NostrAssets halts deposits amid unprecedented user activity surge

In a Telegram announcement on Dec. 5, developers at NostrAssets, a Bitcoin infrastructure developer, advised users to refrain from making deposits temporarily, citing an influx of record-high user activity.

The service, facilitating transactions of Satoshis through the Lightning and Taproot Networks, reported onboarding over 70,000 new users since Oct. 30 and accumulating $11.8 million during the same period.

User communications

The announcement informed users to “Please await further announcements and do not attempt to deposit into NostrAssets for the time being,” coming just one day before earlier allegations were made from Fiatjaf for engaging in an affinity scam.

Nostr Assets’ Telegram thread | Source: TelegramAccording to the Dec. 4 post, Fiatjaf, the mind behind the Nostr protocol enabling the interchange of social profiles and followers across platforms, asserted, “NostrAssets has nothing to do with the Nostr protocol itself. It just borrows Nostr in naming. You should not deposit any sats to this platform.”

NostrAssets developers went on to refute the claims through their account on X, which has 39,200 followers, stating, “NostrAssets utilizes Nostr, Taproot Assets, and Lightning in its construction, making it pertinent to Nostr. However, it’s crucial to emphasize that Nostr is a decentralized, open-sourced, and censorship-resistant relay network that anyone can build on.”

The custodian says these allegations were a communication gap it would take on through the development team.

Garnering attention

Earlier this year, in April, Nostr gained attention with Forbes headlines related to Jack Dorsey’s favorite decentralized social network.

Positioned as the Bitcoin community’s emerging social media favorite, Nostr was conceptualized to compete with ious platforms, including email, blogging, Instagram, Twitter, and Discord. Although not necessarily an app, Nostr was said to introduce a new approach to sending and receiving digital text, allowing open participation and enabling users to build apps freely using the protocol.