Decentralized Twitter alternative goes live on Apple’s App Store

The Damus app is powered by Nostr which uses decentralized relays to distribute end-to-end encrypted messages.

Damus, a so-called “Twitter killer” built on a decentralized network has been approved on the Apple App Store.

The Damus team confirmed the approval to its 11,500 Twitter followers on Jan. 31, following what it claims was at least three rejections from the Big Tech player.

Shortly after, Twitter co-founder and Nostr contributor Jack Dorsey shared the news with his 6.5 million followers, with the entrepreneur labeling it as a “milestone” moment for open source protocols:

a milestone for open protocols...#nostr is now officially on the Apple App Store with @damusapp:https://t.co/GQmvPE5nfX
— jack (@jack) January 31, 2023

The app dubs itself the “social network you control” and is a messaging service built on Nostr — a decentralized network enabling encrypted, end-to-end private messaging, among other things.

It plans to become a social media platform with uncensored content. It also has built-in payments through the Bitcoin (BTC) layer-2 Lightning network according to a Jan. 27 post from Protos.

No servers run the network. Instead, Nostr utilizes decentralized relays to distribute messages.

Nostr developers are also focused on using Bitcoin and the Lightning Network to prevent Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) spam attacks on the Damus app.

*The User Interface of Damus displayed on an iPhone. Source:* *Github*

There have been 44 different software developers who have contributed to the code for the Damus web app, according to the team’s GitHub page.

Neat way to fetch bitcoin addresses: #nostr encrypted dms. pic.twitter.com/lMlnIhf3fg
— William Casarin ⚡️ (@jb55) January 29, 2023

Getting Damus on the Apple App Store didn’t come without issues though.

The Damus Twitter page posted that it had failed in at least three attempts before finally being approved:

We replied again clarifying where and how all these features are implemented. That's all we can do at this time....
— Damus⚡️ (@damusapp) January 31, 2023

One of Nostr’s core developers, William Casarin also shared some frustration on his personal Twitter account, stating that it would be a “shame” if Apple users couldn’t use Nostr natively.

While the exact partnership between Dorsey and Nostr isn’t known, the billionaire entrepreneur sent over 14 BTC — worth about $250,000 at the time — in mid-December to help the Nostr developer team.

While the news appeared to have increased awareness of the application amongst the Bitcoin community, other high-profile figures have tested out the Damus app too.

Amongst those include Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden and pro-crypto U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis.

One of the cool things about Nostr ("Notes and other stuff transmitted by relays", a new decentralized protocol that replaces things like Twitter and Instagram)—beyond censorship resistance—is that you aren't limited to 280 characters.

Find me there. pic.twitter.com/B7JUHeeSdP
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) January 23, 2023

At the time of writing, the Damus web app has run into problems. A warning message on the site homepage reads:

“Damus Web is down because there is someone trying to exploit browser loopholes to steal private keys. I would not recommend using a web client at this time. Damus iOS is not affected.”

Solana attributes major outage to denial-of-service attack targeting DEX offering

Bot attack

The Solana Foundation says bots spammed the Grape Protocol IDO on Raydium with 400,000 transactions per second, bringing the network to its knees.

Solana has attributed the 17-hour outage it suffered last week to a denial-of-service attack aimed at Grape Protocol’s Sept. 14 initial DEX offering (IDO).

In a Sept. 21 blog post, the Solana Foundation stated that bots spammed the network as Grape launched its IDO on the Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Raydium at 12:00 UTC last Tuesday.

The botting activity overwhelmed the network with a transaction load of 400,000 per second, with Solana noting that “unbounded growth of the forwarder queues and resource-heavy blocks” resulted in a number of forks being automatically proposed to the network.

The attack caused Solana’s network’s validators to crash after running out of memory. As a result the network went offline for roughly 17 hours during Sept. 14 and Sept. 15.

The recovery was led in collaboration between Solana engineers and more than 1,000 validators, with a hard fork being passed after receiving support from 80% of the network’s active stakers.

“This was a coordinated effort by the community, not only in creating a patch, but in getting 80% of the network to come to consensus.”

The foundation estimates that the network was patched, upgraded, and restored to full functionality within 18 hours of Solana going offline.

The post added that the community is still working on providing a detailed “technical post-mortem and root cause analysis report” that will be released in the coming weeks

The price of Solana (SOL) has performed bearishly since posting an all-time high of $213 on Sept. 9. Since then, SOL has pulled back by 39% to change hands for $129 at the time of writing.

The retracement followed a meteoric couple of months for SOL, with the token surging 565% since trading for $32 on July 31.

Denial-of-service