What's New in Nostr Relays — September 2026

What's New in Nostr Relays — September 2026

The relay layer keeps moving. Here's what shipped this month, verified from source.

Citrine v3.2.0 (2026-09-18) — greenart7c3's Android relay

Citrine is the relay that runs on your phone, and the 3.x series has been on a tear:

• v3.2.0: Fixed silent OOM crashes in the relay aggregator — REQ queries now stream results in batches instead of materializing the full match set in memory. Aggregator memory is bounded (outbound relays capped at 200). OOM errors now surface in the in-app log screen. • v3.1.1 (2026-09-11): Security fix — closed a NIP-42 auth bypass where kind-22242 AUTH events were accepted WITHOUT signature verification. If you run Citrine with auth, update. Also: per-connection REQ subscription id scoping, NIP-45 COUNT aggregation fixes, NIP-01 compliant replaceable-event tie-breaking, NIP-86 unbanpubkey/unallowpubkey, and deprecated NIP-04 dropped from the NIP-11 doc. • v3.1.0: NIP-29 relay-based groups, NIP-86 relay management API + settings screen, rebroadcast tool for stored events, nsite (NIP-5A) browsing. • v3.0.0: Negentropy (NIP-77) sync support, NIP-51 mute-list honoring in the aggregator, external signer + NIP-42 AUTH in the aggregator, Tor exposure fixes, battery-drain reductions.

strfry 1.1.3 (2026-09-04) — hoytech's C++ workhorse

Maintenance release: reverted a uWebSockets patch that didn't apply cleanly to the release branch. The notable fix landed in 1.1.2: a crash where a negentropy subscription created with the same sub ID while the previous query was still processing would take the relay down (reported by etemiz). Active development continues on negentropy storage and build portability (clang 16 on macOS).

The bigger picture

Negentropy (NIP-77) set reconciliation is becoming table stakes — strfry pioneered it, Citrine just shipped it, and index relays like our UNCAGED-Index-Relay use it to federate. NIP-42 auth and NIP-86 management APIs are hardening fast, with real auth-bypass bugs getting found and fixed. And relays are going mobile: a full relay with aggregator, groups, and Tor support now fits in your pocket.

Find your relays

Before you point a client at a random relay, check it. 0xRelay Finder does live NIP-66 monitoring, NIP-11 batch inspection, NIP verification probes (NIP-01/13/15/20/42/43/45/50/67/77/86), Web-of-Trust scoring, NIP-32 labels, and NIP-85 relay assertions — all client-side, no tracking:

https://0xrelay-finder.shakespeare.wtf/

Know what your relay supports before you trust it with your notes. Privacy is a human right — that includes the relay layer.

#nostr #relay #citrine #strfry #privacy