Twitter Rival Decentralized Platform ‘Damus’ Listed on Apple App Store

• After what it says were at least three denials, the Damus team verified the listing.
• Dorsey donated 14 BTC to the Nostr development team in mid-December.

The decentralized social media platform Damus, dubbed a “Twitter killer” by its developers, has been accepted into the Apple App Store.

After what it says were at least three denials. The Damus team verified the permission to its 11,500 Twitter followers on January 31. Shortly after, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and contributor to Nostr, tweeted the news to his 6.5 million followers, calling it a “milestone” moment for open-source protocols.

Capable of Accepting Bitcoin Payments

The app is a messaging service based on Nostr, a decentralized network that enables encrypted end-to-end private communications, among other features.

Its long-term goal is to create a social networking site where users may post anything they choose. According to a post made by Protos on January 27th, it is also capable of accepting payments over the layer-2 Lightning Network for Bitcoin. There is no central server that controls the network. Instead of relying on a single hub, Nostr uses decentralized relays to spread its messages.

They are also working on protecting the Damus app against DDoS assaults utilizing Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. According to the Damus team’s GitHub, 44 separate developers have contributed to the web app’s source code.

William Casarin, one of Nostr’s primary developers, vented his displeasure on his personal Twitter account. Dorsey donated 14 BTC to the Nostr development team in mid-December, which was worth around $250,000 at the time. It is unclear what the specific nature of the cooperation between the two is.

On the other hand, Twitter which was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk for a whopping $44B has been striving hard to generate revenue from ads.