Over the past few hours, some Keychat users may have noticed several strange messages like the one shown in the screenshot — “null invalid HMACtrack: decrypt failed” — when sending messages in a large group. Our current suspicion is that someone was spamming NIP-17 messages to the receiving address subscribed to by the large group. Those messages were received by the group, but failed during decryption, which led to the error shown in the screenshot.

We’re happy to see that users understand and appreciate the design of Keychat Mini Apps — combining web apps, public key login, and a Bitcoin wallet. BTW, we plan to add a Public Agent alongside Mini Apps later on. View quoted note →

We want the overall design of the Keychat protocol to be easy for anyone to understand, not just developers. View quoted note →

Attaching a Stamp (Client → Relay) When publishing an event to a relay that requires stamps, the client appends a Cashu token as the third element of the EVENT message array: ["EVENT", <event JSON>, "<cashu_token>"] View quoted note →

We are close to completing the development of libkeychat. libkeychat is to the Keychat protocol what libsignal is to the Signal protocol. After libkeychat is released, users should be able to quickly build their own clients using Pi agent, Claude Code, or Codex. View quoted note →

Keychat protocol is a sovereign messaging stack that integrates five layers: Identity — Nostr keypair, self-custodial with no server dependency Transport — Nostr relay network, open and self-hostable Encryption — Signal Protocol for 1-to-1 and small group chats, MLS for large group messaging Addressing — Receiving and sending addresses are decoupled from identity and continuously rotate Stamps — Cashu ecash tokens attached to messages as anonymous micropayments to relays View quoted note →

GitHub

keychat-protocol/MENTAL_MODEL.md at main · keychat-io/keychat-protocol

Protocol specifications for the Keychat ecosystem. Contribute to keychat-io/keychat-protocol development by creating an account on GitHub.

This NIP defines a mechanism for clients to attach ecash tokens (Cashu) to Nostr events as stamps — anonymous per-event micropayments to relays. Stamps solve two fundamental problems for the Nostr relay ecosystem: spam prevention and relay sustainability.

GitHub

keychat-protocol/nips/nip-estamp.md at main · keychat-io/keychat-protocol

Protocol specifications for the Keychat ecosystem. Contribute to keychat-io/keychat-protocol development by creating an account on GitHub.

Maybe agents will adopt sovereign messaging before humans do. Humans are still locked into big-tech chat apps by network effects and habit, while agents can switch to open, self-sovereign protocols much faster. Then humans may end up learning from agents—gradually moving to sovereign messaging themselves. It’s a strange inversion. View quoted note →

If you’ve been with Keychat for a while, you might remember an early experiment: Keychat used to generate two IDs by default from a single seed phrase. One was for chatting with human friends. The other was simply named “Bot” — for chatting with agents. At the time, we shipped two lightweight Q&A agents. You paid per answer in sats, and they replied. But the real idea was bigger: anyone should be able to create an agent, run it as a public service, and earn sats — in a user-sovereign messaging network where humans and agents can talk, trade, and collaborate. Conversation as a service. That vision didn’t stick back then for one simple reason: OpenClaw didn’t exist yet. Building an agent was still too hard for most users, so we paused the feature. Now OpenClaw changes the equation. It makes building and running your own agent dramatically easier. Today it’s mostly used for personal assistants — but we think public-facing agents won’t be far behind. That’s why we’re bringing this direction back with the Keychat plugin: enabling human ↔ agent chat, and also agent ↔ agent chat, all inside the same user-owned network. Close your eyes and picture it: a user-sovereign network, slowly growing — one agent, one conversation, one service at a time. View quoted note →