GM, Nostriches! The Nostr Review is a biweekly newsletter focused on protocol updates, exciting programs, the long-form content ecosystem, and key events happening in the Nostr-verse. If you’re interested, join me in covering updates from the Nostr ecosystem!
Quick review: In the past two weeks, daily active pubkeys rose to 431,549. New user growth increased, as profiles with bios also increased by about 28.88%. Events totaled 42.1 million and zap volume increased to 16.2 million sats. Additionally, 10 pull requests were submitted to the Nostr protocol, with 1 draft. A total of 112 Nostr projects were tracked, with 14 releasing product updates. During this period, 1 notable event took place, and 2 significant events are upcoming.
Nostr Statistics#
Based on user activity, the total daily active pubkeys reached 431,549, reflecting an increase of 33.26% compared to the previous period's 323,838. The highest daily activity was recorded on June 17th, 2026, with 36,302 active users, representing a 49.74% spike compared to the previous record of 24,243.
The number of new users overall experienced significant upward acceleration. In particular, the number of profiles with bios rose to 1,739,634, marking an increase of about 28.88% compared to the previous record of 1,349,861. Furthermore, the number of new profiles with contact lists also increased to 316,501, a 25.20% rise from 252,802. Meanwhile, pubkeys writing events surged to 249,551 within this period, representing a 34.67% jump from the previous 185,309.
In terms of content publishing, network volume grew massively as approximately 42,194,881 total events were published during this period, representing a substantial increase of 143.22% compared to the 17,348,328 from the previous cycle. Among them, Reposts reached a total of 749,652 within this period, marking a 39.73% expansion compared to the previous 536,487.
For zap activity, the total zap amount is about 16.2 million, showing an increase of over 26.56% compared to the previous period.
Data source: https://npub.world/stats , https://stats.andotherstuff.org/
NIPs#
Use hsl for role colors
staab
hodlbod
The PR proposes using HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) color specification for NIP-43 role colors. Originally named "Use okclh for role colors," the author switched from OKLCH (a more sophisticated, semi-proprietary color standard) to HSL because it's more intuitive and predictable when selecting colors.
Key details:
- Original approach: OKLCH color space (which uses a tuple of [hue, saturation, lightness] and fixes many palette-related issues)
- Switched to: HSL color space for better intuitiveness
- Also includes: Updates to NIP-86 role colors in the same commit
NIP-59: relays should reject kind 13 seal events
alexgleason
Alex Gleason
This is a straightforward proposal that relays should reject kind 13 seal events since these events are only ever supposed to be used inside of giftwraps (NIP-59). By rejecting seal events at the relay level, it prevents orphaned seal events and maintains proper protocol architecture.
Conversation Highlights:
- staab reacted with a thumbs up emoji, indicating approval
- alexgleason referenced a GitLab commit from Ditto Relay that implements this rejection logic: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/ditto-relay/-/commit/ddce82c040e78cc37d3a56b8a7f0448daddf3df2
epoch-based deterministic wrapper keys for NIP-17
fiatjaf
fiatjaf
This PR presents an alternative approach to NIP-17 (Direct Messages) wrapper key generation. It proposes using epoch-based deterministic wrapper keys rather than static conversation keys. The PR is described as "Another take on #2396," referring to a related proposal by staab.
Key Concept:
- Uses HKDF (HMAC-based Key Derivation Function) with shared secret and epoch values to derive different wrapper keys for different time periods
- Wrapper keys change based on epochs, providing time-based key rotation
- Clients would paginate backwards through epochs to retrieve historical messages
NIP-XXDLC: DLC oracle announcements and attestations
joemphilips
hodlbod
This PR resurrects a DLC (Discreet Log Contracts) oracle proposal that was previously closed. It introduces specifications for DLC oracle announcements and attestations on Nostr.
Key Details:
- Recreates proposal from: PR #1681 (NIP-88), which was closed
- Placeholder naming: Uses NIP-XXDLC, kind:xxdlc-announcement, kind:xxdlc-attestation, and kind:100xxdlc-announcement instead of concrete numbers
- Reason for placeholders: Final NIP and event kind number assignments are still pending
- Scope: Limited to DLC v0; corrected the oracle_announcement link and removed Nostr-key fallback from previous iteration
- Origin: The original PR author (conduition) agreed for joemphilips to take over and resubmit the proposal.
Source: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pulls
Notable Projects#
- Squalk is a Nostr-based forum platform that helps manage communities of any size with flexible Simple and Full modes, while integrating real-time chat into every forum for seamless collaboration and discussion.
Sidecar - New Tool
Dr. The Daniel 🖖
- Sidecar is a Nostr signer that lives in your browser’s side panel, securely storing encrypted keys locally while enabling seamless event signing, Nostr authentication, built-in Lightning support, and note publishing across Nostr applications.
