Episode Details

Source newsletter: https://nostrcompass.org/en/newsletters/2026-03-04-newsletter/ ### 00:00 Intro This episode opens with the week's big themes: relay routing, AI transport over Nostr, Marmot's first public release, and a February-by-February retrospective. ### 00:30 Outbox Model Under the Microscope Nostrability benchmarked 14 relay selection algorithms across 15 clients and libraries, showing how far smarter relay routing can push recall compared with hardcoded relay sets. The segment covers set-cover plus Thompson Sampling, NIP-66 liveness filtering, faster feed load times, and the practical case for hybrid outbox enrichment in legacy clients. - Newsletter section: https://nostrcompass.org/en/newsletters/2026-03-04-newsletter/#outbox-model-under-the-microscope - Nostrability outbox repo: https://github.com/nostrability/outbox - NIP-65 topic: https://nostrcompass.org/en/topics/nip-65/ - NIP-66 topic: https://nostrcompass.org/en/topics/nip-66/ - nostr.watch liveness data: https://nostr.watch ### 14:39 ContextVM Opens MCP NIP and Ships Ephemeral Gift Wraps ContextVM opened the two proposals that anchor its Nostr transport strategy: one for MCP JSON-RPC over Nostr and one for ephemeral gift wraps. This section explains why AI tool traffic benefits from relay-discarded delivery semantics and how ContextVM is trying to standardize that workflow without overloading the base protocol. - Newsletter section: https://nostrcompass.org/en/newsletters/2026-03-04-newsletter/#contextvm-opens-mcp-nip-and-ships-ephemeral-gift-wraps - ContextVM: https://contextvm.org - MCP over Nostr PR: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/2246 - Ephemeral Gift Wrap PR: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/2245 - CEP-19: https://docs.contextvm.org/spec/ceps/cep-19/ ### 27:09 Marmot Development Kit Ships First Public Release MDK v0.6.0 lands as the first public release of the Marmot Development Kit, bundling encrypted media, deterministic commit race handling, zeroizing secrets, and bindings beyond Rust. The segment also digs into the breaking switch from NIP-44 strings to ChaCha20-Poly1305 for kind 445 messages and the knock-on changes across the Marmot spec, MDK, and marmot-ts. - Newsletter section: https://nostrcompass.org/en/newsletters/2026-03-04-newsletter/#marmot-development-kit-ships-first-public-release - MDK v0.6.0: https://github.com/marmot-protocol/mdk/releases/tag/v0.6.0 - MIP-03 change: https://github.com/marmot-protocol/marmot/pull/48 - MDK PR #208: https://github.com/marmot-protocol/mdk/pull/208 - marmot-ts PR #54: https://github.com/marmot-protocol/marmot-ts/pull/54 ### 32:56 Wisp Ships from Alpha to Beta Wisp moved from its first alpha to beta in eight days, shipping outbox support, NIP-55 signing, Tor, NIP-47, local translation, and a real-time social graph surprisingly fast for a new client. This chapter looks at what that pace says about modern Nostr app bootstrapping and where the feature set already overlaps with longer-running clients. - Newsletter section: https://nostrcompass.org/en/newsletters/2026-03-04-newsletter/#wisp-ships-from-alpha-to-beta - Wisp repo: https://github.com/barrydeen/wisp - v0.1.0-alpha: https://github.com/barrydeen/wisp/releases/tag/v0.1.0-alpha - v0.3.4-beta: https://github.com/barrydeen/wisp/releases/tag/v0.3.4-beta ### 34:44 Vector v0.3.1 Vector ships group management upgrades, deterministic negentropy sync, GPU-accelerated voice-to-text, and broad performance wins. The discussion focuses on why reliable offline recovery matters for Marmot messaging and why 15x improvements across startup and UI paths are notable for an encrypted chat app. - Release: https://github.com/VectorPrivacy/Vector/releases/tag/v0.3.1 - Negentropy topic: https://nostrcompass.org/en/topics/negentropy/ ### 36:20 Alby Hub v1.21.5 Alby Hub adds a second default relay for NWC reliability, fixes malformed zap display issues, and expands its app store integrations. The key point here is operational resilience: fewer relay resta