Nostr Compass #25

By Nostr Compass June 3, 2026 · Edited June 4, 2026

Amber ships NIP-44 v3 encryption ahead of spec Mostro builds Cashu escrow NIP-F4 merges Amethyst lands NIP-32 labeling and podcast screen

Top stories
- Amber 6.2.0: NIP-44 v3 encryption shipped
- Mostro: Cashu escrow integration via CDK
Releases
Unreleased changes
- Amethyst: NIP-32 hashtag labeling, podcast screen, music tracks
- Shopstr: OpenGraph preview URL validation
NIP updates and protocol spec work
NIP deep dive: NIP-32 (Labeling)
NIP deep dive: NIP-F4 (Podcasts)

Amber 6.2.0 ships NIP-44 v3 encryption ahead of the spec. Mostro lands the foundation for Cashu-settled escrow across eight PRs, wrapping the existing Cashu Development Kit as a second settlement backend alongside Lightning. NIP-F4 podcasts merges after 27 months of debate. fiatjaf opens a contested NIP-17 key-decoupling proposal that re-opens the bunker-versus-Marmot architectural argument. Amethyst lands NIP-32 hashtag labeling, a dedicated podcast screen, and onchain zaps across 52 unreleased PRs.

Releases

ngit v2.5.0: GRASP fallback and lazy git fetches

ngit v2.5.0 changes the default behavior of git push pr/<branch> and ngit send to produce a PR kind for new proposals when the repository has at least one GRASP server registered. Previously this only triggered for oversized commits over 60 KB or commits containing submodules. When a PR cannot be pushed to the repository’s GRASP servers, ngit now falls back to GRASP-06 routing through the declared servers. The ngit send --git-server flag or git push -o git-server=<url> lets contributors target a custom git URL or GRASP server explicitly.

ngit init republishes now preserve unknown tags from existing announcements, so tags added by a future ngit version or third-party tool survive republish. A yellow warning lists the carried-over tags, and --clean removes them on demand. ngit pr apply, ngit pr checkout, and ngit pr list consult git servers lazily and share a single fetch helper, so checkout no longer fetches unconditionally when the commit is already local. ngit pr checkout also tries submitter-supplied clone URLs from the PR event as a fallback when the repo’s declared git servers don’t carry the PR tip, matching the existing behaviour in ngit pr apply. ngit is the reference NIP-34 implementation for git collaboration over Nostr, and v2.5.0 makes GRASP the first-class path for new contributors.

Jumble v26.5.7: EXIF stripping and validated zap counts

Jumble v26.5.7 adds two changes that affect user privacy and data integrity directly. EXIF location and camera identifiers are now stripped from image uploads before they leave the client, closing a long-standing metadata-leak surface that affected every image posted from Jumble. Zap counts are now computed only from cryptographically validated receipts, fixing inflated counts from malformed zap events that had let attackers exaggerate zap totals on notes. The release also adds sender-identity verification for NIP-17 DMs, closing a spoofing surface where a sender could forge their pubkey in the seal.

nostr-calendar v1.6.0: RSVP and duplicate participant handling

nostr-calendar v1.6.0 lands Formstr’s RSVP flow (PR #169) and prevents duplicate participants in event invites (PR #168). The waitForAll option in the publish function now defaults to false so the UI does not block on slow relays (PR #170). PR #157 shipped Formstr’s two NIP proposal drafts for appointment scheduling and reservations.

Sprout 0.3.6: Sprout × mesh-llm and channel sections

Sprout v0.3.6 is the headline of a six-release run from v0.3.1 through v0.3.6 this week. In-process Sprout × mesh-llm integration lands in PR #798, letting Sprout serve and consume mesh-llm nodes through relay admission. User-defined channel sections sync across devices via Nostr in PR #792, and channel sections come to mobile with relay sync in PR #800. Thread-aware notifications with mutable follow and mute controls arrive in PR #761.

Arbitrary file-type attachments with download cards arrived in PR #810, expanding Sprout beyond image-only attachments. Mobile gained a Pulse social feed tab (PR #772) and Pulse polish across feed, compose, and filter surfaces (PR #796).

