The Sovereign Engineering Blog

SEC-08: The YOLO++ Report

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 01:00:30 GMT

The last week of every cohort we take a ride on the Pirate Ship off Madeira, to see whales, swim in the Atlantic and talk about the pirating we did the past six weeks and the pirating beyond. We pass the mic around asking each participant for highlights of the cohort which is encapsulated in the No Solutions episode "Drinking from the Firehose".

The first response set the pattern for the ride, "Napplets, FIPS, runtimes, shells. More FIPS, more napplets, more shells. FIPS over audio. Zazafication. Better friendships, jams, walks, barbecues."

npub1nmr6w7q… , who was at SEC-01, had one word; "pain", and said this cohort felt closer to the first one than any since, everyone figuring it out from scratch again.

npub1ye5ptcx… commented:

A year ago we were talking about where we want to be and what tech we want to have, and there were always missing gaps. Now there don't seem to be many..

Totem is a case in point. Totem is a modular hardware platform running napplets on devices that connect in a mesh. We first imagined it at SEC-03, then shelved it for two years, not because people lost interest but because you could not build it right yet. Gzuuus, who has spent more time at Sovereign Engineering than any human alive said, "Totem never died, it was waiting for FIPS and napplets and runtimes to exist." This summer Totem got built, it had a friend and the two talked to each other.

SEC-08 ran 20 July to 28 August. Six weeks of pure unadulterated YOLO++ with half alumni and half new faces. After the focused sprints of SEC-06 and SEC-07 we went back to open exploration: mesh networking, maps, merchant payments, package distribution, a desktop pet, and a multiplayer game stuffed into one HTML file.

Do you even FIPS yet?

Native FIPS, public-key-addressed application traffic with no IP stack in the way, was reserved for FIPS v2. By the end of this year at the earliest. Then you put npub19wavu4f… and npub1zuuajd7… in the same room and it is a one-week problem.

The native datagram API eliminates HTTP, TLS, TCP and IPv6 out of the equation. No more npub.fips hostnames. The npub is the endpoint, and it looks close enough to a Berkeley socket. JeffG benchmarked it while wiring it into Wok and the relay got 8 to 58% faster depending on message size. By demo day Wok spoke native FIPS and White Noise was FIPS only. Encrypted group chat with no IPs, and no DNS.

FIPS was in the air again;

npub1uac67zc… sent FIPS over sound. FipWave modulates packets into audio and two laptops hold a conversation across a room with nothing but chirps. Somebody on the pirate ship proposed dolphins next.

fips-exit-gate, fips-shield, fips2go and a FreeBSD port ( npub1yptpz34… ) - reaching the legacy internet, filtering application-level abuse, putting Android and FreeBSD on the mesh.
JeffG's fips-mac installs and runs a FIPS node on a Mac and shows the mesh from the menu bar. Johnathan's fipsctl gives you the command-line view.
hzrd149 added FIPS support to nostr-relay-tray, putting your desktop relay on the mesh.
npub1hw6amg8… demonstrated LUKS over FIPS, remotely unlocking an encrypted NixOS drive.
hzrd149's FIPS Pong bridged a game across three machines through a browser tab. His own review: "completely useless, but it worked."
npub1uadpshq… and npub19w6s06q… worked on CruxCoach, which syncs a group's climbing playlist over a local BLE/FIPS mesh without internet access. The app itself can be shared over the same mesh. J also used Android's accessibility features to extract the user's MoonBoard logbook, because the MoonBoard needs to be liberated from its enshittification.

Napplets, runtimes and shells

Nostr is easy to use badly and hard to use well. Key handling, signing, relay selection, caching, encryption, expiry, and on and on. Every client implements all of it, and most implement some of it wrong.

Sandwich spent the past year working on NIP-5D, the napplet protocol. A napplet is a sandboxed, single-purpose app that asks a host shell to handle signing, relay access and storage. It never holds your key, never picks your relays, and doesn't know anything about storage. The hard, security-critical work is handled by the shell.

So to write a Nostr app, you don't have to be a Nostr developer i.e. you. Nostr already hands you self-signed structured data and a client was only ever the presentation layer, but until now, we kept making people rebuild the whole Nostr protocol to build clients. Now, a napplet can be shared over Bluetooth via FIPS, or fit inside a link along with its state which can be run on any of the napplet shells.

npub1mygercc… 's RocketShell is a web runtime for NostrRocket.
npub16c9a45p… 's Uzel is a native Debian napplet runtime. npub1l2vyh47… 's nampplets provides a native Rust runtime for macOS.
hzrd149's Napplet Portal provides a server-backed host you can reach from your phone.
Rage of Empires (Gsovereignty and Yo) - decompiled AoE from the Windows binary and packed into a single 83 MB HTML file, multiplayer running once as a napplet and once as an nsite. As put by a participant, "I thought it was dumb. After a few days I got it. We can reverse engineer so many of the applications from the last generation."
Arjen's Myco is a meta sneakernet app over FIPS mesh to share apps and communications. npub1ejxswth… and Arjen worked on file sharing, think AirDrop over the mesh, and André brought it to the desktop with myco-desktop.
Nostrocket (Gsovereignty and npub17plqkxh… ) - G started this years ago around an absurdly ambitious question: how do you build a system resilient to psychopaths? Jeroen revived it this cohort, rebuilt as composable napplets. If you are curious, and you should be, go egg them on.
Nappagochi (Sherry) turns your Nostr activity into the changing life of your Nostr pet.
Anon&Mato (Balas) generates a playable world from your npub. It is beautifully created.
XR napplets (Sandwich) - remember Google Glasses? This is napplets on AR glasses! Think HUDs.

Blossoming Hashtrees

We didn't just FIPS, we Nix'd over Blossom(ing) Hashtrees. This one came off a walk, which is the least surprising sentence in this report. A Nix guy and a Blossom dude went up the hill, and came down with Nix packages over Blossom.

Nix addresses everything by hash. Blossom stores blobs by hash. Do you see it now? It was obvious, but the left foot, right foot rhythm was required for left brain, right brain juices to flow and synchronise. By Friday we had Nix packages distributed with no registry.

nixstr-cache (hzrd149) and Narwal with its publisher (Julien)- resolve Nix packages over Nostr and Hashtree, blobs pulled from Blossom, served to an ordinary Nix client. The packages arrive through a standard Nix binary cache interface, so you can keep using nix build. Nostr announcements identify the publisher, and Nix checks the cache signatures against the keys you trust. It barely worked by Friday - very promising, the correct state for a Friday before the BBQ.
Hashtree explainer (hzrd149) - if you always wanted to know what a hashtree is, it's IPFS without the rest of IPFS.

During the Hashtree talk, someone asked whether a map of the Earth could use one root, with smaller areas fetched as you zoomed in. npub1fz5hhsj… and npub1hr4znut… went and built Mapplets. They used a modified hashtree for the map and Nostr events for the map data, including Madeira's bus routes. Map tiles load as you zoom, and private overlays are shared with the people you choose.

Just works

Our favourite Poncha bar in Funchal knows us as the Bitcoin people. Its payment terminal had been broken for weeks, so we kept paying in euros. One week a bunch of participants decided to team up and fix the UX.

Just Works ( npub175aemyd… , Yo and npub10wzfa7j… ) was built. Just Works just creates beautiful nsites that just work. It has info, menu, schedules, reviews, news, PoS, payments, etc. and keys.justworks ( npub1gzuushl… ) handles the keys underneath.

Just Works takes every establishment in the area. Scrapes their site and their socials, generates a pretty nsite from it, links back to the legacy profiles so their customers still recognise them, gives them an npub, a QR code and a point of sale, and then it puts all of them on the just works map. And you can just start tipping them because you love your local dive bar so much. The owner ends up with a profile, a site, key management and a pile of sats waiting to be claimed.

It also looks good - which is not a sentence we get to write often. Work this far down the stack and you tell yourself beautiful is somebody else's job, right after the protocol is right. Zaza sat down with people one project at a time and showed them otherwise, ran a workshop and by the last demo day almost everything had been Zazafied.

Then we had Granola ( npub1v22qynd… ), an idea since 2024. At SEC-08 he found people to build it with. It coordinates Cashu atomic swaps over Nostr. Other work explored escrow and dispute resolution in anonymous marketplaces.

