Civkit Project Try to activate Bitcoin, the blockchain for the global peer-to-peer economy, has announced the release of its first alpha version after more than a year of development. The protocol aims to enable decentralized peer-to-peer transactions without the need for a centralized order book. The design is built around Nostr and Lightning, and has a reputation system at its core.
A team of anonymous developers, led by Nicholas Gregory (Commerceblock, MercuryLayer), has been working behind the scenes to make this vision a reality. “This project is funded by people in the Global South, and a lot of the work has involved understanding their actual needs, rather than imposing our own assumptions on them,” says Gregory. “Ray Youseff and Noones have helped us fund some of the developers, including those in the Global South, so that we can test this solution in the regions where it’s most needed.”
Civkit Node provides a UI for creating P2P trade orders. You can use it to create peer-to-peer buy and sell orders, pay pending invoices, chat with your trading counterparties, see the fiat you received to release payments, raise disputes (in the chat app), and view other trade orders.
CivKit allows for the use of custom Nostr event types to share orders between Nostr relays that accept these types, creating global purchase orders. The escrow system returns a BOLT11 invoice and locks 5% of the transaction amount into a pending invoice. The pending invoice is released upon completion of the transaction. A URL is provided to access encrypted chat and basic dispute functionality is also included.
The team expects an alpha version of the Civkit reputation system to be released within the next two weeks, after which the focus will shift to purchase order and escrow integration with Fedimint, followed by the incorporation of eCash support.
“This is an incredibly ambitious project and there is still a long way to go, but it is exciting to see the first tangible results,” Gregory added.
