Decentralized consignment exchange over Nostr

[nicholaschiarulli]

Currently, the consignment hand-off in a transfer (consignment.post/get, ack.post/get, media.*) runs over the RGB HTTP JSON-RPC proxy. In practice, that means a handful of centralized proxy servers can read the consignment and the transfer metadata, the receiver has to poll, and the ecosystem leans on a few public instances that can censor or go down.

Our approach: map the proxy's methods onto Nostr. The payer gift-wraps the consignment (NIP-44 + NIP-59) to the payee's key and publishes it to the payee's relays; the payee holds a subscription and is pushed the data in real time. The ACK returns to a per-transfer ephemeral reply key, so the payer stays anonymous end to end.

The relay learns nothing: it sees an opaque blob addressed to a throwaway key, not the contents, the recipient_id, or the real parties. Anyone can run one. Small consignments ride inline; larger ones go to encrypted storage referenced inside the wrap. The proxy's write-once invariants (a consignment and an ACK cannot change) are preserved at the receiver.

Status: the NIP specification is drafted and implemented. A reference relay and client are deployed, and a live demo runs a real RGB transfer end to end over the relay on Mutinynet, surfacing the resulting Bitcoin tx, the kind-1059 event, and the RGB contract.

NIP spec and code: https://github.com/node21labs/parcel21
Live demo: https://demo.node21labs.com/