Meza ( npub1dergggk… )- lets you zap a highlighted passage and split the payment between its author, the person who highlighted it, and Boris, the reading app.
600 Billion Timelock TCG ( npub1su4kplw… and Breno) on Nappelin makes every card in a booster pack a Cashu token, with NUT-22 blinded tokens keeping your hand private. Coloured coins on Cashu, for a card game.

Clankers, data, and the strange stuff

Agents got treated as ordinary users of the network this time. They discover things, pay for things, remember things, and generally make great teammates.

npub1t6m495k… 's Nostrology exposes Nostr ecosystem metrics over MCP, maps marketplace growth by geography, and accepts Cashu payments for Nutzap data queries. An agent finds a dataset, pays for a query and gets its answer.
Nectar explores structured, attestable datasets on Nostr.
si-eval explores auditable model evaluation for tasks such as key handling and privacy.
MDK and White Noise agents (JeffG)- used agents to generate thousands of test scenarios for MDK and built White Noise/Marmot connectors for the major agent tools. Other experiments involved shared memory in White Noise groups and short “mantras” intended to improve small models' tool calls.
Rahul explored agents helping with real-life tasks through Mappy, then put an agent inside a napplet with Kipina.
fips.email (Thomas) - accepts email addressed to your npub and forwards it as an encrypted NIP-17 message to your DM relays. He built it for agents, though people can use it too. No FIPS involved. People just love FIPS.
Mist (Julien) lets you explore Nostr conversations in clusters.

We worked on hardware too. Totems running napplets in shells connected in a self-healing mesh of other Totems over FIPS. Participants had flown in with cases of tools and equipment to build. Even so, they could not build the things they really wanted, because Madeira has no makerspace. This inspired two of the participants to start one, ready to fund it themselves. npub1n0devk3… and other donors piled in behind them, now Nostr Office is giving the lab a home.

People came here to build things and left behind a place for building things.

Talks and workshops

Everyone's AI setup - a fixture now. Every participant shows how they actually work: harnesses, prompts, tools, learnings, etc. No two setups match. You steal two things on day three, then have six weeks to refine and upgrade.
In the spirit of Bitcoin (Gigi) - What does it mean to build it in the spirit of Bitcoin? What is the spirit of Bitcoin? Nobody can define the spirit of Bitcoin in a sentence, but you know it when someone violates it.
Nostr anti-patterns (Gigi) - the old internet is a habit, and habits follow you. The talk was about habits of the old internet and anti-patterns in Nostr, when deliberately avoided, allow us to be liberated from.

Other talks: A primer on Marmot (JeffG), Construction on Nostr (Felix), Everything is a Stream (hzrd149), TEEs (Gzuuus), History of Maps (FLX), and Messaging Protocols (JeffG and Gzuuus)

Cohort Experiments

We skipped the break week this time. By week four everyone was feeling it. SEC-05 had a detox week at that point, and we will probably bring it back.

In week five, Johnathan paired everyone up and asked them to announce their demos three days ahead. Participants appreciated this and took on more complex problems together. We have tried this before and want to keep refining it.

For one week, demos lasted just a minute. You had to decide what people needed to see and get straight to it. The discussions afterwards were better too, because the demos left more questions unanswered. Someone suggested shortening them throughout the cohort, from six minutes in week one to one minute in week six. We want to try that. G also built the Demo Day Command Center to keep us within our allotted time, which provided plenty of entertainment.

The final week was deliberately quieter. After five weeks of building, Gzuuus suggested leaving more time to take it all in and talk to each other. We rarely get six weeks in the same room with these people, and wanted to make the most of the time left.

Walks and barbecues are still the highest leverage R&D we do. Solvitur ambulando.

Paths forward

We didn't know what Sovereign Engineering really was when we started. We set out with a direction, an unshakable belief to "fix the internet". We didn't know how, and most of the tools did not exist. Eight cohorts on, ideas like Totem can finally be built. There is still plenty to figure out, but we can now build things we could only talk about only a year back.

Cohort after cohort of experimenting taught us what works, what doesn't, and how to run the loop that keeps producing ideas like these. Nix and Blossom happened on a walk. Spending six weeks together gives people time to understand each other's work, try something unlikely, abandon it and try again.

But six weeks is a lot to ask. People have jobs they cannot leave and children in school. Some have spent twenty years finding out how systems fail in practice, and we would love to have them here. Wanting to come does not make it possible.

So alongside the six-week cohorts, we are exploring shorter formats. Maybe a week in a mountain hut, working on one question and building towards a demo.

People have also asked about cohorts in other parts of the world. We want to explore that and work with people building local-first hardware/software and mesh networks who might never have considered coming to SEC.

If six weeks is why you have never applied, tell us what you could make time for. If you want to help organise something where you live, come talk to us.

Closing notes

SEC-08 ran on participants going full tilt for six weeks with no breather, and on the captains: Arjen, Gsovereignty, Thomas, Sandwich, Johnathan and Gzuuus, who each steered the ship for a week and took it seriously. Thank you to Zaza for showing us that our work could look beautiful, to npub1eh4lrnz… for the BBQs and Ponchas, to the ladies at the Cowork for hosting us, to npub1tdc9um9… for the space and dealing with the unglamorous parts of running Sovereign Engineering, and to npub1dergggk… for the heart he keeps putting into this.

Head over to the projects page, pick something off this list. Try it, break it, go tell the person who made it. Then come build with us.

The pieces be scattered, laddies, but they be ours. Lash 'em together an' sail.

More: sovereignengineering.io | No Solutions

Building the Really Real

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 22:00:00 GMT

Sovereign Engineering exists because of one guy: John Vervaeke. Few people know about him, even fewer people can pronounce his name properly, and even though I've been ranting and raving about him and his work for the last 5 years or so, I doubt that more than a handful of people have actually listened to his lectures and ingested his vast body of work. (If this is you, please stop reading this paragraph and start watching "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis," which is probably the best entry point into the world of John Vervaeke.)

Without John Vervaeke, Sovereign Engineering would be a very different program. It probably wouldn't be centered around dialogue. Dialogue in the Dia-Logos sense; Bohmian dialogue, as described and pioneered by David Bohm.

There is a reason why David Bohm's book is featured in our library, along with "The Sovereign Individual," "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," and "Free Software, Free Society." These books are important, as is proper dialogue.

The technological world is changing, and it is changing fast. Established patterns and concepts are breaking down, which means that communication and meaning-making are breaking down as a consequence. The world is getting more confusing by the day. The hyper-fragmented world that the internet brought about (or, more accurately: that the polarization and outrage-machinery that is part of the current social media landscape brought about) makes it almost impossible to communicate between echo-chambers.

And now that LLMs are ubiquitous and sloppifying large parts of the internet, most people aren't even sure if there is a real flesh-and-blood human on the other side. And who can blame them? More often than not, there isn't.

Here is another thing that John Vervaeke taught me: people crave realness. Most people, almost all people, in fact, will prefer an uncomfortable truth over a comforting lie. He often cites the one experiment that he does with his students, asking everyone whether they are in a long-term romantic relationship, a relationship that means a lot to them and makes them happy. Hands go up. He goes on to ask whether those who have their hands up would like to know whether their partner cheats on them, even if it would mean the destruction of the relationship. 95% will keep their hand up. Why? Because they don't want to live a lie. They want the relationship to be real. Really real.

Vervaeke will often point out that realness is comparative, just like tallness is. "Everything is a PsyOp" is like saying that everything is tall. It's nonsensical.

He also talks about levels of realness, and while I don't want to get into the examples he often talks about, I want to borrow this concept and talk about levels of realness in cyberspace, if you will.

Bitcoin is real to me, more real than most things. I think that most bitcoiners, i.e. those who have been around the orange coin for some time and understand how the system bootstraps itself into being, would agree. Bitcoin is not a simulation, nor is it made up out of thin air. It is rooted in and related to physical reality, even though the fruits of the network are ethereal, meaning that they can neither be touched nor held. Nevertheless, it is more real than the paper bills that most people call "money," or the credit cards that we use to pay for our groceries.

Nostr is similar, in the sense that your nostr identity is more real than your handle on X, or Instagram, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or YouTube, or TikTok, or whatever the social media platform of your choice. Your handle can be taken away from you, at any time, for any reason. Just like your bank account can be frozen at any time, for any reason.

Why build your digital life on quicksand, when you have the option to build it on a rock? Why rely on middlemen to tell you what is real, what is acceptable, who you can talk to and connect to? Why entrust your digital existence to a central authority? Why view the world through a lens that isn't yours?

