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Tenth Wave of Nostr Grants
We're excited to introduce our latest wave of grants, supporting seven innovative projects that showcase the growing versatility of the nostr ecosystem.
This round features four first-time grant recipients working on censorship-resistant group communication, a decentralized app store, interoperability tools, and hypermedia infrastructure—each expanding the boundaries of what's possible on nostr. It also includes renewed support for three projects advancing private group messaging, Lightning payments via nostr, and modular client experiences.
The four first-time project grants in this wave are:
In addition, OpenSats has renewed project grants for:
Our ability to support these projects is made possible by the generosity of our donors. If you would like to help us continue funding important advancements within the nostr ecosystem, please consider making a donation to The Nostr Fund.
Let's dive in and learn about how each project is contributing to the future of nostr.
Chachi
Chachi is a relay-based group client implementing NIP-29, designed to facilitate mobile-friendly communication across various content types. By leveraging open standards like nostr for communications and Blossom for file hosting, chachi empowers communities—such as open-source projects, meetups, and topic-based groups—to choose where to store their messages and files, ensuring interoperability and freeing users from client or server lock-in. The platform supports diverse content, including text notes, long-form content, polls, highlights, and custom emojis, with plans to incorporate video, audio, wikis, and calendar events.
With the support of this grant, chachi aims to enhance its feature set by implementing synchronized unread state across clients, introducing a comprehensive notifications section, and enabling NIP-17 direct messages with unread state synchronization. Additional planned developments include refined group administration tools, enriched user profiles, Progressive Web App (PWA) capabilities for mobile installation, multiple login methods (NIP-46, NIP-55, and read-only with NIP-05), improved onboarding, and bitcoin integration features such as sending Zaps and displaying Zaps in posts and chats. These advancements are set to further chachi's mission of providing decentralized, user-centric communication solutions.
Repository: purrgrammer/chachi
License: MIT
Zapstore
Zapstore is a decentralized, permissionless app store built on nostr to give developers and users greater control over their software experience. By allowing developers to cryptographically sign their releases and publish them via nostr events and relays, Zapstore ensures censorship-resistant distribution. Users can verify binaries before installation and engage with the social discovery layer—recommending apps, following trusted developers, and zapping value-for-value bitcoin payments directly. Zapstore supports Tor usage, account-less operation, and local-first architecture, making it fast, private, and usable even offline or with poor connectivity. A command-line tool (zapstore-cli) enables developers to publish apps and act as a package manager across platforms like Mac and Linux.
With the support of this grant, efforts will focus on enhancing user-friendly app and relay management tools, supporting a wider variety of DVMs, and fostering a more diverse ecosystem of relays. On the social side, features like ratings, comments, and curated app packs will improve discovery and engagement. The project also plans to extend support to MacOS, Linux, and potentially PWAs, while continuing to develop UX improvements for developers, including self-signing workflows and bunker support. Further goals include integrating with package ecosystems like Homebrew via proxy relays and advancing the open app NIP spec to encourage third-party participation. Through these initiatives, Zapstore hopes to reduce developer dependence on big tech and foster a thriving, open-source app economy.
Repository: zapstore/zapstore
License: MIT
HyperNote
HyperNote is a protocol for applications to interpret hypermedia on nostr. Embracing the "dumb relay, smart client" design philosophy, HyperNote stores HTML-like content and interactions as events on relays, while state is maintained, reconstructed, and interpreted by clients. Much like how hypermedia builds expressiveness on top of the web's stable foundations, HyperNote adds rich interactivity to nostr without requiring changes to the underlying protocol.
With the support of this grant, the project aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers building applications on the HyperNote framework. HyperNote plans to create a reference implementation using the Raylib library and the Zig programming language, and a webview integration to make it easy for existing nostr clients to integrate Hypernote. In addition, they aim to rebuild existing applications including Guestbook, DVM Chess, and Slideshow, as well as launch a new "Instagram Stories" application. Through these efforts, HyperNote seeks to catalyze nostr's own Geocities/MySpace moment—reviving the open, expressive ethos of the early web.
Repository: futurepaul/hypernote
License: MIT
Nostr Epoxy
Nostr Epoxy is a nostr-based paid WebSocket proxy that allows users to connect to relays and other WebSocket services, such as Cashu mints. Whether hampered by network restrictions, censorship, or infrastructure limitations, Nostr Epoxy enables connectivity by acting as a bridge between different networks, including Tor, I2P, and Hyper. By integrating in-band Cashu payments, it also incentivizes proxy operators to maintain reliable infrastructure, fostering a more resilient and decentralized ecosystem.
With the support of this grant, Nostr Epoxy aims to further develop its capabilities by implementing features such as random message delays to mitigate timing attacks, deploying globally distributed proxies in regions like North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, and encrypting all messages to ensure end-to-end security. These advancements will enhance user privacy, improve network scalability, and reduce reliance on traditional DNS and SSL protocols, contributing to a more open and censorship-resistant internet.
Repository: nostr-epoxy
License: GPL v3
As nostr continues to evolve beyond a simple relay-based protocol into a foundational layer for decentralized identity, communication, and financial transactions, the importance of supporting innovative projects that push the boundaries of possibility becomes clearer than ever.
Our ability to foster these advancements depends on the generosity of donors—if you'd like to help drive Nostr's growth, consider making a donation to The Nostr Fund.