- Nymchat is a Nostr-based chat client that enables ephemeral, pseudonymous messaging and integrates with Bitchat for temporary peer-to-peer communication. This release includes a hotfix addressing incorrect unread badge counts in the channel sidebar, improving UI accuracy and notification state consistency. Although this was the latest release, there were also v3.72.516 and v3.72.515 last week.
Nostur - v1.29.1 Fabian
- Nostur is an iOS Nostr client that provides social networking features like posts, DMs, zaps, and relay-based communication with support for remote signing and Lightning integrations. In v1.29.1, the release adds QR code scanning for NWC setup, improved interaction UX (tap-and-hold post actions), more efficient DM fetching, visibility of private message relays, npub rendering in profiles, new Spanish and Indonesian translations, enhanced remote signer metadata handling, and several fixes, including multi-device sync issues, DM scrolling glitches, broken GIF integration, and an updated app icon.
- Roadstr is a decentralized road event reporting client built on the Nostr protocol, designed to let users share and receive real-time traffic and road incident data (similar to a “Waze without centralized tracking”) using signed Nostr events and geospatial tagging. This release introduces a new Metric/Imperial unit toggle for speed and distance display, adds a live value indicator for the speed threshold slider, simplifies the main UI by moving keys and settings into the toolbar overflow menu to declutter the event feed, and improves usability with larger, more accessible report-type buttons optimized for easier tapping on mobile screens.
- NoorNote is a Nostr social client for mobile and desktop focused on simple posting, zaps, and community interaction tools. In v1.1.1, it adds sidebar login/logout on mobile, improves zap UX with a sending state and double-zap protection, and introduces admin moderation features to hide, edit, or exclude authors in Community Dhikr. This was the latest, and there were also a few more releases last week.
- Noscrypt is a Nostr-specific cryptography library written in C that provides low-level cryptographic primitives used to support secure signing and encryption for Nostr applications. In v0.1.15, the release fixes a header-level issue by restoring the missing NC_CC calling convention macro definition (affecting only imports, not ABI compatibility), updates Linux CI setup to use mise-en-place for dependency management, and upgrades the Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk test dependency from 18.5.1 to 18.7.0 to improve build and test environment consistency.
RX Nostr - rx-nostr@3.7.5 kuuote
- RX-Nostr is a JavaScript/TypeScript library designed to manage high-quality, reactive communication with multiple Nostr relays, providing developers with flexible tools for handling event streams, subscriptions, and WebSocket-based relay interactions. In v3.7.5, the release fixes an issue where certain WebSocket implementations could unexpectedly throw errors, improving stability and reliability of relay communication across different runtime environments.
- Mostro Core is a Rust-based peer-to-peer library that provides the foundational networking and protocol logic for building decentralized Mostro applications and daemons. This release adds support for an optional fee_token field in CashuLockProof to improve flexible payment handling, upgrades dependencies including sqlx to v0.9 while raising the minimum supported Rust version to 1.94, and includes maintenance fixes such as correcting automated version bump handling to rely on cargo release, along with general changelog and release process updates. This was the latest, and there was also the release of v0.13.2 last week.
- Mostro CLI is a command-line client for interacting with Mostro (a peer-to-peer Bitcoin and Lightning exchange that operates over the Nostr) allowing users and operators to manage trades, messaging, and transport-layer communication directly from the terminal. This release introduces protocol and transport upgrades including Phase 2 and Phase 3 support for protocol-v2 (NIP-44 direct transport), automatic transport detection, and improved DM handling, along with multiple reliability and UX fixes such as waiting for relay connections before requests, making DM fetches transport-aware, improving Proof-of-Work detection and rejection handling, and ensuring correct admin dispute and settlement flows, plus security hardening for local mnemonic storage and dependency updates to align with the latest mostro-core foundation.
- Nostr VPN is a private mesh VPN system inspired by Tailscale, built on a FIPS-backed data plane to provide encrypted peer-to-peer connectivity and routing between nodes. In v4.0.87, the release improves mesh reliability by refreshing stale embedded FIPS direct paths using fresher tunnel data when available, ensuring that active control traffic does not mask dead payload routes and reducing unnecessary endpoint churn by preferring updated and valid routing paths for encrypted communication. This was the latest, and there was also the release of v4.0.85 last week.
Nostream is a TypeScript-based Nostr relay. In v3.0.0, the release introduces major improvements including expanded protocol support (NIP-17 encrypted DMs, NIP-44 v2, NIP-42 authentication, NIP-62 vanish events, NIP-65 relay lists, NIP-13 proof-of-work, NIP-45 event counts, and additional relay features), stronger performance and reliability (rate limiting, caching, query optimization, improved connection handling, Docker and Redis fixes), enhanced security and dependency upgrades addressing vulnerabilities, and upgraded developer tooling such as event import/export, compression support, CLI/TUI unification, benchmarking and test coverage improvements, plus new capabilities like i2p support and geohash-based filtering.
