Li Kui and Li Gui can’t tell the difference.
Written by: Loopy, Odaily Planet Daily
This evening, a post on Damus’ official
Damus, a decentralized social application built on the Nostr network, believes that donations from the Nostr Assets Protocol are a scam. They wrote, “This is a scam and we don’t accept that. [The other party] is trying to use the Nostr name to legitimize themselves in order to defraud people. We are currently looking for grant funding, but not through a token scam. way. Please send your spam 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 is the complicated love-hate relationship? What disputes and quarrels occurred between the two?
Nostr: The social protocol championed by Jack Dorsey
As early as February this year, the Nostr protocol based on the Lightning Network once became popular in the entire encryption world. Jack Dorsey’s platform quickly made this application layer innovation a star project in the crypto world. Odaily Planet Daily has also written an article introducing this ecology before.
On Jack Dorsey’s X profile, Jack’s Nostr address is still prominently displayed.
At that time, although the Nostr protocol also belonged to the BTC ecosystem, the term had not yet been associated with any token, and had nothing to do with financial use cases such as DeFi. It was a purely social protocol.
The full name of Nostr is “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”, which literally translates to “notes and other content transmitted by relays”. Github code update records show that this project was launched in November 2020. The protocol aims to be the simplest open protocol to create a censorship-resistant global social network.
As the protocol layer of social applications, Nostr is fully decentralized and allows free access by any App. Therefore, Nostr does not even provide users with C-side products that can be directly operated, but focuses on the necessary infrastructure to achieve socialization at the protocol layer. The productization capability is provided by third-party apps. And the social behaviors of users across different Apps are interoperable.
On top of the Nostr protocol, the most well-known and active App is Damus, the initiator of today’s debate.
Simply put, Damus is a decentralized X (original Twitter). The only thing related to “coins” is probably one thing - support for Bitcoin tipping based on the Lightning Network.
Jack Dorsey has always had the idea of connecting to the Lightning Network for payment. By building the Lightning Network into social protocols, people can use cryptocurrency to express their likes more directly, thereby replacing the more common “Like” button. The low fees of the Lightning Network also make the network cost of tipping so low that it is almost negligible.
Nostr Assets Protocol: Innovation or Li Gui?
Back to the other protagonist of this controversy, Nostr Assets Protocol. Nostr Assets Protocol is a new open source protocol designed to bring Taproot assets and native Bitcoin payments to the Nostr ecosystem.
Nostr Assets Protocol allows users to use Nostr accounts as wallets, whose public key becomes the wallet address, and the private key has the authority to manage content events and currency events. The protocol allows interaction with other payment protocols such as the Lightning Network and Taproot assets.
Github shows that the first code submission of this protocol came from July this year.
From a time perspective, there is no doubt that its creation date lags far behind the birth of the Nostr social protocol. Even based on February, when Nostr became popular in the crypto world, it was still about half a year behind.
An interesting phenomenon is that although the code has only been created since July, the project was born on github in February 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 lottery officially began. As the first dozens of draws progressed, participating users discovered that individual draw pools with extremely high “luckiness” had emerged. By investing only about 3,000 draw tokens (Treat and Trick, hereinafter referred to as double T), they could obtain 2,160 jackpot of NOSTR. The current OTC price of NOSTR has reached more than 4 U/unit, which is close to a cost-free profit of US$10,000.
What are the two sides arguing about?
I believe anyone with a discerning eye has noticed that social protocol Nostr and Nostr Assets Protocol are not related in any way except for the same spelling of their names. In this case, the core of this controversy is obvious-is Nostr Assets Protocol maliciously “colliding with porcelain”?
This is not the first time a dispute has erupted between the two parties. As early as the beginning of this month, the two sides had a confrontation.
On the evening of December 3, Fiatjaf (@fiatjaf), the founder of the Nostr Protocol, published an update in Chinese on the
To this day, this statement remains at the top of Fiatjaf’s X platform.
Nostr Assets Protocol responded at that time, stating that their main goal was to “enable builders to create business use cases on the Lightning Network and Nostr.” As for the issue of custody, it said that Nostr Assets Protocol is a “custody solution” and should not be misunderstood as a fraud. “Many wallets provide users with managed wallets to use the Lightning Network, and they are critical to providing users with excellent UI/UX.”
Although Nostr Assets Protocol is not related to Nostr’s development team, Nostr Assets Protocol still “utilizes Nostr, Taproot Assets and Lightning in its construction, making it related to Nostr.”
Since this dispute, Nostr Assets Protocol has been trying to establish a cooperative relationship with the Nostr team. They publicly stated on the Nostr ecosystem."
The new round of quarrels that broke out today is just a continuation of previous conflicts.
Earlier today, Nostr Assets Protocol announced that it had donated approximately US$200,000 worth of NOSTR tokens to the Damus team.
They wrote, “As part of our commitment to the Nostr ecosystem, the donation is intended to promote growth and development within the Nostr ecosystem.” They also posted a screenshot of their transfer, and 50,000 NOSTR tokens have been transferred to Damus CEO the address of.
Nostr Assets Protocol said, “Damus embodies innovation and community spirit. Today we learned that Damus funds are drying up. We sincerely want to help their mission in any way we can. Damus is the application that brings us into the world of Nostr, and we are very Thank you to the Damus team for their innovation and leadership. Damus played a vital role in the development of the Nostr ecosystem, driving rapid growth to reach 500,000 DAU for the first time. This donation is intended to provide Damus with the tools to continue to push boundaries and grow in Nostr The resources needed to reach greater heights in the ecosystem!"
The response to this donation is very worth pondering. “This is a scam. Please send your junk coins elsewhere.”
Needless to say, the Damus team believes that the Nostr Assets Protocol is an affinity scam that leverages the Nostr name and is designed to mislead and deceive people.
As the Bitcoin ecosystem becomes more and more popular, the ecological niche of the old protocol Nostr, a social protocol, has gradually become awkward - this extremely sentimental protocol product that can improve the application layer and bring us use cases, it is actually No coins.
This unique situation also makes it easier for his voice and image to be overshadowed by the skyrocketing crypto products with “coins”.
This controversy is not just a simple brand dispute. This has triggered widespread discussions about the ownership of brands in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, the legality of protocols, and the responsibility and transparency of decentralized products. At the same time, it also reflects the encryption community’s persistence and cautious attitude towards the concept of decentralization.
The controversy shines a light on complex challenges around a range of ownership rights in the emerging crypto community. Many community members have expressed support for Damus’ stance, while others have questioned the intentions and methods of Nostr Assets Protocol. And as a reader, which side of this debate are you on?
