Nostr: Payments Leveling Up II - Beyond Bitcoin

For decades, internet payments have felt disconnected from the rest of the web.That was how the first chapter began. And for a while, it seemed like the story was simple: Bitcoin fixes this. Lightning makes it fast. Nostr makes it social. But something unexpected happened along the way. The open protocol that started as a decentralized social network, a censorship-resistant Twitter clone for Bitcoiners, began attracting attention from other communities. Communities with their own money. Their own philosophies. Their own visions of what digital cash should be. And instead of rejecting them, Nostr did what Nostr does best: it let them in.

The Bitcoin Foundation: A Quick Recap**

Before we talk about what comes next, let us briefly recap where we have been. The first wave of Nostr payments was built on Bitcoin and Lightning. lud16 gave us human-readable addresses like [alice@domain.com].¹ Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC), formalized as NIP-47, gave apps permission-ed, persistent access to wallets.² Zaps, instant Bitcoin micropayments enabled by NIP-57, became the social currency of the network.³ By late 2025, the zap economy was showing real momentum. Nostr’s active user base remains difficult to pin down with precision. Estimates vary widely depending on the methodology used. A detailed retrospective from October 2025 placed total user accounts at approximately 21,000 with daily active users around 3,700.⁴ Other analysts point to a higher figure based on “trusted pubkey” events, which number roughly 228,000 daily.⁵ Still other sources suggest daily active users in the hundreds of thousands, though these estimates are harder to verify.

What is clear is that the ecosystem, while small in absolute terms relative to mainstream platforms, punches above its weight in economic activity. Zaps, the Lightning Network micropayments attached to content, have become a defining feature of the Nostr experience. Whether measured in thousands or hundreds of thousands, the users who are active on Nostr participate in a genuinely novel economic model: direct, peer-to-peer value exchange for attention and engagement. The infrastructure matured. The culture formed. And then something shifted. Developers from other cryptocurrency communities started asking a simple question: What if we could do that too?

The Monero Convergence: Privacy Meets Protocol**

Monero was always a natural fit for Nostr, philosophically if not technically. Both communities value privacy. Both reject surveillance capitalism. Both believe that financial sovereignty and free speech are two sides of the same coin. But Monero’s privacy-first architecture made integration tricky. There was no Lightning Network equivalent. No simple zap standard. No NWC. That did not stop people from trying.

Garnet: The First Major XMR Client**

The most prominent early attempt came from Garnet, a fork of the popular Android client Amethyst with Monero tipping support.⁶ A Monero spend key is derived from the user’s Nostr private key, and the app runs its own wallet that needs to be funded before tips can be sent. Posts include monero tags that function similarly to the zap tag (see NIP-57), supporting multiple privacy levels: private, anonymous, and public transactions. For anonymous and public tips, a tip event (kind 1814) is transmitted to relays. A counter displays next to the tip icon, just like Bitcoin zaps. Garnet proved that Monero zaps were possible. But it was just the beginning.

The Expanding XMR Client Ecosystem**

moStard** emerged as another Monero-focused Nostr client, described as a “minimalist monero friendly nostrudel fork.”⁷ If an XMR address is found in a user’s bio or profile metadata, a Monero button lights up. Click it to view a QR code and select a tip amount.

Nosmero** followed, integrating both Monero and Bitcoin Lightning zap functionality.⁸ It is open source, built with vanilla JavaScript, and supports various NIPs. A Tor address is also available.

nerostr** took a different approach entirely: a Nostr paid relay, paid for with Monero.⁹ Users enter their pubkey and pay a small Monero fee. The strfry relay uses the nerostr-auth plugin to check if the pubkey is whitelisted.

Monstr, a “Svelte + Vite Nostr client,” offers both Bitcoin Lightning zaps and Monero “Ember” tipping.¹⁰

PosterChan: A New Client on the Scene**

A newer entrant worth watching is poster.place, by @verita84 which provides a Nostr relay with a focus on free speech and accessibility.¹¹ The platform offers both TOR and Clearnet access and provides Lightning wallet addresses at wallet.poster.place. The project’s GitHub describes it as “a web app for exploring the nostr protocol.” While Monero integration is not yet confirmed in available documentation, the team’s privacy focus suggests it could be a natural next step.

The Standardization Push**

The real breakthrough came when developers started formalizing the integration. A NIP proposal for static payment addresses (Pull Request #1934) introduced a dedicated event kind (10780) with a simple three-element tag structure: ["asset", "network", "address"].¹² The specification explicitly supports BTC, LBTC (Liquid Bitcoin), ETH, XMR, and USDT across multiple networks: Bitcoin, Lightning, Liquid, Ethereum, Tron, and Monero.