Proof-of-work is what brings reality to cyberspace, and web-of-trust does the rest on the social side. Combine the two and add some digital signatures on top, and you have something that's more real, more trustworthy, more worthy of your time and attention than the military-grade propaganda that's presented to you in the advertisement-industrial complex.

Bitcoin and Nostr aren't the only things we care about, of course. The internet is a permissioned system in itself, from ICANN and DNS to undersea cables and now SpaceX. We quickly realized that we had to build an alternative network stack from the ground up, as grandiose as that sounds.

It started with mesh-networked routers that sell internet access for sats, and culminated in a new way to build self-organizing ad-hoc networks. Networks that work independently of the underlying transport layer, whether it be ethernet cables, Bluetooth, LoRa, Tor, direct WiFi, or even sound waves. Without relying on IP addresses, DNS authorities, or any other entity that might be able to rug-pull you. Device to device, self-organizing, peer-to-peer. As it should be.

While FIPS is still in its early days, it is amazing to see that something that was a crazy idea just a couple months ago is now live, with nodes and enthusiasts all around the globe. And the same goes for Zapstore, and Blossom, and Nsite, and Napplets, and many other things that were born out of dialogue with the right people at the right time.

So, what's our secret? Dialogue. That's the secret. The whole program is engineered to maximize dialogue, to get people out of their shell, to get everyone not only into the same room, but into the same mode, on the same journey. We do Demo Days because it's easier to talk about an idea if it is material, if it exists in the world, if there's a prototype that you can play around with, even hold in your hand. We have Beefsteak-style barbecues because it is a wonderful format to have free-flowing conversations about what we worked on this week. No sitting in a restaurant, but standing in small, fluid groups that automatically and organically assemble and disassemble. We go on walks for the same reason: it's incredibly easy to talk to people on a walk, to have a flowing conversation, to have a proper dialogue in the Dia-Logos sense. To talk about something without an agenda, without a goal in mind, letting the conversation - the Logos - take you where it may. We provide some structure at the beginning of the week to properly orient the group, giving plenty of opportunities to share knowledge and have high-bandwidth interactions. Talks, workshops, and of course lots of spontaneous breakout sessions that might happen at the venue, or at a coffee shop, or a restaurant, or a flat, or even a boat. (Boats aren't the best vessels for Dia-Logos, however. Not everyone is seaworthy.)

As I am typing these lines, the eighth cohort, SEC-08, is in full swing. We are blessed to have exceptional people participate once again: returning alumni like hzrd149, Sandwich, gzuuus, Shadrach, gsovereignty, Johnathan, Yo, Arjen, Paul, and many more. And new participants, like Whisperhash and Julien, who are still trying to figure out what they've got themselves into.

My hope is that Sovereign Engineering will spread outwards, inspiring others to do a similar thing. A real thing, an in-person thing. Something with Dia-Logos at the center. Something that has the capacity to birth something new, or rejuvenate something old. Something special.

If you're interested in entering into dialogue with us, to help spread the word, learn more, or maybe even build your own dialogue-based engineering program, don't hesitate to reach out to us. Let's talk. Let's make it real.

There's never been a better time to start building. Cypherpunk future is now.

This article first appeared on dergigi.com.

SEC-06 Report: Identity & Signers

Sat, 23 May 2026 19:46:07 GMT

SEC-06: Identity & Signers Report

Introduction

It's been a couple of months since SEC-06 wrapped on March 20th. And as its said, better late than never. This was our first three-week focused sprint on the hard questions of everything identity & signers. About 21 people - roughly half alumni and half new faces - showed up in Madeira to tackle one sharp problem: keys are great, but key management is a disaster.

After SEC-05, it was clear that identity in the world of AI would matter a lot. We wanted to talk to our LLMs and have them make payments. Just before the cohort, Openclaw blew up, and the Clankers needed to talk to humans and to each other. The legacy stack does this with phone numbers, OAuth, API keys, payment processors, and a million KYC hoops. With a Nostr plugin, a clanker generates its nsec, sets up its wallet, and starts DMing and zapping in one prompt, in minutes, by itself.

Humans need better key management. For machines, keys are the only path to autonomy.

On the last day of the cohort, Pip the WoT guy published an analysis of about 16,000 leaked nsecs. No NIP-41 in the wild, no rotation, no way to tell the network “this isn’t me anymore”. Today, any key compromise is fatal.

Themes & Projects BIP-85: Nostr Application Number

One of the fruitful outcomes of the many discussions was npub1gpxe2ux… opened BIP PR #2126: a dedicated BIP-85 application number (9000, Funchal's zip code) for deriving Nostr nsecs from a mnemonic, with a structured {identity}'/{account}' path. A dedicated BIP-85 application cleanly isolates nsec derivation, eliminates fragmentation across the current ad-hoc methods (BIP-85 HEX, BIP-85 → mnemonic → NIP-06, NIP-06 directly), and enables account discovery via deterministic pubkey enumeration. The PR is open and under review. Once merged, Nostr keys going forward can have a single canonical path.

Identity & Key Management

Identity continuity was the hot topic and was attacked from multiple angles: cryptographic rotation, social recovery, and checkpoint events, building legitimacy over time. Gzuuus’ OpenContinuity (NIP #2278) is already moving through review - identity continuity on Nostr is observer-dependent, so the draft standardizes claims and evidence, not truth. The PR thread is worth reading.

Friendpub ( npub19at4nqj… ) - 2-of-3 guardian threshold rotation over NIP-17
One Npub / Froster ( npub175aemyd… ) - Single npub backed by FROST
OpenContinuity ( npub1gzuushl… ) - Checkpoint events; NIP draft
pubSwitch ( npub16c9a45p… ) - Prepared key migration with social signalling

Signers & Bunkers

hzrd’s article on signer UX sucks struck a cord and we highly recommend it. Florian’s testbed picks the middle between approving everything (fatigue) and nothing (security facade): per-event-kind flows with risk-tuned warnings.

Fleetgner (Gzuuus) - Remote signer with per-key per-user policies; NIP-46 + CVM/MCP
OAuth Bunker ( npub1klr0dy2… ) - OAuth → NIP-46; split web/LAN architecture
Signer UX testbed (Florian) - Per-event-kind approval flow reference

Payments & Wallets

One of the most fruitful demos was on Silent Payments, and it came from a non-dev.

Silent Payments over Nostr ( npub1n3w4uts… ) - Sparrow fork; NIP-05 → silent payment address via Nostr DM, skipping the chain scan. Gist
FrostyCashuWallet ( npub1zthq85g… ) - Cashu tokens locked to FROST pubkey; audience collaboratively unlocks
Cashutube (Sats And Sports) - Pay-per-view video; Cashu + Spilman channels

AI Agents & Memory

Kosh’s Nomen gives agents searchable memory on Nostr - sleep-style consolidation, turning raw chats into named memories that travel with the npub.

Nomen ( npub1zc6ts76… ) - Agent memory on Nostr; HNSW + BM25 + graph; MCP / CVM / embedded Rust
Rust ContextVM SDK (Kosh) - Native Rust ContextVM
Relatr ELO plugins (Gzuuus) - Scriptable WoT trust-score plugins as Nostr events

Web of Trust

Gzuuus extended Relatr with an ELO scripting language, so trust scores become user-defined plugins: write the rule, post it as a Nostr event, and anyone can run it.

Mesh of Trust (Thomas) - Friends-of-friends follow-graph trust analysis
Nostube WoT (Florian) - Nostube WoT via Relatr plugins
Nostr Signal ( npub1q4hnxfz… ) - Local-business reputation from Nostr activity, reactions, zaps

Storage & Streaming

Blossom kept settling in as the default object store with Nostr as the coordination layer.

Flower market (Tom) - Blossom server discovery with challenge-response retention proofs
Blossom Fire (Tom) - Phone-to-web live streaming via Blossom + Nostr
Nostube (Florian) - Video client on Nostr + Blossom

Network & Discovery

FIPS and ContextVM continued to mature as Nostr-native transports underneath the app layer.

FIPS ( npub1hw6amg8… ) - Two-Tollgate demo; Wi-Fi/Ethernet failover; Nostr relay as first FIPS-native app
FIPS over Nostr (Sats And Sports) - FIPS nodes self-announcing topology over Nostr
CSH (Yo) - SSH over ContextVM; web terminal tunneled through Nostr
Antenna Tracker ( npub1c03rad0… ) - ESP32 antenna tracker; MCP-over-Nostr control

Privacy, Tools & Learning

Nostr identities for things adjacent to social: voting, duress signals, trust-bound releases.

