The Nostr decentralized social networking protocol is now officially available on the Apple app store.
Nostr gained popularity after former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey became enthusiastic about the technology, later donating 14 bitcoins to its creator. The excitement caused the protocol’s most popular mobile app, Damus, to reach its beta testing limit of 10,000 users, prompting its developers to apply for a formal listing on Apple’s app store. Today, Damus was approved, and a full release is now available in the app store for anyone to download.
Dorsey took to Twitter to comment on the news, calling the launch “a milestone for open protocols.”
Nostr, an acronym for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays, is, in essence, exactly that. Users create an account simply by generating a key pair, a public key and a private key, through a client application. The public key is the “ID” of the user in the protocol, while the private key is similar to the user’s password. The user can transmit a message to the protocol by connecting to a repeater and signing the message with his private key. Anyone can send messages to a specific user referring to their public key. Taking advantage of asymmetric cryptography, users can send messages to each other privately by encrypting their message with the public key of the target user, ensuring that only the private key corresponding to that public key can decrypt the message.
This dynamic is similar to Bitcoin. A Bitcoin transaction ensures, also through asymmetric encryption, that only the legitimate recipient can “decrypt” the received funds, that is, spend them on a future transaction. Bitcoin has since evolved from the simple send-to-public-key dynamic used by Nostr, but the core of the idea is still there.
Nostr is still a niche project, as the protocol is in its infancy. Bitcoin, now 14 years old, has yet to be globally adopted, and Nostr has only a fraction of that history established. However, the technology holds promise, as it is an open, censorship-resistant, and permissionless communications protocol. With Damus’s listing on the App Store, Nostr can now reach far more people than was previously possible.