Contributed by: Ricardo Cabral, Radosvet Petrov, XD22, Mahmoud Khedr, Anshuman, Khadar vali, archief2910, khushal, Mohit Davar, Saniddhya Dubey, Chetan Reddy Kodidela, Kanishka.., Divyanshu Kumar, Priyanshu Bharti, Abhinav Rathee, Tharupahan Jayawardana, kartik, Kushagra Kinra, Yash Agarwal, FerryxFerryx349, Vikash Siwach, Sagar
Angor - v0.2.31 (Unstable Release)
dangershony TheDude, Zaza
- Angor is a decentralized protocol (in alpha stage) built on Bitcoin and Nostr, used to enable peer-to-peer funding workflows. This unstable release improves protocol stability and tooling with consolidated BCIP/NIP documentation, cross-platform distribution updates (portable Windows executables, signed macOS DMGs, and Android APK publishing to ZapStore), fixes for relay race conditions and subscription recovery, improved network switching behavior, and several validation and UX-related fixes such as funding date constraints, spinner state handling, and relay reconnection reliability.
Buzz - v0.3.35 https://github.com/block/buzz/releases/tag/v0.3.35
- Strengthens agent policy controls, and continues development of multi-tenant relay support and runtime hardening. This was the latest, and there were a lot more releases last week.
Long-Form Content Eco#
In the past two weeks, approximately 272,976 kind 30023 events have been tracked (long-form articles), with over 55% being Bitcoin related articles and 45% related to Nostr and other topics across the Nostr Ecosystem.
The digital feed is buzzing right now with a fascinating mix of hard-hitting tech debates, grassroots community building, and a little bit of football. People are actively trying to figure out how to build a free, secure digital world while dealing with the realities of the physical one. Here is a quick look at the main topics dominating the conversation.
Overcoming Barriers and Securing the Grid A massive talking point across the ecosystem is how decentralized technology can survive and thrive despite growing regulatory barriers. The community is actively exploring clever ways to route private, encrypted communications over existing public infrastructure. Security is another top priority right now. Everyone is sharing guides and best practices on how to securely set up and store Bitcoin wallets. The overarching goal is clear: keep digital money safe, private, and out of the reach of anyone who might want to censor it.
Social Media and Global Adoption There is a huge wave of excitement about Nostr's potential to completely reshape the global social media landscape. Users are comparing the daily frustrations of centralized platforms with the freedom of open protocols, and the consensus is that the shift is already happening. At the same time, the push to bring Bitcoin to the masses is stronger than ever. The timeline is packed with updates on local adoption efforts and detailed breakdowns of vibrant Bitcoin meetups happening across the UK and beyond. The focus is no longer just on holding the coin, but on actually using Bitcoin as the definitive currency of the future.
Tech Wars and Football Goals The classic tug-of-war between centralized and decentralized systems remains a daily staple on the feed. People are eagerly tracking every tech update that pushes us closer to a trustless, open-source world, while roasting the security flaws and downtimes of traditional networks.
And right in the middle of these intense debates about monetary policy and cryptographic freedom, you will find a healthy dose of World Cup highlights. Because let us be honest, what is the point of fighting for financial freedom and censorship-resistant communication if we cannot take a break to argue about the referee's offside call?
Thank you,
Federico Rivifedericorivi@nostrplebs.com
Mx12artMx12art@primal.net
Gzuuusgzuuus@contextvm.org
markusturmmarkus@einundzwanzig.space
Derek Rossderekross@nostr4.social- Alex Gleasonnpub1q3sle…d26p
Andreas Griffinandreasgriffin@nostrcheck.me
Bitcoin Events UKBitcoinEventsUK@verified-nostr.com
Maxmax@towardsliberty.com
and others, for your work. Enriching Nostr’s long-form content ecosystem is crucial.
Nostriches Global Meet Ups#
Recently, two (1) Notable Nostr and Bitcoin events have been hosted.
- Nostr London Meetup (2140) — June 2026 - Took place Wednesday, June 24, 2026 at (TBA)
Here are the upcoming Nostr and Bitcoin events that you might want to check out.
- Digital Freedom with Nostr & Bitcoin - Takes place Sunday, July 05, 2026 at Jives Coffee Lounge, 16 Colbrunn Ct, Colorado Springs, CO, United States
- Nostr London Meetup (2140) — July 2026 - Takes place Wednesday, July 29, 2026 at (TBA)
Thanks for reading! If there’s anything I missed, feel free to reach out and help improve the completeness and accuracy of my coverage.
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