Collaborators on the PR including @Laeserin && @greenart7c3 , the Garnet maintainer, signaling cross-pollination between the Bitcoin and Monero development communities. What emerged was a layered Monero ecosystem on Nostr.

Bitcoin Cash: The Low-Fee Social Money**

If Monero brought privacy to Nostr payments, Bitcoin Cash brought something else: microtransactions that actually make sense. BCH’s low fees and fast confirmation times make it ideal for the kind of high-frequency, low-value social payments that Nostr zaps enable. The BCH community, with its history of building social platforms like memo.cash, understood the value of integrating with Nostr almost immediately.

BCHNostr: A Social Network on BCH**

BCHNostr, available at bchnostr.com , by @BCH Reply Guy is a decentralized social platform that combines the Nostr protocol with Bitcoin Cash payments.¹³ Users can send and receive native BCH tips directly inside the app. A live dashboard called BCHNostr Pulse lets anyone see what is happening on the BCHNostr relay in real time: live notes, active users, network activity, charts, and more.

Wallet Integration: Paytaca, Cashonize, and 00 Wallet**

The BCH ecosystem took a wallet-first approach to Nostr integration.

Paytaca, a Bitcoin Cash wallet, announced it would bring end-to-end encrypted chat powered by Nostr to its next version.¹⁴ The team’s stated goal: “combine reliable money with secure communication.”

Cashonize v0.9.0 upgraded its CashConnect protocol to operate over Nostr, rebranded as WizardConnect.¹⁵ This enables unified sessions and dApp connectivity without the maze of approvals and pairing methods that plague traditional crypto wallets.

Perhaps most ambitious is 00 Wallet, a browser-native privacy wallet for Bitcoin Cash.¹⁶ According to its GitHub repository, features include:

• HD Wallet: BIP44 multi-chain supporting BCH, BTC, ETH, XMR, USDT, USDC

• Stealth Payments: Beaconless ECDH stealth addresses on BCH where outputs are indistinguishable from standard P2PKH

• P2P CashFusion: CoinJoin coordinated over Nostr with gift-wrapped messages (NIP-59)

• Onion Payments: Multi-hop HTLC contracts routed over Nostr

• Atomic Swaps: On-chain HTLC swaps for BCH to BTC and BCH to XMR

• Identity: Sovereign DID using Nostr keypair as identity

The bch-nostr npm library provides utility functions for BCH-Nostr interactions.

The Standardization Effort**

The BCH community recognized early that interoperability required standards. A proposal to standardize Nostr event kinds for BCH cross-wallet interoperability was published on Bitcoin Cash Research, defining event kinds for:¹⁷

• Atomic swaps (BCH to BTC: kinds 4240-4243; BCH to XMR: kinds 4250-4256)

• CashFusion coordination (kinds 22222-22224)

• Recurring payments (kinds 22240-22241)

• Onion routing (kinds 22230-22232)

Crucially, the proposal specifies that any BIP39 seed phrase automatically has a deterministic Nostr identity, meaning no extra keys to manage. Wallets derive their Nostr identity from the BIP44 BCH path: m/44'/145'/0'/2/0.

The Emerging Multi-Currency Landscape**

What we are witnessing is the birth of a multi-currency Nostr economy. Bitcoin remains the anchor, the settlement layer, the store of value, the philosophical foundation. Lightning provides instant micropayments. But alongside them:

• Monero offers privacy-first transactions for users who value financial confidentiality above all else

• Bitcoin Cash provides low-fee microtransactions that make high-frequency social payments economically viable

• Liquid (LBTC) would bring federated sidechain capabilities

• Ethereum and USDT would connect Nostr to the broader crypto ecosystem

The NIP-10780 static payment address standard envisions exactly this future: multiple assets, multiple networks, all resolvable through a single Nostr identity.

The Architecture of Multi-Currency Nostr**

What makes all of this possible is not any single NIP or client. It is the underlying architecture of Nostr itself. Nostr’s core innovation is portable identity. Your npub is not tied to any specific platform, service, or currency. It is just a public key. What you attach to it is up to you. This means the same identity can:

• Receive Lightning zaps via lud16

• Display a Monero address for private donations

• Accept BCH tips through CashConnect

• Hold Ethereum or USDT addresses for broader crypto compatibility

The identity does not change. The payment rails do.

