Jul 18, 2025 12:35:00

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey invests $10 million in nonprofit 'and Other Stuff' to develop tools using open protocol Nostr

It has been revealed that Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter who after leaving the company worked hard to launch the payment service Block, has invested $10 million (approximately 1.5 billion yen) in

and Other Stuff , a non-profit organization that is actively developing tools using the decentralized network protocol Nostr .

Jack Dorsey pumps $10M into a nonprofit focused on open source social media | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/16/jack-dorsey-pumps-10m-into-a-nonprofit-focused-on-open-source-social-media/

A decentralized network protocol is a protocol for decentralizing the management of user data, which in normal SNS, would be left to the management of the operating company. Since data management is not subject to the wishes of the operating company, the feature of this protocol is that the content of posts and data on following and followers can always be maintained, and the data can be transferred to other services that use the same protocol.

There are various decentralized network protocols such as ActivityPub , AT Protocol , and Nostr , and Bluesky, which Dorsey was involved in, Mastodon, Misskey, and others use decentralized network protocols.

In July 2025, it was revealed that Dorsey had invested in and Other Stuff, the developer of Nostr.

and Other Stuff has five pillars of activity: 'Make Nostr accessible to everyone,' 'Create tools for decentralized public and private Nostr communities,' 'Build payment infrastructure, wallets, marketplaces, and monetization tools,' 'Develop a secure and private messaging system,' and 'Make Nostr the social protocol of choice for open source AI development and integration.' The group will jointly develop and support technology that will enable others to build their own apps, including experimental projects such as development tools and libraries.

In recent years, Dorsey has become more critical of the evolution of the social media platform, saying that 'Twitter should never have been a company' and even going so far as to say that Bluesky, from whom he has since severed ties, 'seemed to be repeating the mistakes that I and others made at Twitter.'

The and Other Stuff team will operate more like a hacker community than a 'company,' and will develop new consumer social apps, development tools, libraries, etc. For example, the team is already working on

Shakespeare , a tool for building Nostr-based social apps with the help of AI.

'And Other Stuff' includes Dorsey, Twitter's first employee Evan Henshaw-Plath, Calle, developer of the electronic cash platform 'Cashu,' and Alex Gleeson, former head of engineering at Truth Social. The people who participated were mainly people who met through the joint development of Nostr, and in addition to Nostr, they plan to develop ActivityPub and Cashu.

Plath called for new 'digital rights' that would guarantee people could communicate without fear of surveillance or exploitation, that users would be able to control the relationships they build, not companies, and that algorithms would be transparent. He said that decentralized network protocols can help build these rights.