NostrBotKit v0.5.0: Marmot group chat in a Rust bot framework

NostrBotKit v0.5.0, released May 24 on Codeberg, adds Marmot (MLS-over-Nostr, NIP-104) support to the self-hosted Rust bot framework. When marmot: true is set, the bot publishes its MLS key packages (kind 443, 30443, 10051), accepts group invitations automatically, and listens for messages in joined groups. Two new command types, dm_marmot and dm_marmot_npub, let bots send messages into named Marmot groups or 1:1 Marmot chats via cron jobs or webhooks. To prevent feedback loops with other bots, NostrBotKit bots only respond to messages explicitly addressed to them via /command or @botname/command. Encrypted attachments using MIP-04 are auto-decrypted and re-uploaded via Blossom or NIP-96, and the MLS state database is encrypted with a key derived from the bot’s private key. NostrBotKit is the first Rust framework to ship NIP-104 bot support, opening Marmot-encrypted bot deployment to a different operator profile than the existing TypeScript path.

noscrypt v0.1.14: signed cryptography library release

noscrypt v0.1.14 is a security release of the C cryptography library used by several Nostr clients for secp256k1, NIP-04, and NIP-44 primitives. The release ships with PGP-signed downloads verifiable against the maintainer’s public key. Downstream clients that bundle noscrypt should validate the signature before integrating.

Chama v1.3.0: new Nostr-native P2P escrow with Fedimint

Chama v1.3.0, released June 1, is the headline of a four-release run for a new Nostr-native P2P escrow client that uses Fedimint ecash and 2-of-3 Shamir secret sharing for settlement. The project ships at getchama.app and runs without a server. v1.3.0 introduces “heal that sticks” (successful re-broadcast and trade healing that survives session restarts) and pay-rail matching, where US-leaning Chamas surface US payment rails first. Multi-unit storefront groundwork landed across v1.2.11 (multi-unit schema) and v1.2.12 (storefront stock accountant + native Fedimint bridge recovery hardening). Chama joins Mostro and Shopstr in the Nostr marketplace category, distinguished by its serverless architecture and Fedimint-based escrow settlement.

Unreleased changes

Amethyst: NIP-32 hashtag labeling, podcast screen, music tracks

Amethyst merged 52 PRs and 411 commits this week without cutting a release tag. The largest functional addition is PR #3111, which implements NIP-32 hashtag labeling and a label-based hashtag feed using kind 1985 events with L namespace and l label tags. This replaces the brittle text-match #tag mechanism with a labeler-based discovery model where users can follow specific labeler npubs the way they follow content creators. PR #3105 adds a dedicated podcast screen with episode list and inline player, landing within days of the NIP-F4 podcast spec merge. PR #3071 adds a Software Apps feed with follow-list filtering, and PR #3067 adds music tracks and playlists support via NIP-51 sets.

Ephemeral signers for anonymous post uploads land in PR #3123, letting users post anonymously without exposing their identity key to upload services. A Tor self-heal watchdog with integration tests against Arti v2.3.0 arrives in PR #3053, strengthening Amethyst’s Tor routing during transient network outages. Onchain zaps and a NIP-05 filter for returning users from Gemini land in PR #3052, broadening the zap surface beyond Lightning to onchain Bitcoin payments.

Shopstr: OpenGraph preview URL validation

PR #504 validates OpenGraph preview URLs before rendering them in marketplace listings, closing a potential XSS surface where malicious sellers could embed scripted content via crafted OG metadata. Shopstr-hosted shops display OG previews for external links, and unvalidated URLs let an attacker inject arbitrary content into the shop UI.

