Shopstr Pitch

Now that the hacking for Nostrasia and Legends of Lightning II has come to an end, we wanted to make an update on our current progress and future plans with Shopstr.

Thomas, Eric, and I came together to build Shopstr because we felt that the main use case for Bitcoin in places with financial privilege was limited to speculative trading. We wanted to make something that provided more utility for Bitcoin while also increasing its adoption. We believed Nostr, as an open, decentralized, uncensorable application protocol, perfectly complemented Bitcoin's open, decentralized, and uncensorable properties for value transfer, opening the flood gates for anyone to connect with people all over the world to buy and sell anything, anywhere, anytime. Together we have a passion for creating software with impact in mind and think that building a decentralized marketplace like Shopstr can change the way commerce is conducted over the internet and introduce more people to the best monetary technology in the world.

Before entering the hackathon, we had focused on getting something functional built quickly while deprioritizing good coding practices, design, and UX. Shopstr didn't look trustworthy, the design was rough, there wasn't much clarity on how to use it, and overall it didn't have the best user experience. Over the course of the hackathon, however, we overhauled the look and feel of the site and refactored our entire codebase to make it more understandable and maintainable, all while adding more features that make using it that much more frictionless. We quickly iterated and responded to user feedback for things like being able to search for and filter products, integrating nostr.build, or just simply allowing users to view products without having an account.

Shopstr differentiates itself from similar sites through our team's philosophy of making markets accessible. We don't think it should be necessary to have an established storefront setup in order to list a product. We want anyone to be able to easily list anything and get paid for it in Bitcoin, regardless of if they are an individual just selling something they had lying around, or a more mature merchant selling a specific line of products. Our initial focus on making things functional over having great design also gave us a leg up as we can now focus on delivering new features and making the overall experience better rather than needing to build out the core functionality to make a marketplace site even work. We also believe in making payments private by default, employing Cashu as the technology to do so.

We decided to use Cashu because we wanted to provide a way for our users to seamlessly buy and sell things anonymously and avoid blacklisting. Although the products listed and corresponding accounts are public, the payments made are untraceable and look the same across mints thanks to Cashu. Cashu also grants users the ability to make payments asynchronously if the channels associated the recipient's lightning wallet are offline.

We currently support NIP-99 for the listing of products, services, and exchanges of any kind, as well as NIP-04, NIP-07, NIP-09, and NIP-19. The Shopstr PWA is also out and ready to use.

We're planning on adding NIP-15 support for more traditional online storefronts to easily get set up on our site, lnurl integration with Cashu so you can receive private payments directly to your lightning address, escrow payments to increase trust between buyers and sellers, metrics for merchants to track their payment and order flow, and much more.

You can use Shopstr by visiting https://shopstr.store and see how it works by checking out our demo: https://www.loom.com/share/f229bfe81d8a4c008f36d8cc51913c1f?sid=aa90d9aa-8aa0-45cc-8e72-40a88f95b675

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