hostr

Hostr is a cryptography-native Airbnb.

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I live more or less on a bitcoin standard in El Salvador, except my biggest monthly expense - rent - is still paid in dollars via a long chain of banks from my UK account until it lands in dollars in my Airbnb hosts' Salvadorian account. The banks take a cut, and so does Airbnb.

I wanted to explore what a Bitcoin and Nostr-native accommodation marketplace could look like: direct host-guest discovery, user-owned identity, private messaging, and Lightning payments without relying on a traditional platform middleman.

What It Does

Hostr lets travelers discover stays, view listings, contact hosts through Nostr-based messaging, and move toward a Bitcoin-native booking flow using Lightning payments. The point of building this on nostr is such that guests and hosts have a cryptographic ownership over their app state, and are not tied to "hostrs" fees.

How We Built It

We built Hostr as a working marketplace prototype with:

  • A searchable accommodation listing flow
  • Host and guest identity primitives using Nostr
  • Direct messaging concepts for host-guest coordination
  • Lightning/NWC payment flow experiments
  • Atomic swap into escrow contract on arbitrum
  • Booking and escrow-status concepts
  • Supporting outreach, lead, and hackathon tooling around the project

The system combines web marketplace UX with open protocol infrastructure. Nostr provides portable identity and communication, while Bitcoin/Lightning provides fast global payment.

Challenges We Faced

Once the protocol is in place, the lack of a single server means it's hard to update. So ensuring a good first design, and iterating with backward compatibility is a big challenge.

Other challenges included:

  • Designing an escrow-like flow that is simple for normal users
  • Making Lightning payments understandable in a booking context
  • Handling Nostr relay reliability and identity UX
  • Explaining a protocol-heavy product in a concise demo
  • Prioritizing what to build first with a small user base

What We Learned

I learned that the hard part is not just connecting Bitcoin, Lightning, and Nostr together. The hard part is turning those protocols into a product flow that feels obvious to hosts and guests.

What’s Next

Hoping that the nostr and bitcoin communities (and tech in general) will rally around the idea and help us make it a real & useful product.

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