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.
The short version
Obelisk is group chat that feels like Discord — servers, channels, voice rooms, threads, DMs — but the account you sign in with is a Nostr keypair instead of an email and password. You keep the key. The account is yours forever, portable across every Obelisk server, and works without handing your phone number to a signup form.
Who is this for?
Crypto communities, privacy nerds, open-source teams, hackathons, and anyone tired of the "verify your email / confirm your phone / solve a CAPTCHA" dance just to join a chat room. If you already use Nostr, Obelisk should feel like home. If you don't, starting here is a friendly on-ramp — you get a real Nostr identity that works across dozens of other apps.
Why a new chat app?
Three things broke at once on the incumbents:
- Identity is rented. Your Discord account belongs to Discord. They can suspend it, and you lose every server, every DM history, every relationship tied to that account.
- Spam defense is crude. Email verification and phone numbers don't stop spammers — they only stop people who care about their privacy.
- Communities are trapped. Moving a community off a platform is near-impossible because identity, invites, and history are all locked to one vendor.
The headline features
- Log in with a Nostr key via NIP-07 browser extension, nsec, or a NIP-46 bunker QR code.
- Servers and channels like Discord — text, voice, forum-style threads, reactions.
- Encrypted direct messages between users via Nostr relays.
- Roles and moderation — admin / moderator / member, with per-channel permissions, bans, mutes, warnings.
- Web of Trust spam resistance. New accounts are filtered through the server's Nostr social graph. Real people get in; bots don't. No CAPTCHAs.
- Self-hosted, open source. Docker Compose, your VPS, your rules.
Built for a hackathon, aimed at a future
Obelisk was built for La Crypta's IDENTITY Hackathon (April 2026). The short-term target is a polished Discord alternative that works today. The long-term target is bigger: sunset the centralized server and move group chat onto relay-based Nostr groups (NIP-29), so the only infrastructure that matters is your key and a few relays. We have a guide about that: The future is relay-based groups.
What comes next
If you're new, the best next reads are:
- How Obelisk works today — the hybrid model: Nostr identity plus a server for channels and realtime.
- Web of Trust, explained — how we stop spam without CAPTCHAs, emails, or KYC.
- The future is relay-based groups — the path from "centralized server with Nostr login" to "pure Nostr client."