Zebedee, a Bitcoin gaming and payments company, has collaborated with self-taught Bitcoin coder and creator of decentralized social media protocol Nostr, Fiatjaf, on a social media layer that will soon launch on Zebedee’s flagship app. Fiatjaf and Bitcoin hobbyist and advocate Ben Arc first conceptualized the protocol in 2019 and later advanced its development via Zebedee’s non-profit arm, No Big Deal (NBD). In 2022, Nostr got the attention of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who donated 14 Bitcoin (about $245,000 at the time) directly to Fiatjaf himself. In May 2023, Dorsey made a $10 million donation to OpenSats, a non-profit organization for free and open-source Bitcoin projects, with half of the donation earmarked for further Nostr development.
The Nostr protocol’s user base has grown, and now Fiatjaf and Zebedee have collaborated to create a Nostr-powered social media layer that will be integrated into Zebedee’s marquee app at a future date, with a waitlist for early access now available for sign-up. Fiatjaf said, “The Zebedee social app is another one of those clients, but one that is very tightly coupled with the Zebedee app.” Zebedee’s Bitcoin-focused app, which already boasts millions of users, will let those users opt into the Nostr-based social media component, allowing them to communicate with millions of other Nostr users on different apps like Damus which debuted on Apple’s App Store in February 2023. Fiatjaf added, “Each user already has a name, profile, and profile picture. For people that opt in, we just turn them into a Nostr identity and they can interact with the broader Nostr ecosystem.”