Jack Dorsey Gives Decentralized Social Network Nostr 14 BTC in Funding

Jack Dorsey donated roughly 14 BTC, worth about $245,000, to further fund development of Nostr (short for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays).

After it was reported that Jack Dorsey will donate $1 million annually to encrypted messaging app Signal, Koty Auditore took to Twitter to urge Dorsey to fund Nostr, following a blog post where Dorsey published his views on the need for a native internet protocol for social media.

Dorsey replied to the tweet two hours later, saying he was “figuring out how to do that.” Roughly 24 hours after that, he deployed funds to developer fiatjaf.

Nostr is an open protocol that aims to create a censorship-resistant global social network. The protocol doesn’t rely on a trusted central server; instead, all users run a client. Using this client, users publish content by writing a post, signing it with their private key and sending it to other servers which then relay that content along. The relays are simple: Their only job is to accept posts and forward them along to relay participants.

Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2006 and departed the company on Nov. 29, 2021, so that the company could move on from its founders. He remained the CEO of Block, a company dedicated to furthering economic empowerment through its portfolio companies. Since his departure from Twitter, the now-Elon Musk-owned company has experienced a rough patch, prompting some users to seek alternatives such as Urbit and Mastodon.