Another quarter, another report. Let's dive into what i've worked on these past few months. Some technical, some social. TollGate has made its way to what seems exponential growth, seeing people out of nowhere pop up and test/contribute. A load of research and ideation about more out-there ideas like alternative to IP addresses.
TollGate#
Conferences#
This quarter was one filled with visits to conferences, sharing the idea and testing + demonstrating TollGate in the wild.
- Zitadelle - Wasserburg Heldrungen,
24.07.2025 - 27.07.2025 - BTC++ Riga - Riga,
07.08.2025 - 08.08.2025 - Baltic Honey Badger - Riga,
09.08.2025 - 10.08.2025 - Cashu Hackday - Berlin,
1.10.2025 - BTC++ Berlin - Berlin,
02.10.2025 - 04.10.2025 - Nostr Hackday - Berlin,
5.10.2025
At Zitadelle, BTC++ (riga) and Baltic Honeybadger we ran workshops and presentations.
Community building#
In the last months we've noticed that our efforts of putting TollGate out there are starting to bear fruits. At Zitadelle we met the first people that had 'heard about' TollGate somewhere, and by the time we reached BTC++ it seemed that everyone had at least heard about the project once.
Software#
We hit some stability/testing issues in the last months with our latest release. BUT, we finally tagged our v0.2.0 release bringing the router-to-router payments out for people to test.
Sovereign Engineering (SEC-05)#
I spent another 6 weeks working with a bunch of amazing Nostr devs working on ideas around Nostr and Bitcoin/cashu. A lot of attention this cohort went out to ideas around the lower levels of our tech stacks. Meaning hosting and networking. Can we build a permissionless, easy-to-use tech stack.
Nostr Networking#
NoDNS#
One such idea was NoDNS. I got tipped about Amperstrand's certificate-over-nostr attempt and it immediately clicked what had been the issue with my earlier attempts of introd
ds (NIP-37 proposal) which came out of Epoxy.
I realised I was trying to combine the protocol (http/wss/etc) and underlying network with what is effectively just a DNS A record. Once I threw out the idea of marrying the protocol and rewrote the spec to contain just DNS records it made a lot more sense.
I wrote a DNS server implementation that resolves records from nostr and stores certificates so that the OS trusts the npub. I included a CLI tool to easily create the record events.
I believe we can achieve large-scale secure HTTPS connections with no central authority involved.
FIPS#
An idea me and some peers have been working on for the last 6 months is FIPS, routing of network traffic using nostr pubkeys instead of IP addresses. The implementation would be software running on Layer 2 of the network stack, so it would NOT exclusively be an overlay network like TOR/I2P are.
We kept the idea relatively quiet as we've been running the the idea by some knowledgable people first. It seems now though that the idea is not completely bullocks. Meaning I want to explore the idea further and want to start publishing the idea/vision and some proof of concepts.
A first exploratory project during Sovereign Engineering can be found here.
TollGate app -> Wally#
I've been wanting to get back to the tollgate app for auto-pay that I worked on earlier this year. I wanted to see if i could re-do it with the help of LLM's and cashu CDK, which both weren't available at that time.
Something that's been bothering many of us at SovEng has been the requirement to build an entire cashu wallet into any app that want to spend some ecash. We came up with the idea of Wally, a native tray item wallet with 'cashu wallet connect'. All local.
For me it's the perfect excuse to get a tollgate auto-pay feature into many hands as possible AND i don't have to develop an entire wallet for just this use-case.
Receipt.Cash#
- I reversed the payment flow of the app, making it safer to use. The person that scanned the receipt is now processing the money
- Applied it in a hackathon project at Baltic Honeybadger
- Renamed to SugarDaddy.Cash
Plans Q4
TollGate#
I'll focus the next quarter on stability/reliablility of the features we've released in v0.2.0. I'll continue to go to conferences and meetups to demo and share the vision of TollGate.
Community and Conferences#
The only large conference currently planned is in Amsterdam. I expect to join some meetups as well to share about TollGate.
Details:
- Bitcoin Amsterdam - Sugar Factory,
13.11.2025 - 14.11.2025
Software#
Because it's a bit slower with regards to conferences, that will leave some more time to work on the TollGate package. Hashing out bugs, improve usability and handle user feedback.
FIPS#
I will continue to explore the idea of routing traffic by pubkey on r layer 2 (same layer as IP) and think that the idea is at a point where I can start sharing more about it publicly.
Receipt.Cash#
- Continue to develop this on the side. Mainly stability & UX.
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