NIP updates and protocol spec work

NIP-F4 (Podcasts) merged after two years

PR #1093 merged on May 28, two years and three months after fiatjaf opened the original draft. NIP-F4 defines podcast episodes as kind 54 events with imeta tags for audio file metadata (URL, mime type, language ISO code, fallback URLs, NIP-96 service flag, bitrate, duration), a title tag, optional image and description tags, and t tags for topic labels. The spec deliberately keeps RSS as the source of truth: episodes can carry an i tag referencing the RSS podcast GUID, letting Nostr clients link to existing podcast feeds without duplicating audio hosting. The long debate in the PR thread (with podcast-namespace co-author Dave Jones, Alex Gleason, and Mike Terenzio) settled on a coexistence model where Nostr provides the social layer on top of RSS while RSS keeps the distribution layer. Amethyst’s PR #3105 podcast screen lands within days of the spec merge, and Jumble’s GIF picker work also includes early podcast-attachment scaffolding.

NIP-17 key decoupling (PR #2361)

fiatjaf opened PR #2361 on June 1, proposing that NIP-17 separate the identity key from the encryption key. Recipients advertise their encryption key in a new kind 10044 event, and senders use that advertised key (when present) for the gift-wrap inner seal, falling back to the recipient’s identity key only when the advertisement is absent. The PR also adds an n tag to the seal carrying the sender’s encryption pubkey, so receivers can derive the correct conversation key without trial-decryption against every retired key. The stated motivation is bunker UX: under the current design, a bunker user must round-trip every received DM through the signer to decrypt, since the encryption key is the signer-held identity key. Decoupling lets the client hold the encryption key locally while keeping the identity key in the bunker for signatures.

The proposal drew the week’s most contentious review. Cody Tseng (Jumble) supports it as the easiest path to cross-client DM interop. Vitor Pamplona (Amethyst) objects on two grounds: it adds a new long-lived decryption secret outside the bunker, and clients that don’t ship it will silently fail to decrypt messages from clients that do, with no degradation path because the break is at the seal layer. Pamplona argues the problem is already solved correctly by Marmot‘s key packages and epoch rotation, and that retrofitting key separation into the base NIP-17 spec creates the kind of interop failure that Marmot took two years to engineer around. fiatjaf’s counter has three parts: decoupling is optional per-recipient, the n-tag fix addresses the trial-decryption concern, and the alternative is keeping bunker UX broken while Telegram eats the messaging use case. The thread remains open without a merge decision and is the most-watched NIP discussion of the quarter.

NIP-Silent Payments payment flow (PR #2362)

silentius-satoshi opened PR #2362 on June 1 as a companion to the broader Nostr Silent Payments NIP draft (PR #2355). The payment-flow NIP defines kind 8352 for silent payment receipt notifications (delivered via NIP-59 gift wrap so the receipt link is not publicly observable) and kind 10353 for an encrypted UTXO cache that syncs across devices for the same Silent Payments wallet. The pair together let a payer signal a payment to a Silent Payments address using Nostr-native primitives without exposing the on-chain link on the open relay layer.

NIP-PIP Perfect IP Packets (PR #2364)

RandyMcMillan opened PR #2364 on June 1 as a draft. It introduces a packet-tree transport with three new addressable kinds: 39078 carries the manifest, 39079 carries individual slices, and 39080 carries repair requests. The spec defines a wire format where large files are broken into addressable slices, with manifests describing the slice tree and repair requests letting receivers ask for missing slices. Early-draft status applies, and the proposal has not yet attracted maintainer review.

NIP-29 audio/video live spaces (PR #2238)

PR #2238 merged on May 28, extending NIP-29 relay-based groups with audio and video live-space support. Groups can now reference an active live-space session, letting NIP-53-style live activity events anchor in a NIP-29 group context.

NIP-71 video multiple audio tracks (PR #2255)

PR #2255 merged on May 28, adding audio-track imeta tags to NIP-71 video events. The new format carries URL, hash, mime type, language tag (with ISO-639-1 plus original-version flag), fallback URLs, NIP-96 service signal, bitrate, and duration. This enables audio-only streaming (video podcasts), resolution switching with stable audio, multiple language tracks, and reduced storage when servers don’t embed audio directly into video files. Clients should check for audio-track availability before assuming single-track behavior.

