That's significant in this space, because it implies that he does not benefit directly[0] from speculation on MOB, and so has less incentives to get involved in a pump and dump.
What I would still like to see for more transparency:
- legal commitment from the Signal Foundation that no employee owns any MOB
- disclosure of money transfers between MobileCoin and any Signal Foundation employee
Maybe some of this information could already be extracted given the statuses of the entities involved?
[0]: he benefits indirectly because if MobileCoin stays up, he'll probably stay as a technical advisor
The article says “Marlinspike has served as a paid technical adviser for the project since its inception” in the same paragraph, so I would say the article is quite clear on the financial relationship.