Nostr Assets Protocol's donation to Damus was punched in the face, causing controversy over its legitimacy

Li Kui and Li Ge are foolish and indistinguishable.

Author | Loopy

Tonight,DamusAn official X post once again drew the community's attention to the name Nostr, and the dispute over the Nostr brand name intensified.

Damus, a decentralized social networking app built on the Nostr network, believes that Nostr Assets Protocol donations are a scam. They wrote, “This is a scam and we don't accept that. (The other party) is trying to legitimize itself by using the Nostr name in order to trick people. We are currently looking for grant funding, but not through token scams. Please send your junk coins elsewhere.”

This morning, Nostr Assets Protocol announced that it has donated approximately $200,000 worth of NOSTR tokens to the Damus team.

Nostr Assets Protocol and Nostr, what are the complicated love-hate feuds? What other disputes and quarrels have arisen between the two?

Nostr: Jack Dorsey's Strong Social Agreement

As early as February of this year, the Lightning Network-based Nostr protocol was once popular throughout the crypto world. Jack Dorsey's platform made this application-layer innovation quickly become a star project in the crypto world. Previously, the Daily Planet Daily also wrote an article introducing this ecology.

Jack Dorsey's Nostr address is still prominently displayed on Jack Dorsey's X profile.

At the time, although the Nostr protocol also belonged to the BTC ecosystem, the term had no connection with any token, had nothing to do with financial use cases such as DeFi, but was a pure social agreement.

Nostr's full name is “Notes and Other Stuff Delivered by Relays,” which literally translates as “notes and other content transmitted by a repeater.” According to the Github code update records, this project started in November 2020. The agreement aims to create the easiest open protocol for a global social network that resists censorship.

Nostr is the protocol layer for social applications. The protocol is fully decentralized and allows any application to freely access. As a result, Nostr doesn't even provide users with C-side products that can be directly operated, but instead focuses on the necessary infrastructure to enable social networking at the protocol layer. The ability to commercialize, on the other hand, is provided by third-party apps. Furthermore, the social behavior of users across different apps is interchangeable.

On top of the Nostr agreement, the best-known and most active app is Damus, the initiator of today's controversy.

Simply put, Damus is a decentralized X (originally Twitter). And the only one of them linked to “coins” is probably only one — supporting Bitcoin tipping based on the Lightning Network.

Connecting to the Lightning Network is Jack Dorsey's idea for a long time. By building Lightning Network into social protocols, people can use cryptocurrency to express their likes more directly, thereby replacing the currently more common “Like” button, and Lightning Network's low rates also make the network cost of rewards so low that they can almost be ignored.

Nostr Assets Protocol: Innovation or Legion?

Back to the other protagonist of this controversy, Nostr Assets Protocol. The Nostr Assets Protocol is a new open source protocol designed to bring Taproot assets and native Bitcoin payments to the Nostr ecosystem.

The Nostr Assets Protocol allows users to use a Nostr account as a wallet, the public key becomes the wallet address, and the private key has the authority to manage content events and currency events. The agreement allows interaction with other payment protocols such as Lightning Network and Taproot assets.

According to GitHub, the first code submission for this agreement came in July of this year.

In terms of time, there is no doubt that its creation date is far behind the birth of the Nostr social protocol. Even in February, when Nostr “became popular in the crypto world,” it's still about half a year behind.

An interesting phenomenon is that although the code was only created in July, this project was launched on GitHub in February of this year.

In December of this year, Nostr Assets Protocol announced its first Fair Mint (NOSTR). With the popularity of the Bitcoin ecosystem, Nostr Assets Protocol has also achieved good data.

On December 18, Nostr Assets Protocol's first Fair Mint raffle officially began. As the previous dozens of draws were carried out, participating users discovered that individual lottery pools with extremely high “lucky” levels had appeared. They only needed to invest about 3,000 Raffle Tokens (Treat and Trick, hereinafter referred to as Double T) to get the 2160 NOSTR jackpot. Currently, NOSTR's OTC price has reached more than 4 U/ sheet, which is close to a no-cost profit of 10,000 US dollars.

What exactly are the two sides arguing about?

Anyone with a clear eye can see that the social protocol Nostr and Nostr Assets Protocol are not related except that the names are spelled the same. Since that is the case, the core of this debate is obvious — is Nostr Assets Protocol maliciously “colluding”?

This isn't the first time a fight between the two sides has broken out. As early as the beginning of this month, the two sides had a confrontation.

On the evening of December 3, Fiatjaf (@fiatjaf), founder of the Nostr Protocol, posted a dynamic statement in Chinese on the X platform, “Nostr Assets Protocol is a fully managed service under the name Nostr and is a type of related fraud.”

So far, this statement is still at the top of Fiatjaf's X platform.

Nostr Assets Protocol was already responding back then, and they stated that their main goal was “to enable builders to create business use cases on the Lightning Network and Nostr.” As for the escrow issue, it means that the Nostr Assets Protocol is a “escrow solution” and should not be misunderstood as a fraud. “Many wallets provide users with custodial wallets to use the Lightning Network, and they are critical to providing users with excellent UI/UX.”

Although Nostr Assets Protocol has no connection to Nostr's development team, Nostr Assets Protocol “used Nostr, Taproot Assets, and Lightning in its construction, making it relevant to Nostr.”

Since this dispute, Nostr Assets Protocol has been trying to establish a partnership with the Nostr team. They publicly stated on the X platform, “Nostr is a decentralized, open source, and censorship-resistant relay network that anyone can build on. We want to connect with the Nostr development team to improve collaboration and nurture a better Nostr ecosystem.”

However, the new round of quarrels that broke out today is only a continuation of the previous conflict.

Earlier today, Nostr Assets Protocol announced that it had donated approximately $200,000 worth of NOSTR tokens to the Damus team.

They wrote, “As part of our commitment to the Nostr ecosystem, donations are intended to promote growth and development within the Nostr ecosystem.” He also posted a screenshot of his transfer. 50,000 NOSTR tokens have been transferred to CEO Damus's address.

Nostr Assets Protocol said, “Damus embodies innovation and community spirit. Today we learned that Damus funding is running out. We sincerely hope to do what we can to help them with their mission. Damus is the app that brought us into the world of Nostr, and we really appreciate the innovation and leadership of the Damus team. Damus played a critical role in the development of the Nostr ecosystem, driving DAU's rapid growth of 500,000 for the first time. This donation is intended to provide Damus with the resources he needs to continue to push the boundaries and reach higher heights within the Nostr ecosystem!”

The response to this donation was very interesting. “This is a scam. Please send your junk coins elsewhere.”

Needless to say, the Damus team believes the Nostr Assets Protocol is an affinity scam using the Nostr name to mislead and deceive people.

As the Bitcoin ecosystem became more popular, the social protocol Nostr, an established protocol ecosystem, gradually became awkward — a highly emotional protocol product that can improve the application layer and bring us use cases, actually has no coins.

And this unique situation also makes it easier for his voice and image to be overshadowed by rapidly rising crypto products with “coins.”

This dispute is more than just a “complicated” brand dispute. Furthermore, this has sparked widespread discussions on brand ownership, the legality of agreements, and the responsibility and transparency of decentralized products in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space. It also reflects the crypto community's persistence and prudence towards the idea of decentralization.

The controversy revealed a range of complex ownership challenges in the emerging crypto community. Many community members supported Damus's position, while others questioned Nostr Assets Protocol's intentions and approach. And as a reader, which side of this debate are you on?