I came across this petition regarding a tweet from David Peterson, General Manager of Proton VPN, claiming they will work on Monero support this summer if someone makes a petition with 1000 signatures.
I personally haven’t used Proton products because alternatives like Mullvad support Monero which I might as well spend somewhere. It would be cool to see this get 1000 signatures and have more private payment options.
Well, I have good news for you. The request for this on Proton’s own board has nearly 3,000 votes. So seems you met the goal by 3x already! Additionally it’s the #2 voted item in its category behind a request for Nano which does not have the same privacy features.
I wonder why Peterson doesn’t feel those votes are sufficient? I’m not signing up for a 3rd party when it is one of the top requested items on Proton’s own petition board.
“Proton is a Swiss company and Swiss companies above a certain size have to undergo what is known as a mandatory legal audit and to get a legal audit done you need to find an auditing company that is willing to run your full audit generally because Proton is a bigger company that is more credible in many ways we try to go with one of the big four accounting firms right so actually it’s public information because it’s on the Geneva registered to Commerce but actually you know we use PWC as our auditor and the thing about big four auditing firms is they are pretty wary of crypto in general and to pass your audit you need to have very good Revenue recognition because it’s something that you have to do properly so already the fact that we accept Bitcoin has made it so that certain Auditors refuse to work with us and the worry that we have is you know if we do Monero that may further limit the Auditors that are willing and able to work with us and at some point you know that poses a problem for us from a legal standpoint because we required to get an audit and we want to get an audit from a reputable firm so it’s yeah I hate to say it right but Monero has a reputational problem that needs to be let’s say separately addressed first before it can gain more widespread acceptance because for a lot of companies there are real business reasons why they are simply unable to do it”
from Proton Wallet w/ Andy Yen | Opt Out Podcast ~48:56
If you read the post David Peterson of ProtonVPN made it indicates that they will be adding Monero support regardless. Andy’s words make perfect sense and are entirely justifiable, but not really relevant since this is a prioritization issue as they plan to do it anyway.
Petition with 1000 people saying they’d switch to Proton VPN and petition with 1000 people acknowledging they will start using or continue using Proton VPN (or another Proton product broadly) on the condition that Proton will accept Monero as a payment method for their services is not the same.
This reply implies that the ProtonVPN General Manager has already accepted this petition
The official Proton VPN just posted the link to the petition on Reddit:
Alt: Petition for Proton to add Monero Payment Option - r/ProtonVPN
I would like this very much to happen