Auditable Voting (Alex / c0brador) - Cashu-mint coordinator voting with multi-coordinator cross-checks
Silent Alarm ( npub1gpxe2ux… ) - BIP-85 duress PIN sends SOS via NIP-17 with GPS
Software signing (Arjen) - Nostr-signed reproducible releases from GitHub Actions across untrusted workers

Talks & Workshops

Identity is Prismatic ( npub1dergggk… ) - Riffing on Chris Poole’s “high-order bit” talk: “posting as” vs “posting to”. Build things on Nostr that map our many selves rather than collapse them into one.
Engineering with Nostr is Better (Tom) - E-bike-company case studies; Nostr identities simplifying production engineering.
Openclaw + NIP-17 in a Prompt (Gigi) - Workshop: agent spins up its own Nostr identity and DMs humans in one prompt.
Tuesday talks - “Bitcoin doesn’t care what any of us want” (Karliatto), WoT + social recovery + SSS (Tom/Yo/Gzuuus), Governance in Nostr (Gzuuus).

Experiments in SEC-06

Three-week format: A bit short - the cohort really starts grooving by Week 3 after 2 weeks of warmup. Still useful since not everyone can do a full cohort.
Outdoor BBQs: BBQs after hikes worked well. Tricky to find hike + BBQ spots in rainy spring weather, but we did.

Paths Forward

Identity continuity isn’t optional. Thousands of keys have been exposed, and serious adoption hasn’t even started. SEC-06’s complementary paths - cryptographic, social, hardware-rooted - are still experiments and need serious effort. Until Nostr has continuity baked in, it can’t be a serious social layer where normal people invest their time and energy. This is a big reason contributing to the difficulty of using Nostr for them. Derek has a point, even though we don't fully agree. The thing is, people don’t like responsibility, and Nostr isn’t for everybody. But let that not be an excuse for bad UX.

Trust should be configurable - Relatr’s ELO-plugin model is a step in the right direction.

Nostr is perfect for agents: identity, money, network, communications. The clankers are here and we'd like to see more of Nostr for the agentic world.

Closing Notes

SEC-06 wouldn’t have happened without our participants at full tilt for three weeks, the captains (Yo, Florian, Gzuuus), npub1eh4lrnz… for the BBQs and Ponchas, the ladies at the Cowork, npub1tdc9um9… for the space, and npub1dergggk… for the heart he keeps putting into this.

We owe SEC-06 alumni an Arrr. We also owe everyone the SEC-07 report, coming next.

Upcoming Cohort

Applications are open for SEC-08: YOLO++ running from 20 July - 28 August in Madeira. Apply here.

Yer keys be yer flag, laddies. Lose ‘em an’ ye’re a ghost on the high seas. Rotate 'em proper, or get plundered.

More: sovereignengineering.io | No Solutions

SEC 08: YOLO++

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:25:43 GMT

We said we're doing it again. We meant it.

SEC-08 runs from July 20 to August 28, 2026. Six weeks of summer in Madeira with twenty-one builders. School's out, bring your dog, bring your family or come by yourself.

SEC-05 wrapped up last October and it was productive chaos. Localhost maximalists, Routstr, Beacon, FIPs, ContextVM, noDNS, Paygress, Earthly.City, Spotstr, Innpub and six weeks of pure vibe coding. Friday demos ran long because everyone shipped multiple projects. Poncha-fueled evenings produced memes that became real code by morning. The energy was electric.

SEC-08 is open exploration, not a focused sprint like SEC-06 or SEC-07. Bring your half-baked ideas. Bring your project that needs momentum. Bring the thing you've been wanting to build, but needed the right people around to make it real.

Past cohorts produced Zapstore, Tollgate, Nutzaps (NIP-60/61), Wikifreedia, and dozens more because of the isolated, in-person environment. Madeira is remote, hard to reach, and in-person only. That's how magic happens.

Applications are now open for SEC-08: YOLO++ (apply here). Six weeks. July 20 - August 28, 2026. See all upcoming cohorts.

If you're building freedom tech - the protocols, infrastructure, and tools that no single entity can control - we want to hear from you. If you know someone who should be there, send them our way.

Great weather. The ocean as far as the eye can see. Vibe to your heart's content.

More: sovereignengineering.io | No Solutions Podcast

SEC-07: The Network Stack

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:40:06 GMT

The internet is amazing. Or at least, the promise of the internet is amazing: anyone, anywhere, can publish anything and reach the world. No gatekeepers. No borders. Just packets flowing freely between peers.

But that's not the internet we have.

What we have is geoblocking, deplatforming, and censorship. Closed systems masquerading as open ones. Infrastructure that was originally built for resilience is now optimized for control.

In February 2025, LaLiga ordered Spanish ISPs to block Cloudflare IP addresses to stop pirate streams of football matches. GitHub went dark. So did ChatGPT, Instagram, Bluesky, X, and some 3,300 other websites. Millions of Spanish users couldn't reach half the internet because one court order hit one infrastructure provider.

They were trying to stop football streams. They accidentally broke the internet. This is just one example of many.

Cloudflare went down again on 5th December - third major outage in three months, affecting 28% of Cloudflare's traffic. X, Zoom, Canva, banks, and many others went down. One company sits in front of 20% of the web, and when it hiccups, the internet chokes.

We need a better internet, and that's exactly what we are exploring in the upcoming SEC-07 cohort. We want to spend the better part of April exploring how we could re-imagine the network stack to be more robust, more resilient, and more resistant to control.

As of today, the internet's architecture is a series of permission layers. DNS translates names into addresses, but ICANN controls the root, and your domain can be seized with a court order. IP addresses route your traffic, but they can be blocked, tracked, and geolocated by any ISP in the chain. Certificate Authorities vouch for encrypted connections, but a handful of companies decide who's "trusted," and they can revoke it overnight.

This isn’t a theoretical threat, as various headlines of the last couple of months clearly show: The UK's Online Safety Act requires age verification to access social media. Australia banned under-16s from platforms entirely, no parental consent exceptions. The EU's proposed Chat Control would mandate scanning all encrypted messages - Signal, Threema, and Proton said they'd leave Europe rather than comply. Brazil blocked X nationwide for two months and fined users $9,000/day for using VPNs to bypass it. The US Supreme Court unanimously upheld the TikTok ban, affecting 170 million users. India had 84 internet shutdowns in 2024, second only to Myanmar's military junta. Kashmir went 552 days without internet. In Myanmar, you can get six months' jail for having a VPN installed.

The question of who controls internet speech isn't new. John Joink drew this cartoon in 2011, during the SOPA/PIPA debates. The mechanisms of control were already in place. What's changed is the scale and the brazenness - governments across the political spectrum, from democracies to dictatorships, now exercise this control openly and in lockstep.

We now have the tools to fix this, and SEC-07 is dedicated to exploring them - routing discovery through pubkeys instead of registrars, building connectivity without exposing addresses, establishing trust through cryptographic proof instead of corporate authority.

The goal is to explore questions such as: How can we make ICANN and IANA irrelevant, DNS optional, and Certificate Authorities unnecessary?

We're joined by the Tollgate team for SEC-07. Tollgate is one of the projects that came out of Sovereign Engineering - alongside noDNS, FIPs, Paygress, and others built during SEC-05. They've been deep in the network stack. They know where the bodies are buried.

SEC-07 runs March 30 - April 17, 2026. Three weeks. Focused work. In Madeira. See all upcoming cohorts.

SEC-07 applications are now open.

If you're building the plumbing for the self-sovereign internet, we want to hear from you. Greybeards and veterans of the network stack, those who watched the open internet's promise fade, we especially want to hear from you, your expertise is needed. If you know someone like that, send them our way.

Great weather. Ocean as far as the eye can see. No shortage of hard problems to solve.

More: sovereignengineering.io | No Solutions Podcast

SEC-06: Identity & Signers

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 21:44:47 GMT

The internet is going from frustrating to unusable at an accelerating rate—especially if you want to maintain any semblance of privacy online. Your digital identity isn't yours, and neither is your data, but having to show your passport to watch a YouTube video or rent a VPS is a sign of the times.

This morning, we tried to create an account to transfer our VPS hosting to a new provider. After begrudgingly handing over our Credit Card details, our account got flagged immediately, "High risk." No apparent reason, no explanation, and only one path forward to remedy the issue: a selfie with a government-mandated ID to prove identity.

