Weaving the Fabric of Nostr

Experience Nostr Nights
Session Type Presentation
Date February 2, 2026
Speaker David Strayhorn (Nosfabrica)
David Strayhorn, co-founder of Nosfabrica alongside Avi Burra, Jon Gordon, and Vitor Pamplona, presents the company's mission to solve decentralized web of trust, a problem he frames as fundamental as Nakamoto consensus. Through their product Brainstorm, a personalized relay that uses an extended social graph to curate trusted information, the team aims to give users control over the algorithms and scores that determine what content reaches their screens.
David Strayhorn presents on web of trust at Nostr Nights, Bitcoin Park

A Decade of Failed Prototypes Led to Nostr's First Decentralized Trust System

Nosfabrica co-founder David Strayhorn told a Nashville audience that after more than a decade searching for a workable solution to decentralized identity verification, his team has successfully launched Brainstorm, a personalized relay that uses web-of-trust scoring to filter bots and surface trusted information across Nostr.

Strayhorn said he had worked through roughly 15 prototypes on his own before meeting co-founder Jon Gordon at Bitcoin Park's Summit of Summits, Imagine IF. The two joined Avi Burra and Vitor Pamplona to form Nosfabrica. The company initially pursued healthcare applications on Nostr, but found that no medical tool could function without a reliable way to verify identity. If users cannot tell the difference between a licensed chiropractor and an impersonator, Strayhorn said, the premise falls apart. That realization shifted the team's focus to the underlying trust problem, which Strayhorn compared in scale to Nakamoto consensus.

"We have to take it out of the power of the centralized institutions and put the actual algorithms and scores in your control, your actual control."

Brainstorm scores contacts across a user's extended social graph through a system called GrapeRank, which assigns trust values from zero to 100. Rather than relying on centralized platforms such as Yelp or Wikipedia to determine credibility, the tool lets each user's network of real people serve as the filter. Personalized trust scores generated by Brainstorm are already live and visible on the Amethyst client and NostrHub.

Strayhorn laid out four principles he urged Nostr developers to adopt: scores should be personalized rather than global, portable so they are generated outside the client, subject to user choice so individuals can select their own scoring provider, and private so clients have no knowledge of where scores originate or what algorithms produce them. The framework, he said, is designed to prevent any single entity from controlling how trust is assigned across the network.

"Our goal is not to have 10,000 weekly. Our goal is to have a billion people and build tools that will attract a lot of people."

Parts of the system are already in production. Vitor Pamplona's trusted assertions NIP, recently merged by fiatjaf, delivers scores to Amethyst and NostrHub without those clients knowing their origin. Brainstorm is early, but available for sharing with anyone who sends a direct message to any of the four co-founders on Nostr. For those who would like to build using this new tool, the company is also sponsoring a web-of-trust hackathon to encourage innovation with their web of trust tools.