NIP-59 ephemeral gift wrap (PR #2245)

PR #2245 merged on May 28, adding kind 21059 as an ephemeral counterpart to the existing kind 1059 gift wrap. The semantics match the standard NIP-59 wrap but follow ephemeral event rules per NIP-01 (relays drop them after broadcast and do not persist them). This lets apps choose persistence based on requirements: typing indicators and presence pings benefit from ephemeral, while DM history needs persistence.

NIP-78 application-specific kind (PR #2292)

PR #2292 merged on May 28, reclassifying NIP-78 application-specific data as a normal addressable kind, dropping the previous separate range. This simplifies replaceability semantics and aligns NIP-78 with the addressable event model used by other application-state NIPs.

NIP-85 clarifications (PR #2304)

PR #2304 merged on May 28 with small improvements to the language around multiple keys and relays per service provider in NIP-85 Trusted Assertions, clarifying the operator-key-rotation path for relay assertion services.

NIP-01 relay connection management one-liner (PR #2307)

PR #2307 merged on May 28, adding a single sentence to NIP-01 about how clients should handle relay connection lifetimes. The fix addresses a long-running gap where clients differed on whether to keep WebSocket connections open after fetching, leading to silent message loss on relays that drop idle connections.

NIP-C7 kind 9 chat constraint (PR #2310)

PR #2310 merged on May 28, restricting NIP-C7 chat views to kind 9 messages only. This separates ephemeral chat from kind 1 timeline posts in clients that implement NIP-C7-style chat surfaces.

NIP-55 simplification (PR #2363)

PR #2363 by greenart7c3, opened June 1, simplifies the Android signer application spec. Vitor Pamplona signed off as “Looks good” and fiatjaf asked whether it’s ready to merge. The change paves the way for the NIP-44 v3 ContentProvider authority registration that Amber shipped this week.

NIP-44 v3 (Amber implementation ahead of spec)

Amber shipped NIP-44 v3 in v6.2.0 with eight commits implementing the encryption upgrade and ContentProvider authority registration, but the NIPs-repo spec PR has yet to land. NIP-44 itself defines a versioned encrypted payload format used inside signed events; the existing v2 (in production since 2024) uses secp256k1 ECDH, HKDF, padding, ChaCha20, HMAC-SHA256, and base64. The v3 wire format adds a new version byte (0x03) ahead of the nonce, allowing receiver clients to negotiate the algorithm explicitly. Amber’s implementation includes auto-reject for invalid v3 requests, a dedicated approval screen distinct from v2 approvals, and per-direction plaintext logging for the history. Until the NIPs PR merges, v3 stands as an Amber-specific extension. Treat it as a forward-looking signal, not a stable protocol-wide signaling.

NIP deep dive: NIP-32 (Labeling)

NIP-32 defines a structured way for any Nostr actor to label events, pubkeys, relays, URLs, or topics using addressable kind 1985 events with a namespaced label vocabulary. The spec introduces two new tags: L denotes a label namespace, and l denotes a label within that namespace. Label-target tags (e, p, a, r, or t) specify what is being labeled. The namespace requirement keeps multiple label systems from colliding: a spam label in nip28.moderation carries different semantics from a spam label in relay-report.

The design choice that makes NIP-32 useful beyond moderation is that labels are assertions, not protocol-level truth. A kind 1985 event says only that a particular pubkey labeled a particular target in a particular namespace. The trust model is delegated to the client: each client picks which labelers to honor, which namespaces to read, and what UI affordance to give each label. The same primitive carries content warnings, license assignment, ISO-639-1 language tags on kind 1 notes, ISO-3166-2 geographic tags, content classification, distributed moderation suggestions, and reputation scores.

Amethyst’s PR #3111 this week is the largest deployment so far. It adds hashtag labeling through NIP-32 and a label-based hashtag feed, letting users browse by labels assigned by trusted labelers. The earlier #tag text-match mechanism that originally drove hashtag discovery on Nostr remains as a fallback for un-labeled notes. The hashtag-as-label model means the same note can be discoverable under multiple labels assigned by different labelers, and users can mute or boost specific labelers without affecting the underlying notes.