We believe there's a better way.

Cryptographic Identities

The wonderful thing about cryptographic identities is that they exist outside of the computer. You can literally generate a keypair by locking yourself in your bathroom and throwing a couple of dice. You can generate one or a million of them, without asking anyone for permission. No email or phone number required. Cryptographic identities are a large part of what makes Bitcoin & Nostr so powerful.

Your public key is your identity across the protocol. Every event is cryptographically signed. Take your keys, take your identity, your social graph, your content, and your money anywhere. It is this aspect that we want to explore in our upcoming cohort, SEC-06.

Upcoming Cohorts

Starting in 2026, we are introducing shorter, more focused sprints to concentrate on specific problems. We will be starting the year with two such sprints in quick succession, followed by our 6-week cohort in the summer:

SEC-06 – Identity & Signers (March 2 - March 20)
SEC-07 – Networks (March 30 - April 17)
SEC-08 – Summer Cohort (July 20 - August 28)

Applications for SEC-06 are now open, and we encourage all developers and vibe-coders to apply!

SEC-06: Identity & Signers

While Nostr is still small, it managed to bootstrap a social network of users that hold their own keys, giving rise to a permissionless and self-sovereign Web of Trust in the process. Tools like Vertex and the ContextVM-based relatr are using this social graph to compute personalized trust scores, among other things. Your network becomes your reputation layer, just like it is in meatspace.

How do we best leverage trust and reputation? And how do we improve the issues around key management and signing? That's exactly the kind of questions we want to focus on in this cohort:

Key management & signers - we agree with hzrd that signer UX sucks. How can we improve it?
Novel uses of Nostr identities - what can we build if users (humans or machines) have permissionless wallets and spending from the get-go?
Leveraging WoT - Nostr gives us a Web of Trust for free, primitive as it may be. What can we do with it?

As mentioned in the SEC-05 report, Sovereign Engineering is slowly but surely moving past the crazy experiment phase. The program is maturing, and the protocols and substrates we are most interested in—Bitcoin, Nostr, and ecash—are maturing too.

We are excited that the npub1p0rtalt… team, led by BDK maintainer Alekos Filini, is joining us for SEC-06. The team just released the Portal SDK, which makes it easy to integrate Nostr-based auth, lightning payments, and Cashu tokens into any app. We're looking forward to exploring the possibilities of this SDK with their team.

We expect great weather, blue ocean as far as the eye can see, and interesting problems to solve. Apply for SEC-06 today and see you in sunny Madeira soon!

More: sovereignengineering.io | No Solutions

NOTE: Applications for the other cohorts will open soon.

SEC-05: YOLO Report

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 23:01:30 GMT

SEC-05: YOLO Mode is over and YOLO it was! It was an expedition in vibe coding and vibe we did We concluded our last Demo Day on 10th October, with most participants having more than one demo, and 6 minutes per demo felt less. The spirits were high thanks to Ponchas and LLMs despite their sycophantic hallucinations. The fifth edition saw about 50% alumni and 50% new participants. It was built upon the explorations of SEC-04 to enhance our collective understanding and utilisation of LLMs, as well as the ideas explored across all the SECs. It was also the cohort where we literally memed our ideas to life! Great memes were born during Poncha-fuelled evenings and Sunday walks.

Main Themes

It is challenging to pinpoint the main theme, as the cohort was highly dynamic and participants came from diverse domains; however, one of the underlying themes was a local-first approach. Most things being built were oriented towards being offline as the default. This also lent into selling/creating markets for locally available resources viz. compute, hardware, maps & even IPs over Nostr and automated purchases of the same by machines using Cashu - Oh! How could we forget, wifi & data too - 🎩🤏 Tollgate!

A second major theme was rethinking the entire Internet stack using Nostr keys as identities that can announce, be discovered, and communicate with each other without having a domain, connected to centralised DNS servers, or having certificates from CAs. Audio/Video streaming & MLS was another highlight, combining Nostr with other protocols like Iroh & MoQ . The challenges of doing A/V, the simplicity of Nostr contrasted by the complexity of current browsers, inspired npub1zxu639q… to rise up to the challenge and build a browser from the ground up, where he channellised his and other participants' collective hatred for WebRTC.

We saw quite a few projects on Maps over Nostr, where we not only overlaid information over Open Street Maps, but also stitched our own maps and served them as blobs. There was an acute need for deeper integration below the application layer of various tools and apps such that they can be easily installed and have a unified experience à la Umbrel, leading to many discussions & projects on local DBs, Wallet UX(NWC/NWA), Blossom, Torrents & local relays.

Two important toolings that were used over and over by various projects were the Applesauce library and ContextVM.

Applesauce has matured, is optimised, and very opinionated, which makes it extremely useful. Being functional in nature also allows it to be very reliable. It does take some getting used to, but npub1ye5ptcx… has published very good docs , extensive snippets and live examples . It's a fantastic library for building applications,10/10 recommended.

ContextVM is the mature version of DVMCP by npub1gzuushl… . It is a lot more than just a DVM or an MCP server. It is a protocol to communicate with remote services in a structured manner without having to deal with Network configuration, IPs, etc. Irrelevant. What it enables is not just a protocol to communicate with your MCP servers remotely, but to expose ANY services and access them from anywhere if you know its npub. It was seen being used in many projects and was found to be very easy to work with. Read the ContextVM docs to learn more.

Highlight Projects by Category

AI & Local-First Computing

Routstr (by npub18gr2m5c… , npub1u37h8rh… & npub1ftt05tg… ) - many updates to Routstr, a protocol to buy and sell LLM compute using Cashu payments over Nostr
OTRTA (Routstr client) (by npub1ygjd597… ) - Openrouter over nostr using Cashu for selling local/API compute in a self-custodial manner
Local++ (by shroominic) - Mobile app for local LLM models with dynamic online/offline switching using Routstr/OTRTA

Remote Vibin' Tools

Wingman (by npub1jss47s4… ) - AI Development remote assistant app, which now can use many LLM providers
Opencode UI (by Justin) - Web companion for managing remote opencode instances

Communication & Social

NEET (by Justin) - P2P calls via Nostr using Iroh for hole punching
Marmot Chat (by Justin) - Audio/video calls between Nostr IDs using MLS for E2EE & MoQ for data transfer
Innpub (by npub1p4kg8zx… & Justin) - Location sensitive voice meetup app using MoQ

Maps & Location

Spotstr (by npub1zc6ts76… ) - Maps on Nostr with encrypted group sharing of locations and importing BTCMaps data
Earthly.city (by npub182jczun… ) - Maps stitched, stored, and served as blobs
Nostr Globe (by Evan) - Mapping map overlay data on the globe - very pretty
Gather (by npub1rtcjydw… ) - Spontaneous event publishing with temporary postings

File & Blob Management

BloVM (by Gzuuus) - Blossom server monitor & indexer with blob health checks, also uses ContextVM
Blob Box (by hzrd149) - simple Blossom server built for UmbrelOS

Mining - by npub16vzjegl…

hashpool - Improvements on hashpool - mining pools, eHash & Cashu; dashboard, proxy
bitcoin-nostr-relay - A Rust library for relaying Bitcoin transactions over the Nostr

Cashu NUT Proposals - by vnprc

NUT-XX: Deterministic NUT-13 Derivation Paths - Dynamically and predictably map currency unit names to derivation paths.
NUT-XX: Mining Share Payment Method - Proposal to mint ehash with the mining_share payment method.

Networking & Infrastructure

Paygress (by npub1qnw27f2… ) - VM provisioning and VPN purchasing over Nostr with Kubernetes integration
noPorts (by npub1hw6amg8… ) - NGrok-like service over Nostr with smart reverse proxy
noDNS (by Arjen) - DNS over Nostr
FIPs (by Arjen) - Fuck IPs using bloom filters
Chrysalis (by Noa) - Atomic Cashu mint migration with "traveling server" concept

Wallets & Payments

noDNS BIP353 & BOLT12 (by npub175aemyd… ) - BIP353 & BOLT12 payments over noDNS
Nutoff (by Gzuuus) - Cashu wallet using ContextVM for remote access
Wally (by Paul & Arjen) - Desktop native wallet with NWC
Beacon (by Pete Winn) - AI and Bitcoin stuffed in chat apps, WhatsApp/Signal/Qual uses ContextVM

Search & Discovery

ants (by Gigi) - Nostr search done reasonably well
Boris (by Gigi) - Highlighter fixed and done right - finally!
Seekstr (by TheFux & k0sh) - Semantic multimedia search across Nostr data

Applesauce & Window.nostrdb.js - by hzrd149

Window.nostrdb.js - A polyfill for window.nostrdb
Backyard Explorer - An example search app for window.nostrdb
Nostr Bucket - Browser extension that provides a Nostr event cache to all web apps
Nostr Gatekeeper - A Nostr connect bunker that actually works

Memes & Games - by Pete

Retired in a field - solving developer funding and using ContextVM
Craig David - get roasted by Craig David(AI), because no matter what, he's having a better week than you.

