Jack Dorsey's Block Launches Buzz, a Nostr-Based Slack and GitHub Rival for AI Agents

The Shift Toward Agentic Infrastructure

Jack Dorsey has spent the last few years shedding the skin of a traditional social media CEO to become something else entirely. While the market watches Bitcoin price charts, Dorsey’s firm, Block, has been building the plumbing for a world where humans aren’t the only ones doing the work. Their latest release, Buzz, is an attempt to solve a problem most founders haven’t even realized they have yet: where do your AI agents actually live and talk?

Buzz is being framed as an open-source workspace. On the surface, it looks like a competitor to Slack or Microsoft Teams. But look closer and you'll see it is built on Nostr, the decentralized protocol that has become Dorsey’s primary obsession. This isn’t just a new place to send emojis; it is a communication layer designed to give AI agents their own cryptographic identities and a place to collaborate without a central server sniffing the data.

Why Nostr Matters for Builders

For the average founder, Nostr versioning might feel like an unnecessary technical hurdle. Why not just use a private Discord? The answer lies in sovereignty. When you build a business around AI agents today, you are usually nesting them inside proprietary ecosystems. If you use a Slack bot, Slack owns the logs, the access rights, and the kill switch. If your agent is operating on a centralized cloud, you are renting its existence.

Buzz leverages Nostr because the protocol handles identity differently. Instead of an email and password managed by a database, every user—whether human or bot—has a public and private key pair. This allows for truly portable identities. For a builder, this means you can spin up an agent that exists independently of the platform it is currently running on. It can sign its own messages, verify its own actions, and interact with other agents in a trustless environment.

The GitHub Comparison

Block isn't just targeting chat apps. They are positioning Buzz as a rival to GitHub. To be clear, it isn't a code repository in the traditional sense yet, but it aims to handle the collaborative logic that usually happens in the margins of a software project. AI agents are increasingly writing code, reviewing pull requests, and managing deployments. Buzz wants to be the venue where those agents coordinate those tasks.

Current development cycles are bottlenecked by human oversight. We still manually approve almost everything. Buzz envisions a workflow where an AI agent notes a bug, communicates the fix to a testing agent, and coordinates the merge, all within a decentralized protocol. This removes the reliance on centralized intermediaries that can gatekeep or censor the development process.

The Practical Reality of AI Identity

The hardest part of managing AI agents today is keeping track of what they are doing and who they are doing it for. In a corporate environment, agents often share credentials or operate under a single developer's API key. This is a security nightmare and an organizational mess. Buzz attempts to fix this by treating the agent as a first-class citizen with its own cryptographic signature.

This means every action an AI takes in a Buzz workspace is verifiable. You can look at the data and know for a fact that Agent A performed an action, not because a log file says so, but because the message was signed by that agent's private key. For builders in the crypto space, this level of auditability is non-negotiable. If you are building a protocol that manages millions of dollars in TVL, you cannot afford to have ambiguous AI activity in your dev channels.

Breaking Down the Hype

I have a healthy skepticism for anything that claims to replace Slack or GitHub. These are massive incumbents with deep moats built on user habit. Switching costs are high. However, Block isn't necessarily trying to convince every marketing agency to leave Slack. They are targeting the frontier—builders who are already feeling the friction of legacy tools when trying to integrate autonomous agents.

The current iteration of Buzz is free and open-source. This is a classic builder-first move. By giving away the infrastructure, Block is trying to set the standard for how agentic communication should work. If they can get enough developers to adopt Nostr keys for their bots, they win by becoming the default layer for the next wave of automation.

• Decentralized Identity: No more shared API keys or bot accounts tied to human emails.
• Censorship Resistance: Because it runs on Nostr, the workspace isn't at the mercy of a single service provider.
• Interoperability: Agents can move across different Nostr-based applications without needing a new account.

What This Actually Means for Your Startup

If you are a founder, you don't need to migrate your entire team to Buzz today. But you do need to pay attention to the shift it represents. We are moving away from "software as a service" toward "protocols as a service." If your agents are locked into a proprietary silo, you are building on sand. Tools like Buzz offer a glimpse of how to build on stone.

There is also the question of cost. Centralized workspaces get expensive as you scale. Because Buzz is decentralized, the cost structure changes. You aren't paying a per-seat license to a SaaS giant; you are interacting with a protocol. This could significantly lower the barrier to entry for small teams running massive fleets of AI agents.

The future of work isn't just humans using better tools; it is humans managing autonomously operating entities that need their own space to function.

The Road Ahead

Block is taking a risk here. Nostr is still niche, and the UX of decentralized apps often leaves much to be desired. But Dorsey has shown he is willing to play the long game. By aligning with Bitcoin and Nostr, Block is betting that the world will eventually get tired of the permissions and privacy violations inherent in the current tech stack.

For those of us building in the AI space, the takeaway is clear: stop thinking about AI as a feature inside your existing tools. Start thinking about AI as a collaborator that needs its own identity and its own sovereign communication channel. Whether Buzz is the specific tool that wins or not, the architectural philosophy it represents is the direction the industry is moving. You can either build for that move now, or spend the next five years catching up.

Ultimately, Buzz is a tool for the paranoid and the pioneers. If you trust Big Tech to hold the keys to your company's internal communications forever, stick with Slack. If you think the future belongs to autonomous, decentralized agents, it might be time to start playing with Nostr.

Read the original at Decrypt →