American by style, European by nature
Sonar can now pay someone without opening a chat first — pick a contact, paste an address, or scan a code. No invoice to request, no claim step for them, and it works even when their phone is asleep in a pocket.
Sonar can now keep an encrypted backup of your conversations that only you can open — no cloud account, no company holding a spare key. Here is what it saves, what it deliberately does not, and the one thing you should do before you need it.
You can now pay someone without opening a chat first. Plus six rounds chasing a single iOS crash signature, Lightning that arrives while the app is dead, a pile of transcript bugs that all looked like "my message disappeared", and a full walkthrough of how encrypted account backup works — down to what deliberately is not in the archive.
Sonar's biggest release yet: one @sonarprivacy.xyz handle now starts an encrypted chat (NIP-05) and receives Lightning payments (BIP-353) from any wallet — plus a production cutover to Signal-style transcripts, the Trill nudge, and mesh/group security fixes from an adversarial review.
A nudge shakes the screen, fires a haptic, and plays a bell — but unlike MSN Messenger's notorious feature, Sonar's trill is persisted, muted, and throttled so attention never becomes harassment.
Sonar separates free-form nicknames, claimable NIP-05 handles, and Signal-style HTTPS group invites so people stay discoverable and shareable — while the account key stays the only durable identity.
We extracted Signal’s open / pin / owned-inset patterns into monorepo twin packages so Sonar can ship Signal-comparable chat performance without cloning Signal chrome — and without freezing a public Maven/SPM API before a second consumer forces semver.
Sonar is not "Signal plus Bluetooth." It is one portable Nostr identity driving two transports — Noise over a BLE mesh when you're nearby, MLS (Marmot) over Tor and open relays when you're not — folded into a single conversation without accounts or a central message vault.
On July 10 the European Parliament revived message scanning even though more MEPs voted against it than for it. If you've never heard of "Chat Control", start here — what it is, what just happened, and what actually protects a conversation.