Hyper-media/note/OS/vibe - by Paul

Hypernote - Main idea of the hypermedia system built on Nostr
Hypernote Stories - Story feature extension
Hypernote Elements - UI elements library
Hypernote OS - Hypernote imagined as an operating system

Zig doing Nostr, finally! - by Paul

Zig MDX - An MDX (Markdown with JSX) tokenizer and parser written in Zig
Zing Nostr Loader - A WASM-first Nostr event loader built with Zig, designed for high-performance caching and deduplication
Hypernote Pages - Component-oriented version of Hypernote OS using zig-mdx and zig-nostr-loader for building reactive Nostr applications

Web Browser

Frontier Browser (by Justin) - The Web is Dead, Long Live the Web!

Memes

We had some great memes!

don't fuck with spiders
bum fist
retired in a field
sometimes you are the retard, sometimes the cow
moo money, moo cows
the ultimate fight is the cow within
localhost maximalist
FIPs: Fuck IPs

Experiments in SEC-05

This cohort saw many experimentations in the tradition of #SovEng:

We had a proper chef for our BBQs this time, and they were a feast with good cuts of handpicked meat from local butchers, Sangria, and freshly made Ponchas!
We had outdoor BBQs after our Sunday hikes, and they were quite fun!
Week 4 was an unstructured week to give everyone a breather from the intensity of the vibe, which was highly appreciated, and gave us new information to work with.
Week 5 saw collaborative work for group demos, an exercise in composition and building more complex things, which resulted in some excellent projects.

Paths Forward for "the other stuff"

We are starting to build less social media and more of the other stuff on Nostr. What we have on our hands are the seeds to completely rethink the entire Internet stack, layer 2 and upwards. We think we have the primitives and a general sense of direction to make ICANN and IANA irrelevant, DNS optional, Certificate Authorities unnecessary, and solve 402.

Path Forward for SovEng

As has been shared with our Alumni, we are professionalising and making structural changes to SovEng. We are stronger and way more motivated than ever. SEC-05 truly felt like our experimentations had matured, and we are onto something truly radical. It's time to focus our efforts and boost this 10x. We have big plans for next year, which shall be announced as they materialise.

Next item on the agenda is to brainstorm how we want to conduct the next year and beyond. In the very least, there will be the regular two cohorts, but we want to be more focused and have continuity that SEC is. We have been contemplating doing at least 3 cohorts, of which two will be a bit shorter (in spring & fall) and one of regular length, i.e., 6 weeks (probably in summer). Along with that, we do wonder if we can do smaller sprints with select participants on focused domains. Maybe even 3-day sauna retreats.

A lot of what we can do in the immediate future depends on a lot of some things. Regardless, we are very ambitious and our stoke is over 9000! SovEng will continue, and we will keep shipping the future no matter what!

Closing Notes

SEC-05 was a blast, but it wouldn't have been possible without our participants loosing sleep before Demo Days showing off their awesome vibes, the Captains for their time and leadership, the ladies at the Cowork being such wonderful hosts, npub1eh4lrnz… our chef for the feasts, npub1tdc9um9… for providing the space, npub12hcytyr… for the badass artwork and made our swag awesome, npub1l2vyh47… for the groundwork , and Gigi for the heart he puts into SovEng and making it a point to participate despite his challenges.

Altright me laddies, now get back to yer piratin'! I'll leave y'all with this..

Neither Nostalgia Nor Utopia

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 20:48:50 GMT

There's this phrase that you sometimes hear uttered during our cohorts, a quote from John Vervaeke: "Neither nostalgia nor utopia."

It is a powerful statement, resonating deeply with the work we do at Sovereign Engineering. It serves as a warning, a constant reminder of two of the most alluring and dangerous traps for anyone trying to build a better future.

The Trap of Utopia

Utopia. The promise of a perfect world, a final solution, an end to all struggle. It always was, and it always will be a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that.

History is littered with the corpses of utopian dreams. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," and the best of intentions often lead to the worst of outcomes, as a brief glance at any utopian endeavor will quickly reveal.

Bitcoiners should understand this intuitively. Bitcoin is no utopia. It’s the opposite: a stark reflection of reality, with all its sharp edges and unforgiving consequences. It’s a system that demands radical responsibility—a footgun of the highest caliber. It doesn’t solve human nature; it accounts for it. It doesn’t promise a perfect world; it provides a single, immutable anchor in a world of chaos.

The same holds true for Nostr, for that matter. It is no utopian communications protocol. It’s messy, inconsistent, and gloriously incomplete. And yet, it works. It’s real. A step in a certain direction, not a final destination.

The Trap of Nostalgia

Nostalgia. A yearning for a past that never quite was. A look back at "the good old days," with their raw, untamed spirit. A desire to "return to the source." This pull is painfully visible in the aesthetics of many nostr clients—heck, even our own website with the blocky charm of Windows 95 buttons. It's hard to resist the longing for the wild west that was the bulletin boards of old.

Yes, there's value in looking back. Lessons are there to be learned from what worked and what was lost. But the past is for drawing from, not for living in.

The trap of nostalgia is that the world it remembers no longer exists. Its memory is but a beautiful, distorted echo. Attempting to perfectly recreate it is as futile as building a utopian future. The past was never perfect, and we may not return to it. One cannot go home to a place that ceased to exist.

A New Reality

So what is the path forward, if both the ghosts of the past and the mirages of the future are traps? What is the goal? The path is an incremental one; the goal is to build something real by putting one foot after the other. The direction is revealed by walking.

Building something real means making difficult trade-offs in a world of constraints. It is not about building something that will be perfect forever. It's about building something that provides a real benefit to real people; something that puts the user's sovereignty first; something that empowers the individual, instead of trapping them or selling them.

Learning from the past without getting trapped in it. Striving for a better future without succumbing to the fantasy of a perfect one. That's the challenge. Building tools for sovereign individuals, right here, in the messy and imperfect now.

Engineering Dialogue

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 04:10:42 GMT

Every time we speak into the void of the internet, we are entering into a dialogue with the world. The world reacts, and even if we can’t see the faces of our audience, their reactions are real. They manifest in the digital realm, in conversations, in shared ideas, in the birth of new projects.

Dialogue is at the core of Sovereign Engineering. It is why the program was created, why we made the decisions we made, and why our weekly loop is structured the way it is. It is the heart and the engine of each cohort.

From the get-go, the idea was to create an environment that is conducive to high-bandwidth communication, experimentation, and ideation. The overarching goal was and is one and the same: implementation. Creating—and shipping—new freedom tech.

The Problem of Creation

Why is dialogue so important? Because creating new things is hard. Innovation is hard. It doesn't just happen magically, and it most definitely doesn't happen on its own.

However, there's a certain kind of magic that we wanted to reproduce when we first started talking about Sovereign Engineering. The magic that sometimes happens in and around conferences: when people who are fascinated with the same topic, drawn together by the same ideals, come together for the first time. When some of this magic happens at conferences (if it does at all), it seems that the time is always too short. A couple of days of hectic energy, and it’s over. We wanted to see if we could replicate and prolong the conditions that make this magic happen.

Shipping new freedom tech is the goal, but how do you get there? How do you move from a vague idea to a tangible implementation? How do you navigate the vast space of possibilities and find something that is not only interesting to you, but also to your peers, and ultimately to the world?

You can't do it alone. It is extremely difficult to solve the hard problems by oneself, if at all. Most ill-defined problems of the world were not solved by individuals, but by distributed cognition, as John Vervaeke would call it.

Writing words and code is now cheaper than ever, which means that having the right idea is one of the most valuable resources. Yes, you will need to sit down in solitude and do the work to make robust implementations. But solitude won't do you any good to figure out whether you are lost or not, to know whether you are headed in the right direction.

