• What it can do
• Sovereign by default, capable on demand
• Budget caps it can’t argue with
• Auditable
• Where v0.2 stands
• Try it
• Where to get it

Two weeks ago I shipped five MCP servers — a Lightning wallet, a NOSTR client, a marketplace publisher, a hub admin, and a paywall sidecar. People kept asking what they were for. This is the answer.

nostr-merchant is a local-first Python agent built to run a business on NOSTR. Not a chatbot with a wallet bolted on — an agent that holds the whole merchant toolkit and the guardrails to use it safely: it reads its Lightning balance and lists incoming sats, publishes notes and listings, runs a Shopstr storefront, sends and reads encrypted DMs, and pays for the paid tools it needs to finish a job — all under sats budget caps it cannot exceed.

§What it can do

Give it a job. It has 37 tools across the five servers and picks what it needs:

• check the wallet, list incoming sats, decode invoices (nwc-mcp)
• publish notes, listings, and profile updates; resolve profiles and NIP-05; send and read encrypted DMs (nostr-ops-mcp)
• create and update stalls and products on a Shopstr storefront (marketplace-mcp)
• pay paywalled MCP tools over NWC and redeem the result (paywall-mcp)

Then it reports back with a ## Receipts section naming every paid tool it called. No black box.

§Sovereign by default, capable on demand

Point NOSTR_MERCHANT_MODEL at a local Ollama model and nothing phones home, nothing needs a phone number — your wallet, your keys, your inference, your box. Need more capability for a hard task? The same env var switches to anthropic:… or openai:…. Only the inference location changes; the wallet and nsec stay local, which is exactly where the trust boundary belongs.

(Honest note: a 37-tool agent loop on a small local model wants a GPU. On modest hardware, run a hosted model for the reasoning and keep the wallet + keys local.)

§Budget caps it can’t argue with

An agent with a pay_invoice tool is a liability without limits. Three caps sit on top of nwc-mcp’s own wallet caps:

• per-task — one job can spend at most N sats
• per-day — a rolling 24h ceiling across all jobs
• per-tool price — refuse any single paid tool over a threshold, whatever the remaining budget

Every tool call routes through agent-layer middleware: allowlist → read-only refusal of priced tools → forward → on payment_required, enforce price-cap + budget-cap → on payment, record the spend → audit at every step. A tool that asks more than your cap gets refused, not paid. AGENT_READ_ONLY=true kills all spend in one flag.

§Auditable

Every tool call, LLM call, and budget block is one NDJSON line — same shape as the servers’ logs. nostr-merchant audit prints it. You verify what your merchant did from the log, not from the model’s summary.

§Where v0.2 stands

This release ships the complete toolkit, the safety stack, and a working self-paying loop as proof the agent-pays-for-tools path holds end to end. Directing it at your own merchant workflows — publish this product, answer that buyer, post the launch — is what it’s built for. Unattended, scheduled storefront-tending is the road ahead; this is the foundation it runs on.

§Try it

pipx install nostr-merchant      # or: uvx --from nostr-merchant nostr-merchant --help
nostr-merchant doctor            # ping every MCP server
nostr-merchant ask "What's my Lightning wallet balance?"

CLI: ask · doctor · budget · audit · config-print · version. Built on pydantic-ai (no LangChain). 71 tests, ruff + mypy –strict clean. MIT.

§Where to get it

Free on PyPI. The Shopstr listing (100k sats) bundles the full setup walkthrough — wiring all five servers + your NWC sub-wallet + model backend — plus a direct support DM with me. The five MCP servers it drives are 50k each on the same storefront, or npx -y on npm.

Built for people who want their commerce sovereign, capped, and audited. Zap if you ship something with it.

— LLMOps.Pro · npub1hdg932jvwc3jdvkqywgqv0ue4nn60exrf92asy8mtazt3hjg7d2s2yw0nw · sovereigncitizens@getalby.com