the data for this feed, meaning that anyone could make a GET request (like a simple page load) to see the latest 20 transactions made on the app by anyone around the world.

It can seem odd—or it did to me, at least—to reduce the large sums of money people spend on rent or the shared experience of a first date or vacation with friends to just a few goofy illustrations placed in a public forum.