That's what we want to provide: some guidance, and possibly even a North Star that orients you.

Creating Dialogue through Structure

But simply throwing a bunch of smart people in a room and hoping for the best is a recipe for chaos, not creation. Raw creative energy, uncontained, dissipates into nothingness. You need a structure—not a cage, but a container. A framework that channels the flow of dialogue, creates the conditions for serendipity, and acts as a midwife for new ideas.

That's why the entire structure of our program is engineered to facilitate dialogue. Every component, every scheduled event, every shared meal is an opportunity for conversation; for the cross-pollination of ideas. The weekly rhythm of our program is a testament to this philosophy.

In addition to this structured approach, the advent of LLMs and "vibe-coding" now allows us to enter into an ongoing dialogue with technology itself. An interesting turn of events, given that dialogue is at the core of what we do.

Plus, thanks to agents getting reasonably good at coding, you don’t have to do the groundwork of sitting down for hours to produce a working prototype. You can literally speak your ideas into existence, as we did in the last cohort. And once something exists, you can properly and meaningfully talk about it, and pursue it further—or not.

The Philosophy of Dialogue

Why this obsession with dialogue? Because top-down preaching has never worked (and never will). We don't want to preach what needs to be done. What we want is a dynamic, interactive program where anyone can participate and everyone has something to contribute.

The structure of our program is downstream from our worldview. It comes from a deep place of self-motivation and belief. We don't want to micromanage. We want to get the right people involved, people with the right values, with the right amount of care and motivation, and let them do the things that need to be done.

We have many mantras that we repeat throughout each cohort, and one of them is the following: everyone knows something that you don't. You have something to learn from absolutely anyone. It doesn't matter how well educated they are (or how well-educated you think you are). It doesn't matter where they come from. It doesn't matter what you think of them. Everyone has something to teach you.

The structure of our program is designed to create an environment where this special kind of learning and trust-building can happen. That's also why we have a strict "no outsiders" rule. Each cohort builds a shared history, a shared context, and a level of camaraderie that allows for open and honest dialogue. We have learned early on that bringing in outsiders destroys this dynamic.

As mentioned in a previous post, Sovereign Engineering is a program geared towards engineers. We are looking for people who can build (and ship!) stuff; people that have an engineer mindset and attitude; people who actually run the numbers; who care about cryptographic verification and know enough about cryptography to apply it. The conversations are technical, the problems are technical, and in our opinion, most of the solutions (if there are any) will have to be technical too.

We wholeheartedly agree with Hal Finney, who famously said that “The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.” Liberation is what we're after. From platforms, from golden cages, from the attention economy—in short: liberation from technology that controls its users.

We believe the internet is broken in more ways than one, and we believe that we can do better. We have a burning desire to fix these issues, and we want to work with people who share our vision for a better web.

Education is not the filling of a vessel; it's the kindling of a flame.

— Plutarch

We are here to provide the fuel for your flame, but a flame needs to exist already. You need to be here for the right reasons, be self-motivated, and be truly excited about the things we are constantly talking about and working on.

Birthing new Ideas

In the Socratic sense, we view the program as a midwife to new ideas, a midwife for new freedom tech. We are not here to tell people what to think or what to build. We are here to help them give birth to their own ideas.

When the right people come together—mission-aligned, motivated, and feeling safe enough to build trust and share their wildest ideas for the future—that's when novel insight has a chance of happening.

We often joke that we want ideas to have sex so that new freedom tech can be born, and we're only half-joking when we're saying that. That’s, in a nutshell, what we're aiming for when running a Sovereign Engineering cohort.

Measuring Success

But just inspiration isn't enough, as every engineer knows. It is transpiration that makes things real. "Proof of Work," as some would call it.

Our measure for success is simple: If projects born from the program make it out into the wild, we've succeeded. If they die on the vine, we've failed. And by that measure, the results speak for themselves: Blossom, Nutzaps, Cashu Wallets, Wikifreedia, npub.cash, Nsite, TollGate, Zapstore, and more are out in the wild, and thriving. And we are confident that this list will grow longer with each passing cohort.

This will always be the ultimate test of our dialogues. It’s not about how many interesting conversations we have, or how many great ideas we come up with. It’s about what we create. It’s about the tangible impact we have on the world. It’s about building the tools that will help us build a freer and sovereign future.

And that, in the end, is what Sovereign Engineering is all about. It's not about words, but about actions. It's not just about ideas, but about implementing said ideas to see if they survive contact with reality.

The entire program is an engine built to spur conversations—and, ultimately, produce new creations.

The dialogue continues—in prose, in recorded conversations, and most importantly, in shipped code.

This essay was brought about by various dialogues. If you are interested in participating in Sovereign Engineering, you can apply to the next cohort.

Sovereign Engineering: What's in a Name?

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 19:33:03 GMT

The name “Sovereign Engineering” was not chosen by accident. It is our essence, our story, our rallying cry for a better future, a better internet. It is our mission statement. When we chose it, we were very deliberate. It’s a declaration of intent. It’s the banner under which we sail.

Engineering Sovereignty

First and foremost, this is a program for engineers. Not researchers, not theorists, not thinkers, not talkers. Engineers. People who build things. People who ship things.

In a world drowning in bullshit, the ability to build and ship is a superpower. It cuts through the noise. It’s a practical, tangible, and undeniable proof of work. An idea is worth little. A working prototype is worth a thousand brainstorm sessions. A shipped product is worth a thousand prototypes.

This is why we focus on engineering as a craft. A discipline. It’s not just about slapping some code together. It’s about understanding the materials, the tools, and the trade-offs. It’s about building things that are robust, reliable, and resilient. Things that are seaworthy.

In the Spirit of Bitcoin

What does it mean to build something "in the spirit of Bitcoin?" It’s a question we return to again and again. It’s a philosophical touchstone, a guiding principle. It's about building things right.

Bitcoin is more than just code; it's a set of values made manifest. It’s about decentralization, censorship-resistance, and individual empowerment. It’s about creating systems that are transparent, auditable, and antifragile.

Building in the spirit of Bitcoin means embracing these values. It means favoring simplicity over complexity. It means building for the long term, not for a quick flip. It means creating tools that serve the user, not the other way around. It’s a commitment to open-source, to permissionless innovation, and to the idea that technology should be a liberating force.

This philosophy is downstream from our worldview. It informs not just what we build, but how we build it, and why. It’s a rejection of the parasitic models of the current web, the walled gardens, the data silos, the attention economy. We are not here to build another cage, however gilded. We are here to build tools for freedom.

Which brings me to our logo. The ship. A vessel, charting unknown waters. This is the perfect metaphor for what we do. We are explorers of the vast, open, cryptographic sea that Bitcoin and Nostr have created. These are new frontiers, wild and untamed. To navigate them, you need a sturdy ship, a skilled crew, and a clear destination.

The act of shipping is the act of setting sail. It’s the moment of truth. The moment your creation leaves the safety of the harbor and faces the real world. It’s scary. It’s exhilarating. It’s the whole point.

Sovereign Tools, Sovereign Individuals

The "sovereign" part of our name is, of course, a direct nod to the seminal book The Sovereign Individual. It speaks to the why behind the what. We are not just building for the sake of building. We are building for a purpose: to birth new freedom tech.

What is freedom tech? It’s technology that empowers the individual. It’s technology that pushes back against centralization, against control, against surveillance. It’s technology that gives people the tools to be sovereign in the digital realm.

A sovereign engineer is someone who can stand on their own two feet. They can build, deploy, and maintain their creations. They are not dependent on the gatekeepers of the old world. They are, in a sense, full-stack individuals.

This is what we aim to cultivate in the program. Not just technical skills, but a mindset. A spirit of independence, of self-reliance, of radical agency.

Join Us

So, what’s in a name? For us, everything.

Sovereign Engineering is our mission, encapsulated in two words. We are here to build. We are here to ship. We are here to explore the frontiers of freedom tech.

We are not a lab. We are not an incubator. We are a fleet. And we are setting sail.

The sea is wide and open. The winds are picking up. The journey has just begun.

Come sail with us.

SEC-02 Calling!

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 21:37:04 GMT

It feels like yesterday when we decided to embark on the journey that was SEC-01. We didn’t know what we would get ourselves into. We still barely know. But just like the guy in the meme, we’re gonna do it again. We’re going to walk the walk, we’re going to ship things, and we’re going to have a good time while doing it.

https://m.primal.net/HpDG.mp4

We expect a lot of experimentation, discussion, and exploration. We expect that SEC-02 will rhyme with SEC-01, even though it won’t be a carbon copy of the first cohort. We’d encourage you to listen to this Plebchain Radio episode and (the end of) this Citadel Dispatch episode to get an idea of what we’re aiming for.

