Nostr

The State of Nostr in 2025: Bitcoin, Freedom, and Friction

The Nostr ecosystem is evolving fast but unevenly.

It’s part social protocol, part financial layer, part freedom experiment.

And as of late 2025, we’re watching it move from pure idealism into the gritty reality of scaling, securing, and sustaining an open internet.

Here’s a recap of what’s happening with Nostr.

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1. Bitcoin Integration and the Rise of the “Zap Economy”

One of the most exciting developments is how Bitcoin payments are now natively woven into the Nostr experience.

Bitcoin Well Integration

U.S. users can now buy Bitcoin directly inside Nostr through DMs.

You connect your npub (your public key identity) to your Bitcoin Well account, send a command like /buy $21.00, and the transaction completes over Lightning, no centralized exchange dashboard, no middlemen.

The Zap Surge

Tipping (or “zapping”) is exploding. Reports estimate 792,000 zaps among half a million daily users, totaling nearly $2 million USD in value.

Zaps are micro-transactions that attach value to engagement, likes that pay.

It’s the beginning of a Bitcoin-powered creator economy, an internet where creators get paid instantly, peer-to-peer.

2. Security, Protocol Health, and Growing Pains

For all the progress, Nostr’s simplicity comes with real risks.

A number of researchers and cryptographers have started raising alarms:

Public-key substitution attacks: Because Nostr doesn’t fully authenticate keys, a compromised relay could swap a user’s public key and resign messages.
Weak DM encryption: Some clients use unauthenticated CBC encryption — opening the door to bit-flip attacks.
Link previews and DNS leaks: Metadata exposure via previews can reveal user IPs and browsing patterns.
Incomplete signature checks: Some major clients reportedly skip signature verification in certain contexts.

None of this means Nostr is doomed but it highlights a key truth:

Decentralization doesn’t guarantee security.

Freedom requires engineering discipline, not just ideology.

Developers continue to push Nostr beyond micro-posts and memes.

Zap.store and App Distribution

A growing ecosystem of developers is experimenting with decentralized app stores — publishing directly through Nostr identities, bypassing Apple and Google.

Federated Learning on Nostr

Projects like FEDSTR propose using the protocol as an open marketplace for machine-learning datasets and training coordination — censorship-resistant AI collaboration.

Diverse Use Cases

Messaging, file-sharing, streaming, collaborative writing — Nostr is gradually turning into a multipurpose transport layer for human coordination.

4. The NostrAssets Controversy

One of the loudest community debates this year has been around “NostrAssets.”

The project announced the issuance of 50,000 NOSTR tokens to support ecosystem development — including grants to Damus (the most popular Nostr client).

The Damus team called it out as a scam and brand hijack, and fiatjaf, Nostr’s creator, publicly warned users not to engage.

This episode underlines Nostr’s identity tension:

Is it a protocol, or a platform?
A movement, or a market?

Every open system faces this moment — where decentralization meets speculation.

5. How Nostr Compares to Bluesky and Others

Compared with AT Protocol / Bluesky, Nostr remains bare-bones — no moderation layer, no typed data schema, no federation rules.

That’s both its charm and its challenge.

Bluesky aims for a “moderated, federated” social web.

Nostr aims for a “minimal, unstoppable” one.

In 2025, many are drawing the analogy:

Nostr is to social media what Bitcoin was to money in 2012.
Rough, radical, but real.

6. The Road Ahead: Promise vs. Polish

The protocol is still early.

Relays struggle with cost and uptime.

User experience can be rough.

Security audits are only just beginning.

But what’s emerging is something far bigger than a social app.

Nostr is an idea — that speech, identity, and money can live outside the reach of gatekeepers.

The next phase will test whether that idea can hold up under real-world pressure — from scaling costs, from attackers, and from its own internal divisions.

Final Thought

The open-source world moves in waves.

Bitcoin took ten years to go from fringe to foundational.

Nostr may follow the same arc, slower than hype demands, but faster than governments expect.

If you’re building on freedom tech, now is the time to watch and build.

Stay Tuned

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