'Bama Recap & Rockin' Roadmap

We're filled with gratitude here as we enjoy products from Bitcoin-based merchants like Soapminer, Oshi, Ketolish.us, Peony Lane Vineyards, and Great Ghee who are already present on Nostr. There's a lot more artists and artisans out there too, and (provided we can afford it) we plan on continuing to sample the goods of ALL these pioneers we hope to serve one day.

There's something different about the level of care put into a good or service when you're trading it for the hardest money that has ever existed. Or maybe it's the fact that these merchants are carefully cultivating their reputations on Nostr amongst discerning peers. Probably some mix of both. Whatever it is, we're lucky to be consuming the goods of merchants who already use some iteration of de-commerce technology to sell their wares.

The puzzle pieces of a beautiful future are there waiting for us to sort them into place. If you need some help imagining it, our friends at Soak Quest posted a slightly hilarious and visionary epic showing what this future might look like.

With all that said, let's dive in to what happened this month:

Nostrbama Recap

It's hard to describe what we felt during our adventure to Mobile, Alabama to meet a bunch of likeminded Nostriches. The best we can come up with is it felt like hanging out with long-lost family.

The week started out with a series of talks at the Haberdasher. The prolific and unstoppable "CEO of Nostr" Derek Ross opened things up with some fun history. The man seems to have limitless energy and enthusiasm for all things Nostr. He's a must-follow.

Then Vic of Cornychat.com came up to showcase what his app is currently capable of and what he's got in the pipeline. We learned quickly that Cornychat is where all the cool kids on Nostr hang out.

After that, Manime presented what we can only describe as the perfect technical foundation for us to follow. He laid out a detailed and compelling argument as to why Nostr should become the social layer for ANY application on the internet. Thanks again for the layup, Mani.

And then came Conduit. We took the stage last to run through our "Unleashing De-Commerce" presentation and live tech demo. There's no point in me telling you about it here because we re-recorded and posted it on Nostr shortly after the event. Please take a watch and let us know what you think!

Once the talks were wrapped up, the severely underrated Brooks Hubbert and his crew got up and jammed while our gracious hosts Sergio, Mallory and Riddler hustled to keep us all well fed and "watered". Needless to say, conversations flowed and connections flourished.

The following day we all hung out at a local AI/VR studio run by TheDarkSith before grabbing some delicious barbeque. We even made a cool Nostr promo video on the spot with our avatars.

Then we capped it off on the final day with some skydiving hooked up by the one and only world-record-holding daredevil DankSwoops.

We wish all conferences were this cool– can't wait for the next one.

Announcements

A few things we'd like to share:

1) We've Moved to Gitlab

We're not perfect, but as we build this company we're trying to keep our internal tools as close as we practically can to the ethos of the community we're in. Github is a centralized, closed-source, & proprietary service owned by Microsoft. While there's a few awesome Nostr-based Git projects we have our eyes on, we found Gitlab to be a solid open-source option for us in the meantime. As a bonus, it's a one-stop shop helping us with project management, CI/CD, automation, and much more.

2) Open Alpha Launches in September

While our tech was definitely ready for a live-demo, we needed a couple months to release something public-facing. That being said– we're almost there. Both Conduit.Market and the Conduit Merchant Portal will be launching in open alpha next month.

The primary goal with both of these apps is to provide an intuitive & familiar UX that walks shoppers and sellers through a manual purchase flow. This version of the experience is, and will hopefully always be, completely free to use.

We're really excited but please note: this is an alpha release. There will be bugs. Features will be limited. We still have a ton of work to do.

Part of the reason it's taken so long to release is that we've mapped out a lot of exciting features that we needed to leave room for in our architecture. Now that we've got it sketched out, we can release the initial version and add features as we go. Here's a couple design samples we're working towards for Conduit Market:

Things like product ratings, advanced filters, and social features won't be in the alpha release yet– but we've got a spot for them to be built in. That being said: the app will be functional and to allow you to find products and buy them.

Here's a couple shots of the Merchant Portal we're working towards.

Similar to the Market experience, the dashboard will not have all the features you see there yet– but we will have enough to get merchants selling to real people through a DM-based checkout flow.

We're really looking forward to the pioneers of Nostr testing out what we've made. Good or bad– we can't wait to start getting real user feedback so we can continue to improve the experience.

3) Future Roadmap Milestones

• We're planning on re-launching a fully "Nostr-ized" version of Conduit.Coffee that will simultaneously post products on Conduit.Market in November of 2025. Our design team is already working on hi-fidelity mockups for this.
  • We'll be using the upgraded version of Conduit.Coffee to test and showcase the premium merchant services we'll be offering (more on that below).
  • Once launched, we'll be integrating multiple payment and shipping options on Conduit.Coffee to test them out for future merchants.
• Once we have a coded template, it will actually be relatively easy to generate Nostrized individual stores from there. We hope to offer custom store generation as a service in Q1 of 2026.

Yes– this means merchants can have their own branded stores that also post products to the broader de-commerce universe. We'll write an individual blog post about this– it's HUGE and exciting.

• Following that, we'll be launching the Conduit Merchant Portal premium services. So, about that...

How do we plan to make money?

We get this question a lot and figured it would be a good time to post a response we can refer people to.

First off, nobody should ever NEED any paid service to sell through Nostr! Free versions of the experience will always exist, and we believe de-commerce through Nostr can flourish with just good UX. We hope to achieve this with our "base model" releases next month.

The protocol design will never truly allow anyone to lock people into a paid service anyway– they will always be optional. And in case you forgot, the protocol doesn't lend itself well to manipulative profiling practices.

So how do we make money under those conditions? The simple answer is a common Nostr trope: value for value.

V4V Proposal

We're going to be offering optional paid services for merchants on top of the free version of the Merchant Portal. These added gadgets will automate checkout, shipping label generation, and many other services so merchants can provide their shoppers a smooth experience that competes with traditional ecommerce. It's going to be a sales-booster service that merchants can plug into and out of whenever without compromising their sovereignty.

This experience should increase conversion rates and lower overhead for the merchant, and we'll charge a % based on gross volume handled. This will be far less of a cut than what centralized players can offer because we have less overhead and liability thanks to Nostr's beautiful design. We plan on being worth our clients money and then some if they choose the premium services. If you're winning, we win.

Sovereign Design Considerations

The design challenge is as such: how do we make these services work while preserving all user's privacy and sovereignty? We need to make sure that we can't see or control anything sensitive– this is for our own sake too: we don't want the overhead and liability!

We believe we've cracked that nut through the use of existing tools such as nsecBunkers and secure enclaves, but there's a lot of work to do before that gets delivered to others. Rest assured we'll be testing it on ourselves before we release it to anyone else. And yes, as with everything we release, the software will be open-source.

Premium Services Release Estimate

Our goal for the release of sovereignty-preserving premium merchant services is Q2 of 2026. First things first, we need to show what's possible without the need for paid services.

...then we can add the boosters to a resilient decentralized base and launch de-commerce into the stratosphere.

Thanks as always for reading. See you next month.

Cheers,

Eric FJ- Caffeinated Executive Officer, Conduit Hodlings

Acea Spades- Caffeinated Tech Officer, Conduit Hodlings

PS: You can always tune in to our Conduit.Market Nostr Profile for the same long form posts–zero email subscription required.