Over the last five years, Elastos has built the infrastructure to run a complete peer-to-peer internet. This allows the web surfer to shred new and higher waves of a fresh oceanic net with no middlemen whatsoever. The vision of this blockchain behemoth and its founding Neptune-like deity of the deep, Rong Chen, began in the days of yore during his tenure at Microsoft building ground-breaking operating systems.
In the past twenty years, and in a way captain Rong foresaw, giant corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter have created near monopolies on what information people can readily see, how they view it, and who owns the data that users create. These platforms take all user data and keep it for their own use. These guys want to charge people to get on the beach and wade in the water, while telling them where to sit, taking pictures of them in their swimsuits, and then selling the bikini photos to the highest bidder. Not cool, bros!
Built to address centralized problems with current social media platforms, Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) is a protocol that allows developers to create and deploy decentralized applications for communication between users. The Bitcoin-centric Nostr tide is rising from the murky centralized depths with a new peer-to-peer communication structure. In its main public-facing expression, Nostr is a platform allowing users to post social media-type messages without censorship or intermediaries. Elastos and Nostr share deeply decentralized functionalities, BTC integration, and a love for the open sea of communications, data, and freedom. Let’s ride!
While Elastos has decentralized applications such as Glide asset exchange, the Feeds social media platform, and Elacity Digital Rights Management creation station and marketplace, its depth and potential as a comprehensive operating system has yet to find its public-facing breakthrough decentralized application. Moreover, Nostr’s social media protocol could very well birth that dApp, while its infrastructure can provide Elastos creators with an additional layer of composability, a hybrid communication model, and global reach.
Both Elastos, with its blockchain utilization, and Nostr allow developers to create dApps. Elastos, though, through its native virtual machine, has additional capabilities that enable developers to create secure, sandboxed applications that can interface with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) architectures and monetize digital creations and user-generated data. These structures would allow Nostr users to generate and transfer value in a currently unavailable way. The primary source of revenue for Nostr users at this moment is through running a relay. Enhanced marketplace functionality and access can do nothing but add to the protocol’s popularity.
Currently, using Nostr is more technically demanding than using Twitter. This may discourage some people from using it. Elastos Essentials super wallet, a sleek, multichain Web3 gem of an access point, can support users posting to Nostr directly from their wallet. With Elastos’s amazing developers and technical expertise, simplifying using Nostr is a natural interface that would create serious synergies between the two protocols; low-hanging coconuts ripe for the picking. Word on the beach is, Elastos is working on something a lot like this already! Righteous! In fact, the preexisting Feeds social media platform could be woven into Nostr’s messaging and vice versa so that users post to both spaces just by using the simple user interface of Feeds.
Many relays supporting Nostr charge fees. Elastos Essentials can streamline, diversify, and automate the payment process with their top-shelf self-custody wallet. Making running a Nostr relay easy for a totally non-technical user is another way Elastos can weave Nostr and itself together.
Through its comprehensive architecture, Elastos makes personal data ownable and storable. Elastos users hold their own data and rights to that data while having the native marketplace of Elacity as an outlet for getting paid for their creations. Nostr creators can have the same opportunities. Elastos can empower Nostr users and creators to exchange services and products with revolutionary worldwide market access, unparalleled security and reliability of the Bitcoin network, true digital ownership, and endless creative freedom. Additionally, Elastos can provide Nostr with a full and final operating system, free from any and all centralization constraints. So don’t just rent a surfboard; make your own! Open a surf shop with Elastos!
At this time, Nostr relays may use Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services for core functionalities, such as data storage and hosting, exposing the protocol to centralized points of possible failure, manipulation, and censorship. Elastos can ensure complete decentralization for Nostr relays while, through its merged mining with BTC, offering the big Kahuna security of the Bitcoin network. While many VPS (Virtual Private Server) options are available, not just AWS or Azure, even smaller, more grassroots VPS providers still have the standard centralized concerns of censorship and failure. Elastos fixes this.
Elastos’s Hive can store all the Nostr data and communications securely and in a fully decentralized manner. The ELA architecture can host Nostr relays in its own cloud. This can revolutionize social media and bring the internet back to its original vision of freedom and openness for all, free from gatekeepers and giant corporations determining how and what people share.
As with any relationship, communication is key. Interfacing regularly with the Nostr community via Telegram and other social chat group platforms can create a responsive and immediate bridge to address the desires, considerations, and imagination of Nostr users. So let’s circle up and see what we can build together!
Some high-profile, Bitcoin-centric entities running relays for Nostr include Zebedee and Kollider. Deep support by Elastos in the Nostr vision can do nothing but gain advocates for its empowering infrastructure.
Elastos can dedicate resources to building an Instagram and/ or Tik Tok clone on Nostr, making a clean, beautiful, fast platform.
The Nostr community is gearing up to release a film on Nostr. Elacity, the one-stop Digital Rights Management protocol on Elastos can assist these creators in publishing, owning, and financially benefiting from their work. If creators on Nostr can increase their financial well-being and creative authority using the Elastos tech stack, the horizon is the limit.
Forward-thinking leaders are reimagining the seven seas of the internet. As the popularity of Nostr grows, with Elastos’s support and integration, ELA’s future is sure to be bright. Don’t just stand in the sand; get your longboard out and go for a cruise! The ocean belongs to everyone, and an Elastos and Nostr team-up is just the thing for clear skies and epic rides ahead.
This article was created by Aaron Water and won first prize in the Best Article Contest.