Relays as Coordination Layer**

Nostr relays do not care what currency you are using. They just pass events. This makes them ideal coordination infrastructure for atomic swap offers, CoinJoin coordination, payment channel state updates, and encrypted payment requests.

The 00 Wallet architecture demonstrates this: privacy primitives such as stealth payments, CoinJoin, onion routing, and atomic swaps are coordinated peer-to-peer over Nostr.

The Wallet as a Node**

With NWC (NIP-47) and multi-currency support, wallets are evolving from simple key management tools into full nodes in a decentralized financial network. They listen for payment requests, generate invoices across multiple currencies, coordinate with other wallets over Nostr, and execute complex transactions.

The wallet is no longer a separate application. It is an integrated part of the Nostr experience.

The Security Challenge Intensifies**

The first article warned about the dangers of attaching economic weight to Nostr identities. With multi-currency support, those dangers multiply.

An nsec compromise now threatens not just Bitcoin and Lightning balances, but potentially Monero funds, BCH balances, Ethereum and USDT holdings, atomic swap positions, and reputation across multiple communities.

Key management, including hardware isolation, remote signing, ephemeral session keys, and multi-key identity structures, becomes even more critical.¹⁸

The BCH community’s approach, deriving Nostr identity deterministically from the BIP39 seed phrase, offers one model. Hardware signer support through NIP-46 provides another. But the ecosystem still lacks a unified, user-friendly solution for managing multi-currency keys securely.

This is the next frontier.

The Bigger Picture: Web3 Convergence

What is happening with Nostr payments is a microcosm of something larger. For years, Web3 has been a fragmented collection of different blockchains, different wallets, different identities, different communities.

Nostr is emerging as a coordination layer that can tie these fragmented ecosystems together. It does not dominate them; that is not the goal. But its open architecture makes it uniquely suited to serve as common ground where different monetary traditions can interoperate.

Why This Matters for Web3 Adoption**

One common Web3 onboarding experience looks something like this:

1. Create a wallet

2. Write down a seed phrase

3. Figure out which network to use

4. Bridge assets

5. Connect to a dApp

6. Pray it works

It is a frustrating sequence that has kept countless potential users on the sidelines. The complexity compounds with each new network or token. What starts as a simple desire to participate becomes a gauntlet of technical decisions and security tradeoffs.

Nostr offers an alternative path:

1. Generate a keypair or use your existing one

2. Attach addresses for whatever currencies you use

3. Interact with any client, any relay, any currency

Identity-first, currency-agnostic. It could be a much more natural path toward mainstream adoption of decentralized technology.

The Communities Are Already Converging

The evidence is already visible:

• Bitcoin developers are collaborating with Monero developers on NIP standards (Pull Request #1934)

• BCH wallet teams are building Nostr chat into their apps

• Cross-chain atomic swaps are being standardized through Nostr event kinds

• Multi-currency wallets like 00 Wallet support Nostr alongside multiple blockchain networks

The walls between communities are breaking down. Not because anyone forced them to, but because open protocols allow voluntary cooperation.

The Hope for Broader Adoption : What does this mean for the future?

For users: One identity. Many currencies. Choose what works for you. Bitcoin for savings, Lightning for speed, Monero for privacy, BCH for microtransactions. All accessible through the same profile, the same clients, the same relays.

For developers: One protocol. Many integrations. Build once, reach users across the entire crypto ecosystem. No need to pick a winning chain.

For the ecosystem: Open standards that let communities experiment, compete, and collaborate. No platform risk. No vendor lock-in. Just keys, relays, clients, and the freedom to build.

Conclusion: The Internet Is Becoming Economically Native**

The first article ended with a declaration: “For the first time in a very long time, the internet feels like it is rediscovering something it lost: Native value exchange between people.” That was true then. It is even truer now.

But the story has expanded. It is no longer just about Bitcoiners tipping each other. It is about multiple monetary traditions finding common ground on a single, open protocol. It is about privacy advocates and low-fee enthusiasts and sound-money maximalists all building on the same infrastructure. It is about the internet becoming economically native, not for one community, but for anyone who chooses to participate. Is it early? Absolutely. Messy? Definitely. Risky? Without question. But important? Very.

Because what we are watching is the emergence of something genuinely new: an open, permissionless, multi-currency financial layer for the internet. No gatekeepers. No platform monopolies. Just identities, relays, and the freedom to transact in whatever money you choose. We are not there yet. The infrastructure is still being built. The standards are still being written. The security models are still being tested. But the direction is clear, and the momentum is real. That is not just payments leveling up. That is the internet leveling up.

Footnotes