07 Aug What is CivKit & Can it Increase Self Sovereignty?

CivKit, the brainchild of renowned Bitcoiners Nicholas Gregory, Ray Youssef, and Antoine Riard, represents a revolutionary “peer-to-peer electronic market system” leveraging Nostr, a Bitcoin-friendly decentralised social networking protocol, and Bitcoin’s Lightning Network.

CivKit: A Permissionless P2P Marketplace via Nostr & Bitcoin

CivKit is a revolutionary peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic market system built on the Nostr protocol and the Bitcoin’s Lightning Network. It aims to address the drawbacks of existing P2P marketplaces while leveraging the strengths of Nostr’s reputation-based public keys, Bitcoin-like relay nodes, and public/private key cryptography. CivKit is positioned to be a permissionless and censorship-resistant marketplace, incentivising participants to build and maintain a positive reputation similar to other P2P trading systems, thereby ensuring a reliable and trust-based trading environment.

CivKit’s novelty lies in its fusion of Bitcoin, Nostr, and Lightning Network. It advocates for reduced centralised control, upholding cryptographically-secured Bitcoin Script contracts to provide escrow services, and auto-execution upon satisfying predetermined conditions. The aim is to diminish upfront costs of entry, lower middlemen costs through innovative technology, and decrease discrimination based on location, types of trade, or trade flows.

While the concept of decentralised markets is not new, with precedents like OpenBazaar, CivKit’s commitment to ‘Infrastructure-as-a-service’ protocols, which provide incentives for nodes to enforce accurate, transparent operations, distinguishes it from its predecessors. Its promise of a fair, accessible, and transparent P2P marketplace could potentially redefine the landscape of global trade.

CivKit is a significant stride forward in the realm of P2P markets, building upon the work laid down by predecessors but aiming to surpass their limitations. The whitepaper, authored by Nicholas Gregory (Mercury Wallet), Ray Youssef (formerly of Paxful), and Antoine Riard (Bitcoin core and Rust-Lightning developer), highlights issues such as high barriers to entry, insufficient access to dispute mediation systems, and limited transparency of centralised reputation/review systems that continue to plague global marketplaces today.

Censorship-Resistant Decentralised P2P Trades Over Lightning Network

The CivKit Node is an experimental Nostr relay node enhanced by the ongoing development of communication gateways for BOLT8 Noise transport and BOLT4 sphinx onion routing, enabling Nostr services to be accessed over the Lightning network. At its core, the CivKit Node facilitates a market board that enables a peer-to-peer market system across multiple connected nodes.

The CivKit Node is underpinned by several essential building blocks. Firstly, it uses BOLT12 Offers, a next-generation payment protocol streamlining Lightning Network payments. This feature enhances selective revealment of fields for trade intermediation and extends the format to incorporate custom information for different trade types. Secondly, it leverages Onion Messaging, an onion-routing network built into the Lightning Network, to transport offers while preserving privacy and benefiting from the anonymity provided by Lightning network nodes.

The CivKit Node leverages Civkit’s own Orage Lightning Node implementation to achieve these advanced features. Orage is an advanced Lightning node project focused on enhancing availability, modularity, and security in the Lightning Network. Rather than seeking to construct a new Lightning Network stack, Orage’s primary objective is to streamline the onboarding experience for newcomers to Bitcoin and Lightning. Built on the Lightning Development Kit (LDK), Orage is designed specifically to simplify and bolster the integration process for both individual users and large-scale enterprises.

Given its foundation based on LDK, Orage offers built-in features like custom scripts, which provide increased versatility for application development on the Lightning Network. This approach aims to stimulate the production of more ‘Lightning-aware’ applications, thereby expanding the ecosystem’s utility and accessibility. The incorporation of features such as custom scripts, escrow services, Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs), and Taproot is geared towards facilitating this overarching goal. By doing so, Orage is setting the stage for a more versatile and innovative Lightning Network landscape.

Additionally, the CivKit Node utilises the Nostr Relay/Client, a communication protocol designed to transport data notes between relays and clients. This feature allows clients to switch between market boards with low-migration costs, efficiently responding to market dynamics. Mainstay, a notarisation protocol based on the Bitcoin blockchain, is used to verify the board offers history in a trust-minimised manner, preventing market boards from selectively revealing advantageous offers.

Finally, the CivKit Node uses Staking Credentials, anti-DoS tokens that allow servers to protect their resources by requesting prepayment from the client in exchange for privacy-preserving credentials. This aligns the management of publication space resources with client incentives. Slated for release later this year, CivKit aims to provide robust interfaces for client software, enabling them to access market board services over standard Nostr or Lightning communication channels.

Can CivKit Usher in a New Era of Self-Sovereignty?

CivKit represents a revolutionary leap forward in the pursuit of self-sovereignty and decentralisation. As a P2P marketplace built on Nostr and the Bitcoin blockchain, it promises to democratise and disintermediate global trade of goods, services, and foreign currency (FX) exchanges.

One of the fundamental ways CivKit bolsters self-sovereignty is by allowing individual users complete control over their transactions. Through its use of the Bitcoin’s Lightning Network for trades, payments, contracts, and record-keeping, users can operate without reliance on traditional intermediaries, such as banks or financial institutions. This also affords individuals the ability to engage in transactions globally without being tied to any specific geographical location or subject to traditional banking restrictions, fees, or censorship.

CivKit also promotes decentralisation, through its P2P marketplace which reduces centralised control by vested parties that might censor content, including products and services. Furthermore, Bitcoin-based contracts offer escrow services and automatically execute upon meeting certain conditions. This architecture ensures that the system operates transparently and without the need for a centralised authority. By reducing entry barriers to the marketplace and diminishing the costs of middlemen, CivKit allows for a more inclusive and diverse trading environment, with the freedom to transact without restrictions. It also enables the use Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, Layer two payment network protocols, providing incentives for nodes to maintain accurate, transparent operations, further decentralising control. 

Additionally, by employing Nostr’s reputation-based public keys and a decentralised review system, CivKit adds a layer of trust and accountability into the marketplace. This incentivises users to maintain a positive reputation, similar to existing platforms like eBay, but with the added advantage of this reputation being portable across any social media application that supports Nostr public keys, of which there are many, and which continues to expand.

In conclusion, while CivKit is still in the development phase, it already suggests vast possibilities for revolutionising P2P trade. The merging of the Bitcoin and Lightning with the Nostr protocol, along with the integration of innovative escrow contracts and the decentralised review system, points towards a future where transactions are not only more secure, but also more accessible, democratic, and resilient.

The use of cutting-edge Bitcoin-centric technologies and the provision of a decentralised infrastructure based around Nostr are key components of CivKit’s promise to create a marketplace that breaks down traditional barriers and fosters self-sovereignty. This underlines the platform’s potential to reshape global trade and usher in a new era of truly P2P transactions.

It’s worth noting, however, that the success of such a platform relies heavily on the adoption and acceptance by a wider user base. The CivKit team is making strides towards realising this by inviting collaboration from the wider community, emphasising transparency, and adhering to the same open-source standards that characterise the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Ultimately, while CivKit is a work in progress, it promises exciting new possibilities for P2P trade. It represents a potential paradigm shift, not only in the realm of cryptocurrencies but in the broader landscape of global trade and commerce as well. The continued development and eventual realisation of CivKit will certainly be a milestone to watch in the evolving world of decentralised markets.