Facebook Messenger passed a major milestone. That would not be the introduction of payments.

In a major interview with Wired, David Marcus, Facebook Messenger’s new president (and former president of PayPal), left out something conspicuous: talk of payments. Rather, Marcus focused on the development of other functionality in Facebook Messenger, which yesterday passed 500 million users.

Most significantly, Marcus has apparently been working on developing the standalone Messenger app, which launched last April. His efforts seem to focus (almost exclusively) on development of the app. Here’s an anecdote from Wired that reflects Marcus’s current focus:

If Marcus is successful, however, everyone will feel they need it. “It’s really hard to express emotion across a texting interface, and so we want to give people tools that enable them to express themselves better,” he tells me. Just as importantly, he wants the application to work—fast—for every type of message every single time.

Marcus then whips out his phone to show me a feature in development, which will improve the dependability of the product. He sends a message to Martinazzi, and a small blue dot pops up, indicating that Martinazzi has received this message. Beside him, Martinazzi responds to the ding. Once he has read the message, Marcus’ blue dots are replaced by a miniscule Martinazzi chat head.

The plus? You can tell when someone has gotten your message, and whether she has read it. “We’re going to be doing a lot more things like this,” Marcus says. His bet is that if Messenger becomes the most predictable way to communicate, even my sister-in-law will let bygones be bygones and download the app—eventually.

And that implies that Marcus is not concentrating on payments now.

So far, the Messenger team has not been focused on making money, but it’s not a stretch to imagine how Messenger could become profitable. In Facebook’s second quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg indicated there would be an overlap between Messenger and payments, but that it was a long way out. Leaked snapshots obtained by a tech blogger suggest Facebook has experimented with a service that lets friends make payments to each other.

We will point out that that overlap between Messenger and payments was not mentioned in Facebook’s third-quarter earnings call, but rather Mark Zuckerberg during that call talked about how a smooth payments infrastructure was helpful to … wait for it … Facebook’s advertising revenue. For now, it seems, it’s blue dots only for Messenger.