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.

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.