NWC runs on Nostr — a small, open protocol for signed messages on the internet. The short version: your identity is a keypair you hold, your words are signed, and no single company can revoke either one.
Nostr stands for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays." It is a protocol, not a company. A note is a signed message (a post, a listing, a witness event, a governance proposal). A relay is a server that stores and forwards notes. Anyone can run a relay. Anyone can write a client. Your keypair works with all of them.
There is no login, no account, no profile owned by anyone but you. When you post on Nostr, you sign the message with your private key. When someone else reads it, they verify the signature against your public key. The relay is only a pipe — it never owns your voice.
Why NWC chose it
A community that claims to care about sovereignty cannot run on infrastructure that can revoke membership with an email from legal. Nostr gives us a floor: your identity is cryptographic, your exchanges are signed, your governance votes are auditable. If NWC the company disappears tomorrow, your Nostr key still works — your witnesses, your exchanges, your oath are still readable on any relay that has them.
Concretely, NWC uses Nostr for: profile metadata, community listings, witness events, applications, the Living Code ritual, the Membership Oath, and exchange coordination. The supabase layer underneath is a caching and aspirant-onboarding convenience — it is never the source of truth. The signed event is.
The contrast
Centralized identity vs. sovereign identity
Platform-held
One company is the gatekeeper.
Key-held
You are the gatekeeper, with math.
Who holds your identity?
The platform. It can delete it.
You. A keypair only you control.
Where do your posts live?
One company’s database.
Any relay you or others run.
Can the platform shadow-ban you?
Yes — silently, often.
No. Relays can drop you; your identity moves.
If the platform shuts down?
Your identity is gone.
Your identity persists. Find a new relay.
Are your words signed?
No. The company says it was you.
Yes. Cryptographically, by your key.
Who sees the algorithm?
Nobody. It is proprietary.
You choose. There is no forced feed.
Set up in ten minutes
The Alby path — the gentlest on-ramp
Alby is a browser extension that holds your Nostr key and signs events for you. You can swap it out for any other NIP-07 signer later (nos2x, Flamingo, a hardware signer). Pick Alby first because it is the shortest distance between "new here" and "signed in."
Step 1
Install the Alby browser extension
Alby is a free, open-source browser extension. It is the simplest on-ramp because it holds your Nostr key and signs events for you when a site asks, instead of you pasting a key every time.
Open the extension and choose "Create a new Nostr key"
Alby generates an ed25519 keypair locally in your browser. The private key (nsec) never leaves your device. The public key (npub) is the one you share.
Two strings appear: npub1… (public — share freely) and nsec1… (private — guard it like a password).
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Step 3
Back up your private key somewhere offline
Write the nsec down on paper, or store it in a password manager. If you lose it, there is no recovery — there is no company to reset it.
nsec1xxx… — store this exactly as displayed. Case-sensitive.
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Step 4
Copy your public key (npub)
Your npub is how you appear on Nostr. You can paste it into NWC’s profile page to claim the identity here. No email, no password required.
npub1ab…xyz — this is you, publicly, everywhere on Nostr.
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Step 5
Come back to NWC and sign in
On the sign-in page, choose "Sign in with extension". Alby will ask your permission once; from then on it signs silently in the background.
You will see a one-time permission prompt: "Allow newworldcommunities.com to request signatures?"
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If you get stuck
Nostr is new. Pieces break. If Alby refuses to sign, the first thing to check is whether you gave it permission for this domain — the prompt can be easy to miss. If you see your posts on NWC but not on other Nostr clients, your relay set may need another relay; wss://relay.damus.ioand wss://nos.lolare broadly connected fallbacks.
The deeper answer: read the signed event. Every post, every witness, every application is an addressable record with a signature you can verify independently. If anything on NWC looks wrong, that record is what to trust — not the screen.
Next
Once your key exists, the first honest step inside NWC is the Living Code ritual. Twenty minutes, no commitments — just a sequence of questions that signal how you actually relate to the seven tenets.