Free speech on the internet depends on open, uncensorable communication infrastructure that keeps users in control. OpenSats launched The Nostr Fund in 2023 to support the nostr ecosystem building this infrastructure, and since then we have funded work on protocol development, developer tooling, relays, and a wide range of clients.

Nostr is a simple, open protocol for publishing and receiving signed messages, relayed by independent servers, not a single platform. The design is intentionally minimal: clients handle keys and signatures, and relays store and forward events. Anyone can run a client or a relay, and people are free to move between them without abandoning their identity or social graph. In his original 2019 white paper introducing nostr, fiatjaf described it as:

The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global 'social' network once and for all.

—fiatjaf

Nostr shifts power toward users. A nostr identity is a keypair, not an account on a single site. If one client blocks or censors someone, removes features, or changes in ways they cannot accept, the user signs in to another client with the same keys. Their history, relationships, and audience move with them; they are not trapped inside any one application.

The same simple protocol that routes nostr posts can also route bitcoin between users via Lightning zaps. Many clients treat zaps as a native social action, and to date, statistics show users have sent millions of zaps, totaling more than 2.6 billion sats, directly to one another over nostr.

This impact report focuses on seven nostr clients with different approaches to product design and a shared commitment to openness, interoperability, and user sovereignty. Their progress shows how donor support translates into concrete improvements for people who rely on nostr for communication, coordination, and value transfer.

The seven clients highlighted in this report are:

• Amethyst
• Coracle
• Damus
• Jumble
• NoStrudel
• Nostur
• Zap.stream

Let's take a closer look at how each of these clients has evolved over the past year and how donor funding supported their work.

...read more at opensats.org