Nostr as a Wire Format

Summary

Stroma treats Nostr as a compact wire format for signed, encrypted, relay-backed events. Social media is one use of Nostr, not a boundary on what the protocol can carry.

At its simplest, a Nostr event supplies:

author key + timestamp + kind + tags + content + signature

That is enough for applications to exchange opaque, verifiable objects without agreeing on a central database or application provider.

What this enables

Portable authority

An event signature can be validated independently of the application that created or displayed it. The key establishes cryptographic authority; the application decides what that authority means in context.

Typed application messages

An integer kind and a set of tags let an application define its own protocol messages while retaining the same event envelope and relay transport.

Encrypted payloads

NIP-44 provides authenticated encryption between keys. NIP-59 can place an encrypted event inside a separately signed seal and ephemeral outer envelope, reducing visible sender-recipient correlation.

Stroma deliberately gives the seal and outer gift wrap the current timestamp without randomized backward jitter. This keeps relay ordering and Acorn's checkpoint processing aligned with the actual delivery time. The policy trades away the timing-obfuscation benefit that randomized timestamps can provide.

Replaceable transport

Events can be published to or queried from different compatible relays. A relay stores and transports events; it does not have to understand Acorn's wallet or record semantics.

Wire format, not system of record

Stroma does not decide which event is authoritative application state. Acorn may apply canonical-record, continuity, replication, or recovery rules over the events it retrieves. Stroma provides the verified inputs to those rules.

This distinction keeps the protocol layer useful without turning it into an application framework.