Self-labeling is also supported. An author can attach L and l tags directly to their own kind 1 notes to declare language, location, and topic. A note tagged ["L", "ISO-639-1"], ["l", "en", "ISO-639-1"] self-identifies as English and can be filtered by language-aware clients without third-party labeling infrastructure.

Example NIP-32 label event tagging a kind 1 note as English and assigning it a moderation tag:

{
  "id": "a5f87fe2d4c8b9a0e3f1c4d5e6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6e7f8091a2b3c4d5e6f",
  "pubkey": "79be667ef9dcbbac55a06295ce870b07029bfcdb2dce28d959f2815b16f81798",
  "created_at": 1748908800,
  "kind": 1985,
  "tags": [
    ["L", "ISO-639-1"],
    ["l", "en", "ISO-639-1"],
    ["L", "nip28.moderation"],
    ["l", "approve", "nip28.moderation"],
    ["e", "8b39f4e5d6c7a8b9c0d1e2f3a4b5c6d7e8f9a0b1c2d3e4f5a6b7c8d9e0f1a2b3", "wss://relay.example.com"]
  ],
  "content": "Labeled as English-language content approved for NIP-28 chat moderation",
  "sig": "f1e2d3c4b5a6978869504132c3d4e5f6a7b8c9d0e1f2a3b4c5d6e7f80192a3b4c5d6e7f80192a3b4c5d6e7f80192a3b4c5d6e7f80192a3b4c5d6e7f80192a3b4c5"
}

The Amethyst rollout combined with the recent Trusted Relay Assertions work suggests NIP-32 is becoming the standard substrate for any “user-driven assertion about a target” pattern on Nostr. The next test is whether labelers themselves develop trust hierarchies: whether users will follow specific labeler npubs the way they follow content creators.

NIP deep dive: NIP-F4 (Podcasts)

NIP-F4 merged this week, two years and three months after fiatjaf opened the original draft (PR #1093). The F prefix is plain hex numbering: NIP-F0 through NIP-FF use the same 1-byte hex space as NIP-0A through NIP-0D, with the upper hex range serving as overflow now that the 01–99 decimal range is filling up. NIP-F4 defines how podcasts publish episodes and metadata as Nostr events while keeping RSS as a complementary layer for the audio file itself.

The core architectural choice is that each podcast is its own Nostr keypair. The spec opens with this directly: “each podcast is its own Nostr keypair”. This lets podcasts combine their podcasting presence with a normal kind 0 / kind 1 microblogging presence, and lets a podcast change ownership over time through key handover or MuSig2-style shared signing. Four event kinds carry the publishing layer:

kind:10154: replaceable podcast metadata. Carries title, image, description, optional website tags, and optional p tags marking authors with a role of host, cohost, or editor.
kind:10164: author counter-claim. The example in the spec uses kind 10064 (a typo open for correction), but the heading and surrounding text identify it as kind:10164. Users list the podcast pubkeys they author, so that clients can verify the p tags in kind:10154 against an equivalent claim from the supposed author. Without this, a podcast could falsely tag anyone as a host.
kind:54: episode events authored by the podcast pubkey directly. Tags include title, optional image, description, and one or more audio tags. Each audio tag is ["audio", "<audio-url>", "<optional_media_type>"]. The spec notes “other important fields to be specified here later after further discovery”, and the merged form is deliberately minimal.
kind:10054: a NIP-51-style favorite-podcasts list, letting users mark which podcasts they follow.

The thread debate around the merge involved Podcasting 2.0 co-author Dave Jones, Alex Gleason, Mike Terenzio, Pablo F7z, and staab. Jones argued strongly against any attempt to replace RSS: “It’s been tried many times and always fails”, citing JSONfeed, XMPP, AMP, Twitter’s API, and Spotify’s failed migration. Terenzio reframed the proposal as a social layer on top of RSS, keeping RSS itself as the distribution layer. fiatjaf agreed to step back and let the proposal mature: “I agree with everything you said but I still think we can pull it off, let’s stop here for a while”. Two years later, the merged spec lands closer to coexistence than replacement.

