I'd rather them have done _nothing_ at all.
Oh well.. further proof you really need federation.
For example, Let's Encrypt reliably, like clockwork, distributes certificates and maintains related PKI infrastructure. That is what Signal was supposed to be (at least, my interpretation based on their PR) with regards to secure messaging, and they have utterly failed to maintain the focus you'd expect of a non profit with their mission.
If I want payments (unregulated payments at that), I would use and donate to a payment app, not a messaging app. But heh, report it to regulators and let them be the bullwhip to Signal and their poor choices if they ignore the community (who are their stakeholders as a non profit entity). Of all the ways to kill your project, this doesn't seem like the "hill to die on." Don't drag secure messaging into your fight against nation state currency regulations, and have some common sense about compartmentalizing around regulatory risk.
This is exactly what Signal had, until the leadership changed their focus onto more lucrative prizes.
I'm not sure if I understood it correctly, but isn't a major selling point of cryptocurrencies is the anonymity/untraceability?
Let's Encrypt doesn't have a reason to try to blockchain their certs because their bills are being paid. Signal clearly wants more money (they openly state that the coin will pay $1m/yr to Signal).
And will remain so forever. Which is not realistic.
more like: open protocols for certain interactions, irrespective of the app that implements it.
Plus, an open protocol changes the risk calculus for the group that manages the client implementation, in a way that would prevent situations like this one.
However, open protocols beget federation, so I don't think you're at odds with the above poster. Email, DNS, etc are all open protocols with federation built-in, but we trade away some centralization of servers (GMail, Cloudflare, etc) in exchange for nice things (DoS protection, spam filtering, etc).
In the worst case, where a server starts acting scammy (like embedding ads in your email) or tries to diverge from the protocol, you can always go back to hosting it yourself, or paying a small and trusted shop to host it for you.
In the arena where Signal is competing, Matrix [1] is probably our best bet. (Assuming irc is too barebones for your needs, in 2021). It has also supported end-to-end encryption for some time now [2].
[1]: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/
[2]: https://matrix.org/faq/#which-matrix-clients-support-e2e
the PIN & cloud features are explicitly designed to facilitate breaking the phone number requirement.