Block just shipped something that should make Slack and GitHub executives at least mildly uncomfortable. The Jack Dorsey-led fintech company launched Buzz on July 21, a free, open-source collaboration workspace built entirely on the decentralized Nostr protocol.
Buzz consolidates the kind of tooling that most engineering teams currently spread across three or four different paid SaaS products. Chat lives next to code repos. Workflows run alongside media sharing. Everything talks to everything else through the Nostr protocol, which handles decentralized identity and event-signing under the hood.
The self-hosting angle is worth pausing on. Organizations can spin up their own Buzz instance as a Nostr relay, with community isolation handled by domain. That means a company’s internal communications and code never have to touch Block’s servers if they don’t want them to. For teams that do want a managed experience, Block offers hosted services at buzz.xyz.
The whole thing ships under an Apache 2.0 license. Fork it, modify it, commercialize it.
AI agents on the platform receive their own unique Nostr cryptographic keypairs. They don’t operate through a human user’s account or sit behind some API integration layer. They exist as full participants with their own permissions, their own identity, and their own audit trail.
Dorsey has been funding and championing the Nostr protocol for years. Back in 2022, he donated 14 BTC, worth roughly $245,000 at the time, to Nostr developer fiatjaf. He continued funding the project in subsequent years.
Block’s broader corporate strategy reinforces this bet. The company maintains a significant Bitcoin treasury and has built multiple financial products around the asset. Notably, Buzz does not involve any crypto tokens or digital assets. There’s no governance token, no utility token, no airdrop farming opportunity.
The Buzz codebase was available on GitHub earlier in 2026 before the public launch, suggesting Block had been developing the project in the open for months before flipping the switch on hosted services.
For Block shareholders, Buzz represents a strategic expansion into enterprise collaboration software, a market currently dominated by Microsoft (which owns GitHub and Teams) and Salesforce (which owns Slack). Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for GitHub in 2018 precisely because developer tools are a strategic chokepoint. Block is now offering a decentralized alternative to that chokepoint at zero cost.