Everyone thinks Nostr is just another decentralized Twitter clone that peaked in early 2025. The W3C Nostr Community Group just published did:nostr v0.1.0 as an official draft report—with over 30 implementations already in the wild. But that’s only half the story. What happened this week in Perl repositories and European fintech might matter more for Nostr’s future than any social media trend you’ve seen. Keep reading.

The W3C Draft That Changes Everything

If you’ve been watching Nostr from the sidelines, this was the week the protocol stopped being just a social network and started becoming something closer to infrastructure.

Monday kicked off quietly enough. But by Wednesday, July 1, the W3C Nostr Community Group dropped something that caught my attention: did:nostr v0.1.0—published as a Community Group Draft Report. For those of us who’ve been tracking decentralized identity, this is a bigger deal than it sounds. The specification defines a DID (Decentralized Identifier) method for Nostr identities based on secp256k1 and BIP-340—the same cryptographic foundation that powers Bitcoin. It’s now registered in the DID Method Registry, comes with a conformance test-vector suite, and even has a DIF did-resolver driver that works through the Universal Resolver.

What does that mean in plain English? Nostr public keys can now function as verifiable, interoperable identities across the broader decentralized web. Not just within Nostr apps. Across the entire DID ecosystem. “It’s great to see the progress and the growing implementation ecosystem around DID,” wrote Amir Hameed Mir in response to the announcement, offering to contribute however he can. That’s the kind of quiet endorsement that signals real momentum.

Perl Libraries and Protocol Expansion

Then Thursday, July 2, brought what I’d argue was the most consequential developer update of the week. The Net-Nostr Perl distribution—a foundational library for the protocol—received a major update to version 2.001000. The changelog reads like a roadmap of everything Nostr has been building toward: NIP-29 group identifiers, NIP-43 role definitions, NIP-44 extended prefixes, NIP-59 ephemeral gift wraps, NIP-78 app data, NIP-89 manifest tags. If you’re not a developer, that list probably looks like alphabet soup. But here’s the takeaway: Nostr’s spec coverage is expanding rapidly. The protocol isn’t stagnant. It’s adding layers.

Friday, July 3, was the real firehose. Three independent releases dropped from the Net-Nostr ecosystem: Net-Nostr-Core (the protocol and NIP tooling), Net-Nostr-Client (the WebSocket client implementation), and Net-Nostr-Relay (the relay server and in-memory event store). This modular split is exactly what mature protocols do—they decouple responsibilities so developers can pick and choose what they need without pulling in the entire kitchen sink.

The Real Story: Payments in Europe

But here’s where it gets interesting for people who don’t write code.

Also on Friday, Wavespace—a Bitcoin neobank serving the Eurozone—announced MiCA compliance for its self-custodial debit card. The card uses Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) , the protocol documented in NIP-47, to connect directly to users’ self-hosted Lightning nodes. You set a minimum balance—say, $200—and every time you spend via the Visa network, Wavespace pulls sats from your self-custodial wallet to top up the card. No preloading. No custodial risk. Just automated, self-custodial spending.

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Eivydas Račkauskas—Chief Orange Pill Giver at Wavespace—revealed that 70% of payments on the platform already use the Lightning Network. That’s not a pilot program. That’s production usage. And it’s built on Nostr.

I think this is the sleeper story of the week. While everyone’s watching decentralized social media for the next viral post, Nostr Wallet Connect is quietly becoming the plumbing for real-world Bitcoin payments in Europe. The company is bootstrapped, self-funded, and now MiCA-compliant—one of the few surviving Bitcoin exchanges in the region as regulations tighten. If NWC adoption continues spreading, we might look back on this week as the moment Nostr stopped being just a social protocol.

Summary

• did:nostr v0.1.0 published as a W3C Community Group Draft Report on July 1, with 30+ implementations and full DID Method Registry registration.
• Net-Nostr 2.001000 released July 2, adding support for NIP-29, NIP-43, NIP-44, NIP-59, NIP-78, and NIP-89.
• Three independent Net-Nostr modules (Core, Client, Relay) released July 3, marking a major architectural shift toward modularity.
• Wavespace’s MiCA-compliant debit card uses Nostr Wallet Connect (NIP-47) to enable self-custodial Lightning payments—with 70% of transactions already on Lightning.