I lately sat down with Vitor Pomplona, creator of Nostr shopper Amethyst, to debate how Nostr in 2025 is so much like what Bitcoin was like in 2012 — a bit tough across the edges, however thrilling to make use of.
Nostr, a decentralized protocol for social media and different types of communication, is barely 4 years outdated, and builders are nonetheless determining easy methods to create the absolute best person expertise throughout the shoppers they’ve created. These shoppers embrace apps like Primal (which is similar to X) to Olas (which is like Instagram) to Yakihonne (which is analogous to Substack).
What’s distinctive about Nostr shoppers, although, is that customers can “zap” (ship small quantities of) bitcoin to at least one one other to indicate appreciation for the content material their fellow customers have created.
And Pomplona is optimistic that increasingly Nostr shoppers are beginning to achieve traction, simply as Bitcoin started to take action 13 years in the past.
“We are starting to see communities being formed and more money being transferred,” Pamplona informed Bitcoin Journal within the interview.
A Bitcoin-Fueled Creator Financial system
Pomplona acknowledged that a part of the aim of social media is to allow means for customers to monetize what they create in ways in which they will’t do of their bodily atmosphere.
“[Some social media] users want to earn a living,” stated Pomplona. “They have hope that they can achieve more with social media than they can alone or in their cities.”
Pamplona believes that Nostr shoppers might help rework that hope right into a actuality, and it’s his mission to assist customers do that.
“That is our end goal: If we can get creators to the point where they can earn a living, we will win as a platform.”
This potential for customers to earn a residing with Nostr turns into higher on a regular basis, particularly because the Nostr person base expands and it continues to develop as the most important bitcoin round economic system on this planet.
Amethyst
In creating Amethyst, Pamplona had a imaginative and prescient for a Nostr shopper that served as an all-in-one app, which was impressed by a plan much like the one which Elon Musk had for X (previously Twitter).
“Amethyst came in at the same time that Elon was talking about buying Twitter,” defined Pomplona. “He was like let’s make a mega app out of Twitter, and I went for the same thing.”
Whereas Pomplona understands that Amethyst didn’t fairly obtain this, he’s excited that it’s come to play a special function. It serves as a lab for people who find themselves growing new Nostr shoppers.
“Amethyst is helping everybody kickstart their own applications,” he stated. “Olas came from Amethyst.”
Nostr As A Bitcoin Onboarding Device
Pomplona sees Nostr as an effective way to onboard individuals to Bitcoin, although he doesn’t assume this must be the first objective of Nostr shoppers.
“The main goal for [Nostr] apps is to get people to do their thing — to get people to be creative, or to talk to their friends or to have a chat with their family,” defined Pomplona.
“No app should ever talk about either Nostr or Bitcoin. They should just be what they are,” he added.
Pamplona believes that, after a while, the app’s customers will inevitably begin to study Nostr’s self-sovereignty Nostr gives in relation to customers with the ability to management their very own information and about Bitcoin.
“[They’ll realize that] it just so happens that the platform helps them to manage their own data, and use best payment protocol we have today.”
And he highlighted that almost all new customers are coming to Nostr due to the liberty and censorship resistance it gives.
“In the past two years, most of the new Nostr users came in because of freedom, because of some censorship in their country,” stated Pomplona. “And they learned about Bitcoin after that.”
