Nostr Compass is a technical resource for the Nostr protocol, helping developers, relay operators, and builders stay current on protocol evolution.
We publish weekly newsletters covering NIP proposals, client updates, relay developments, and notable code changes. Our podcast features conversations with the developers building Nostr. The topic index documents key concepts with links to primary sources.
Recent Newsletters
Nostr Compass #31
Welcome back to Nostr Compass, your weekly guide to Nostr.
This week: Vector v0.4.0 retires Marmot as the default transport for Group Chats in favor of Concord, an open, MIT-licensed community protocol also used by Soapbox’s Armada, and ships Concord v2 four days later with a slash-command picker for bots, a self-destruct timer, and NIP-58 badges. Amethyst merges its own clean-room, wire-compatible Concord implementation the same week. Sonar splits off from Bitchat with a cross-platform alpha and is the cited spec source for this week’s sticker-pack kinds proposal. Divine Mobile …
Nostr Compass #30
Welcome back to Nostr Compass, your weekly guide to Nostr.
This week: the Marmot spec is marked adopted across 42 files as MDK cuts v0.9.0 through v0.9.3 with encrypted group avatars, external signer support, and MarmotKit iOS and Android bindings. Mostro ships Transport v2 on NIP-44 direct messages with anti-spam gates and a coexistence window in both mostrod v0.18.0 and Mobile v1.3.0. Bitchat 1.6.0 adds NIP-13 proof-of-work to geohash channel messages, an opt-in mesh-to-Nostr gateway that lets one online phone uplink a whole crowd, prekey bundles, transitive verification, and creator-managed …
Nostr Compass #29
Welcome back to Nostr Compass, your weekly guide to Nostr.
This week: FIPS v0.4.0 ships a Nym mixnet transport, opt-in mDNS LAN discovery, hitless rekey under loss, and a data-plane overhaul, wire-compatible with v0.3.0. Whitenoise Linux surfaces as a desktop Marmot client in Rust and Slint with a protocol proposal to move message effects to a dedicated kind-9 event. CustID v0.1.10-beta launches as a hardware-backed mobile identity vault acting as a NIP-46 remote signer and answering physical access challenges over NFC. myco launches peer-to-peer nsite sharing over the FIPS mesh with a new BLE …
Nostr Compass #28
Welcome back to Nostr Compass, your weekly guide to Nostr.
This week: Sprout rebranded to Buzz and started publishing personas, teams, and managed-agent records as Nostr relay events, with cross-device read state and per-message read markers replacing the old badge-frontier model. Napplets by sandwich.farm launches as a trust-boundary protocol for composable Nostr apps distributed over Nostr and Blossom. Conduit (a three-app marketplace monorepo on Nostr: buyer market, merchant portal, store builder, with its own in-repo NIP and spec directories) lands 17 PRs hardening the marketplace MVP, …
Nostr Compass #27
This week ran heavy on signer work, P2P trade protocols, and flagship client releases. Amethyst v1.12.0 ships 170+ PRs adding NIP-60 Cashu wallets, NIP-61 nutzaps, NIP-82 software-app feeds, NIP-F4 podcast support, CLINK on-chain zap verification, KMP phase-1/2 iOS migration, and a Tor self-heal driver. Clave v1.0.0 (build 102) was submitted to the App Store, bringing push-woken background signing and incoming-signature verification to iOS. Mostro Core v0.13.0 ships Protocol v2, replacing relay-based order communication with NIP-44 gift-wrapped direct messages, and Mostro v0.17.5 made the …
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