Obelisk Guides
Everything about Obelisk — what it is, how it works, and where it's going. Written plain, no jargon walls.
An admin CLI any coding agent can drive
Obelisk ships a headless admin CLI that authenticates with its own Nostr key and drives the same HTTP API the web admin panel uses. Give your Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor agent an admin account and it can run your server end-to-end.
Bitcoin zaps in chat
Obelisk lets you send Bitcoin over Lightning directly from a chat message using Nostr Wallet Connect (NIP-47). Here is how it works, what it costs, what stays private, and why the wallet stays entirely in your control.
The future is relay-based groups
Obelisk today is a centralized server with Nostr login. The plan is to retire the centralized server and become a pure Nostr client on top of NIP-29 relay-managed groups, NIP-28 public channels, and NIP-59 gift-wrapped private groups.
How Obelisk works today
Obelisk is hybrid by design — Nostr handles identity, a server handles channels and realtime. Here is exactly what happens when you log in, send a message, and join a server.
Web of Trust — spam resistance without CAPTCHAs
How Obelisk uses your server's Nostr social graph to score every newcomer's trust, stop spam, and skip the "verify your email" step forever. A guide to the nostr-wot-extension model.
What is Obelisk?
Obelisk is a Discord-style group chat where your account is a Nostr keypair. No email, no password, no phone number — just cryptography. Here is what it is and why it matters.