Scratching the Surface

Our thesis remains the same: The space that is opened up by Bitcoin, nostr, and other freedom tech is vast. We believe that we have barely scratched the surface. We believe that lots of awesome stuff is yet to be built, and we believe that the new paradigms will allow us to step outside of the extractive models that are so prevalent in the current landscape.

If you believe the same, you might be a perfect candidate for the second cohort—and you should apply today.

Markets, Synergies, and Peers

As foreshadowed in a previous post, we want to focus on peer-to-peer markets and exchange. With nostr acting as an effective and open layer for discoverability, and sats (and esats) acting as a bearer instrument for final settlement, what used to be siloed marketplaces can finally be opened up to merchants and customers alike.

It allows us to move from the win-lose of zero-sum games to the win-win-win of positive-sum games: good for you, good for me, good for everyone. In one word: Synergies.

We hope that the various peers that are working on these markets—as well as the building blocks that make them possible—will collaborate and learn from each other, just like they did in the first cohort. And even if your expertise is tangential, we hope that novel insights, products, and services will come out of it all. Just like they did in the first cohort.

That’s the basic idea of the Sovereign Engineering cohorts: Explore the unknown. Re-think how we do things online. Ship things that last.

Starting May 6 — Apply Now!

The second cohort will start on May 6 and will conclude on June 28, and just like the first one, it will be on the beautiful island of Madeira.

Applications are closing soon, but we still have a couple of spots left.

Apply now!

SEC-01: A Pirate Ship Full of Guinea Pigs

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 15:51:09 GMT

Oh my, what a ride. Where do I even begin? A wise man once said that the best place to begin is at the beginning. So I'll try to do just that.

SEC-01: The Beginning

I don't even know how it all started anymore, but I know for a fact that it was Martijn's idea. And the idea was this: let's do something like a Bitcoin Academy on Madeira!

"Neat," I thought. "Let's do it," André said. "Let's fuck shit up and do a nostr thing instead," Pablo remarked. "But it must have a pirate theme," was my only objection. "Deal."

"Deal."

SEC-01: What's the Big Deal?

I don't think we did anything special. What we're trying to do, and what I think we managed to do, is to get the right people together at the right time. We knew from the get-go that we didn't know what we were doing. And we decided that that's okay.

We decided that that's okay because any explorative adventure is by definition unknown. And that's what the Sovereign Engineering Cohort was and still is: an explorative adventure.

So I guess the big deal was that we were knowingly venturing into the unknown. And 21 people signed up for it. Willingly.

That's a big deal.

SEC-01: The Crew

Every pirate ship needs a crew. We started as four: Martijn, André, Pablo, and myself. We invited three more: Paul, Ben, and Tony—our North Star team for SEC-01. And then we invited 21 more to board the ship.

Our 21 participants were people with vastly different backgrounds, from vastly different countries, having vastly different ideas about how Bitcoin, Lightning, and nostr could transform the internet, and the world at large. One thing that everyone had in common was a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the status quo. Everyone knew and still knows that large parts of the internet are broken. And everyone felt that there's something we can do about it to fix it.

We talked a lot about what it means to build it right. Or at least what it means to build it wrong.

One goal we had in mind was to learn from each other so that we may not repeat all the mistakes that we made in the past. And I think it started working immediately.

SEC-01: The First Week

We started the program with a brief introduction about what we had in mind for the eight weeks, as well as an introduction of the crew, the participants, and what everyone was working on.

One thing that we try to focus on is what I will call the loop. The loop is what I consider the Cornerstone of the Sovereign Engineering Cohort, as it neatly summarizes the main idea of the program.

The idea is simple: you talk about what you're going to build, you build it, and you show it to everyone. Rinse and repeat. Every week. For two months.

SEC-01: Distributed Cognition

I am convinced that the problems that we are facing cannot be solved by traditional means. More importantly, they cannot be solved by a lone wolf. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

So the question becomes: how do we get enough eyeballs looking at the right thing? And more than that: how do we get them to look at problems from the right angle, inhabiting the right perspective?

SEC-01: Walking the Walk

Looking at things it's necessary but not sufficient. If you want to solve deep problems you have to think about them deeply. So again, the question becomes: how do we create an environment that facilitates and allows for deep conversations?

I think the Ancients were onto something when they came together at the gymnasium to discuss deep problems, have deep conversations, and—pardon the pun—hash things out. It strikes me as odd that all the paintings of these times show people not only talking but walking.

A lot of people who figured out solutions to hard problems in the past enjoyed an occasional stroll through the park. Not alone, but with company. There's something about walking and talking that really gets the brain juices flowing. From Aristotle to Einstein, the greats all intuitively figured out that walking facilitates proper talking, and proper talking facilitates proper thinking. Someone from the cohort remarked, "Left foot right foot; left brain right brain." I believe it.

So that's what we did. Not only did we talk the talk, but we also walked the walk. Once a week. Granted, not all of our walks were perfect or magical, but many of them were. And a lot of stuff got figured out. And once you've got stuff figured out, it's almost trivial to build it. Figuring it out is the hard part.

SEC-01: What Came out of It

Some of you might have been fortunate enough to experience the final Demo Day of SEC-01, held on the last day of Bitcoin Atlantis. It took us three hours to show what came out of it, failing demos and all. There's so much stuff that I had to put the list in a separate post, aptly titled:

"SEC-01: What Came out of It"

Vibes were high, the room was packed, and while most of the presentations kinda sucked, everyone tried their best to paint a picture of what they have been working on or what problems they cared about most.

And that's what we cared about most: Getting the people together that care, and providing an environment where they are encouraged to collaborate and discuss freely.

We strongly believe that the pie is big enough for us all. Now it's not the time to think about competition. Now is the time to focus on collaboration. We believe that Bitcoin is a move from zero-sum to positive-sum thinking. We believe that we should aim at win-win-win: good for you, good for me, good for us and the environment we’re embedded in.

SEC-02: What's Ahead

The space that has opened up by Bitcoin, nostr, and other freedom tech is vast. We have barely scratched the surface.

The goal of the Sovereign Engineering Cohorts is to scratch the surface as properly as we know how. So we're going to do it again. In May. Same recipe, same crew, different participants. The focus will be on P2P markets and exchange.

We're not here to make any promises. I want to repeat once more what we've mentioned in the past: "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low No wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."

But it's going to be fun. Maybe.

SEC-01: What Came out of It

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Some of the things that came out of SEC-01 are already live:

A lot of the projects that participants worked on have a strong focus on DVMs...

...as well as developer collaboration and tooling...

...and NWC:

Many more things are still in the making:

And if my Spidey senses are to be trusted, a lot more things will come out of the conversations that were had in the last 2 months.

Keep an eye out for:

ghole.xyz
pubkey.studio
pubkey.land

...and other weird stuff.

Turns out you can actually re-invent the future if you put 21 guinea pigs on a pirate ship.

Meet the 1st Cohort

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 12:09:46 GMT

In a little over a month from now, 21 participants will be joining us and the Mutiny Team for SEC-01, the first Sovereign Engineering Cohort in Madeira. We are thrilled that so many devs and builders decided to join us and can't wait to see what everyone's going to build.

If you've been around the lightning & nostr sphere for a while, you might recognize some of the participants:

In case you didn't make it this time around, don't despair. We're gonna do it again. There will be a 2nd cohort in May, taking place from May 6 to June 28, and applications for SEC-02 are now open.

Sovereign Engineering

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 13:56:27 GMT

We are building something cool that maybe you'll be interested in.

What is this? An announcement of an announcement (AoA for short)?

Well. Yes.

But bear with us.

We are doing an AoA because we haven't figured out all the details yet, (e.g. the name of what we're doing)

But here is what we do know:

2 months of focused building in #madeira.
21 builders with a record of shipping things in the #lightning/#nostr space
working individually or in teams to make progress towards advancing freedom tech
npub1dergggk… and npub1l2vyh47… will be physically (and spiritually) there to help bounce ideas off
Funding (likely) available to all teams

Dates? Jan 8th - March 1st.

How to be a part of it? Details to follow very soon™️

But in the mean time, if you're stoked, DM us at npub1s0veng2….