Three design questions remain explicit in the merged spec:

The kind:10164 typo (example shows 10064) needs reconciling before clients can interoperate safely.
Episode-level discovery without RSS GUID linking is left open. The merged spec has no i tag, no podcast:item:guid format, and no RSS bridging mechanism. Clients that want to bridge an existing RSS catalog into kind 54 events must define the bridge convention themselves.
The “other important fields” stub on the kind:54 definition leaves bitrate, duration, language, transcript pointers, chapters, and per-segment metadata as open territory for follow-up proposals.

Amethyst’s PR #3105 lands a dedicated podcast screen with episode list and inline player within days of the merge, the first major client implementation. Jumble shipped early podcast attachment scaffolding alongside its GIF picker. Wavlake remains the largest Nostr-native podcast platform and will need to decide whether to align its existing kind 31337 music track events with NIP-F4’s kind 54 episode model.

Example NIP-F4 kind 54 episode event, matching the merged spec’s minimal tag set:

{
  "id": "55807e7d5cd90d0303d7dce7397f996fdbaed8697903f326c7cf8ad999b9de3d",
  "pubkey": "79be667ef9dcbbac55a06295ce870b07029bfcdb2dce28d959f2815b16f81798",
  "created_at": 1748995200,
  "kind": 54,
  "tags": [
    ["title", "Episode 42: Why RSS Won"],
    ["image", "https://podcast.example.com/ep42-cover.jpg"],
    ["description", "Dave Jones and fiatjaf on protocol coexistence and the social layer."],
    ["audio", "https://podcast.example.com/audio/ep42.mp3", "audio/mpeg"]
  ],
  "content": "In this episode we discuss the two-year journey of NIP-F4 from draft to merge, and why coexistence with RSS turned out to be the right architectural choice.",
  "sig": "abc123def456789012345678901234567890abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef01234567"
}

PR #1093 was open for 27 months, well above the median open duration for merged NIPs PRs. The next test for NIP-F4 is whether the kind 10164 typo gets reconciled, whether episode-discovery and RSS-bridge conventions emerge from the implementers, and whether the major podcast hosts publish under per-podcast keypairs as the spec recommends.

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Nostr Compass #25

§Top stories

§Amber 6.2.0: NIP-44 v3 encryption shipped

§Mostro: Cashu escrow integration via CDK

§Releases

§ngit v2.5.0: GRASP fallback and lazy git fetches

§Jumble v26.5.7: EXIF stripping and validated zap counts

§nostr-calendar v1.6.0: RSVP and duplicate participant handling

§Sprout 0.3.6: Sprout × mesh-llm and channel sections

§NostrBotKit v0.5.0: Marmot group chat in a Rust bot framework

§noscrypt v0.1.14: signed cryptography library release

§Chama v1.3.0: new Nostr-native P2P escrow with Fedimint

§Unreleased changes

§Amethyst: NIP-32 hashtag labeling, podcast screen, music tracks

§Shopstr: OpenGraph preview URL validation

§NIP updates and protocol spec work

§NIP-F4 (Podcasts) merged after two years

§NIP-17 key decoupling (PR #2361)

§NIP-Silent Payments payment flow (PR #2362)

§NIP-PIP Perfect IP Packets (PR #2364)

§NIP-29 audio/video live spaces (PR #2238)

§NIP-71 video multiple audio tracks (PR #2255)

§NIP-59 ephemeral gift wrap (PR #2245)

§NIP-78 application-specific kind (PR #2292)

§NIP-85 clarifications (PR #2304)

§NIP-01 relay connection management one-liner (PR #2307)

§NIP-C7 kind 9 chat constraint (PR #2310)

§NIP-55 simplification (PR #2363)

§NIP-44 v3 (Amber implementation ahead of spec)

§NIP deep dive: NIP-32 (Labeling)

§NIP deep dive: NIP-F4 (Podcasts)

Top stories

Amber 6.2.0: NIP-44 v3 encryption shipped

Mostro: Cashu escrow integration via CDK