Team BitcoinVN has been a friend and supporter of the Nostr ecosystem since its early days (you can follow us here if you wish), recognizing the need for a social networking protocol that does not rely on the goodwill of platform owners or opaque algorithms deciding which content to promote and which to suppress.
While different Nostr frontends may still choose to elevate or downrank certain content, your posts and social graph are not “owned” by any single corporation. You can opt out, build your own relay, and connect with your own friends, social circles and communities – allowing you to share content with one another without a centralized actor being able to remove you and your network at the click of a button.
While Nostr is still young, it has already attracted plenty of excited engineering talent from the Bitcoin space and from the wider crowd that values decentralization and censorship resistance – a topic which, in this day and age, seems to be gaining more relevance and urgency by the day.
As such, Nostr developers and builders still have a wide-open playground ahead of them, with plenty of work to do in making Nostr more useful and easier to access for a wider audience.
Achieving a critical mass of high-quality users is essential if Nostr is to become a tool to which people voluntarily return again and again. That requires interesting people with interesting content to share, strong communities, and useful features that allow users to do things with less friction – and, ideally, in a better way than before.
Removing friction is also part of the mission that defines Nostr Gold, a new service which makes it easier for Nostr users to move value across different rails.
What is Nostr Gold?
Nostr Gold is a new project developed by Stacksats, a long-time Nostr infrastructure builder and former operator of Australia’s largest Nostr relay. The service is designed to reduce friction for users and developers by making it easier to move value between Bitcoin, Lightning, Monero, stablecoins and other digital assets directly within the Nostr ecosystem. Compatible Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) wallets can be linked to the platform, enabling seamless swaps without requiring users to leave their preferred Nostr applications.
For example, a user could convert a Lightning payment into Monero or stablecoins directly from within a compatible Nostr application.
The service is expected to be particularly useful for developers building Nostr-native tools, bots and automation services.
Nostr Gold operates on a no-KYC basis, allowing users to access the service without unnecessarily exposing sensitive personal data to theft, leaks or exploitation.
Integrate with BitcoinVN Swap API
Nostr Gold has chosen the BitcoinVN Swap API as its integration partner, allowing users to move between Bitcoin, Monero and stablecoins through one of Southeast Asia’s longest-running cryptocurrency exchange infrastructures. BitcoinVN has been operating since 2014 and runs the majority of its liquidity and core infrastructure in-house, reducing third-party dependencies and supporting fast settlement times.
Developers interested in integrating swap functionality into their own applications can review the API documentation here.
Connect with BitcoinVN Lightning Nodes
If you like what either we or Nostr Gold are building and would like to contribute to the reliability and resilience of the wider Lightning ecosystem – while perhaps earning a few routing Sats along the way – you can also connect directly to BitcoinVN-operated Lightning routing nodes.
BitcoinVN22 (TOR routing node)
BitcoinVN26 (Clearnet routing node)
For operators running their own Lightning nodes, establishing a direct channel can provide lower payment costs, improved reliability and – perhaps most importantly – additional privacy benefits when interacting with your (hopefully 🙂 ) favourite instant swap service.
