Block just shipped something that should make Slack and GitHub executives at least mildly uncomfortable. The Jack Dorsey-led fintech company launched Buzz on July 21, a free, open-source collaboration workspace built entirely on the decentralized Nostr protocol.
Buzz consolidates the kind of tooling that most engineering teams currently spread across three or four different paid SaaS products. Chat lives next to code repos. Workflows run alongside media sharing. Everything talks to everything else through the Nostr protocol, which handles decentralized identity and event-signing under the hood.
The self-hosting angle is worth pausing on. Organizations can spin up their own Buzz instance as a Nostr relay, with community isolation handled by domain. That means a company’s internal communications and code never have to touch Block’s servers if they don’t want them to. For teams that do want a managed experience, Block offers hosted services at buzz.xyz.
The whole thing ships under an Apache 2.0 license. Fork it, modify it, commercialize it.
AI agents on the platform receive their own unique Nostr cryptographic keypairs. They don’t operate through a human user’s account or sit behind some API integration layer. They exist as full participants with their own permissions, their own identity, and their own audit trail.
