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Fourth Wave of Nostr Grants

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It’s been a year of notes, a year of zaps, a year of purple-feathered early adopters telling each other “good morning” and “good night”; a year of experimentation, a year of relaying, and a year of building other stuff.

While still in its infancy, nostr is slowly but surely establishing itself as something that stands out from the flock of decentralized social media protocols. As more and more people realize its elegant simplicity—and the power that direct lightning integration brings—nostr will inevitably grow and mature.

No technology is ever fully formed or perfect, and neither is nostr. However, we believe it has the right building blocks and solid architecture, which is what will allow it to go beyond what we currently understand and know as the social web.

In addition to the 32 nostr grants announced in the past, we are giving out 7 more grants to the following nostr projects:

This brings the total number of nostr grants to 39, providing support for a wide range of developers working on clients, relays, libraries, NIPs, cryptography, research, education, design, UX, and ... other stuff.

Our nostr grants are sourced from The Nostr Fund. If you would like to help us in supporting the nostr ecosystem, consider making a donation to the fund:

As always, let's look at each project in more detail:

Lume

Lume is a cross-platform nostr desktop client focused on creating a unique communication and content browsing experience. Lume aims to be extendable and customizable, allowing users to easily install extensions and use various themes. Its multi-column TweetDeck-style interface is a great way to stay on top of multiple feeds and topics at once.

Repository: luminous-devs/lume
License: GPL-3.0

Flockstr

Flockstr is a calendar events app on nostr. Users are able to create events, post updates, invite other users, issue tickets, collect payments, and pretty much everything that is commonplace on centralized platforms like Eventbrite and Meetups.com. The goal is to provide a seamless UI so users foreign to nostr may be entirely unaware that they are using a decentralized ecosystem aside from when signing in or seamlessly paying for paid events via lightning.

Repository: zmeyer44/flockstr
License: MIT

Camelus

Camelus is an Android client that focuses on ease-of-use and content delivery. One design choice is to remove addicting features such as likes, pull to refresh, and other dark patterns that are designed to keep you addicted. The goal is to have users come back to the app because of content rather than dark patterns.

While the client is currently focused on short kind:1 notes, support for long-form content and communities is to be added in future versions. Camelus is built upon NDK and the NIP-65 gossip model, allowing the client to focus on higher-level functionality and features.

Repository: leo-lox/camelus
License: GPL-3.0

noStrudel

noStrudel is a fast and feature-rich web client that is focused on power users and developers. While it is not geared towards complete newcomers, it might help curious users learn more about how nostr works under the hood.

It supports quite a bit of other stuff, offering e.g. strong support for communities with a Reddit-style interface for NIP-72 moderated content. Alongside regular note, messaging, and profile functionality, noStrudel also features streams, channels, lists, badges, and more.

Repository: hzrd149/nostrudel
License: MIT

ZapThreads

ZapThreads is a standalone component that provides threaded comments for nostr clients. It allows a commenting experience on any nostr event, including long-form notes. ZapThreads is currently integrated into Habla.news, nostr.cooking, 21ideas.org, and other nostr apps.

Commenting on generic URLs is also supported, allowing it to become the commenting system of any web page. The focus of ZapThreads is to keep the component versatile, fast, lightweight, and extremely easy to integrate.

Repository: fr4nzap/zapthreads
License: Unlicense

NIP-44 Cryptography Audit

While nostr allows for encrypted direct messages to be sent, the current NIP-04 standard has significant flaws that NIP-44 aims to address. A new encryption standard would allow us to fix DMs, implement group chats, and facilitate other encrypted use cases within nostr. Cryptography is hard, however, which is why NIP-44 underwent an independent audit covered by this grant.

The result of the audit is available as a PDF and the issues found will be addressed in the coming weeks.

Repository: nostr-protocol/nips/44 & paulmillr/nip44
License: Public Domain

NIP-90 Data Vending Machine Framework

This generic framework provides an easy way to build and run NIP-90 DVMs. While notes and zaps are fun and all, there is a lot of “other stuff” that can be done with nostr. Data Vending Machines (DVMs) are a way to perform a variety of automated tasks over nostr, i.e. get something (computationally expensive) done in exchange for sats.

Some algorithms might provide content curation or profile recommendations, while others might use LLMs to generate or transform content on the fly. Thanks to NIP-90, nostr can act as a marketplace for data processing, where users can request jobs to be processed without having to care about "who" processes the data.

Repository: believethehype/nostrdvm
License: MIT

We can’t wait to see what 2024 has in store for the nostrverse, and we’re proud to support some of the ingenious developers that are building toward a better future. Join us in our efforts by making a donation to The Nostr Fund:

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