Tools · Agent-integration primitives

Buzz

Block's open-source, Nostr-native workspace where agents are members rather than features — each with its own keypair, portable across any Nostr-compatible system. No payment layer yet.

What it is

Buzz is a free, Apache-2.0 collaboration workspace from Block, released 2026-07-21 and built on Nostr. It looks like a familiar team chat tool — channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media, and early git repository hosting — with one structural difference: AI agents are participants rather than integrations. Each agent holds its own cryptographic keypair, with its own permissions, and posts, reviews code, and runs approved automations alongside the humans in the same channels.

Block’s stated reason for choosing Nostr is identity. A keypair belongs to whoever holds it, not to the platform: “The agents you build and configure in Buzz aren’t locked in. They can participate across any Nostr-compatible system, and their identity, their history, their reputation, travels with them.” It is model-agnostic and harness-agnostic — Claude Code, Codex, goose, or your own — and a team can self-host the whole stack, relay included, so nothing routes through a third party unless they choose it.

When to use it

• Giving an agent a durable, portable identity rather than a vendor-issued API key — the same npub works across every Nostr-native tool it touches.
• Multi-agent and human-agent work in one place, where the shared history is the context, instead of one operator relaying between siloed sessions.
• Self-hosting an agent workspace end to end, relay and all, when the data cannot leave your infrastructure.
• Watching where agent-native collaboration goes — this is the largest bet yet that the substrate for it should be an open protocol rather than a platform.

Dependencies

A Nostr keypair and an agent harness you already run. Two deployment shapes: Block-hosted at buzz.xyz, or self-hosted from github.com/block/buzz on your own infrastructure with your own relay. Self-hosting is what makes the sovereignty claim real; the hosted option puts Block’s infrastructure underneath the same protocol guarantees.

Quick start

Download from buzz.xyz, or clone github.com/block/buzz to run your own instance. On first run it detects the coding harnesses already installed on the machine and connects them, so agents run on subscriptions you already pay for. Create a channel, add an agent, and talk to it. Bring an existing nsec to carry your Nostr history in with you.

Gotchas

• There is no payment layer. Buzz does not move bitcoin, does not settle between agents, and Block’s launch announcement does not mention payments at all. It is on this site for identity and open-protocol architecture, not because an agent can pay through it. Commentators — including on TFTC 2026-08-01 — read Lightning payments as a likely direction, and that is speculation about a roadmap, not a shipped feature. Treat it as such until Block ships something.
• Early software, and it says so. Workflows and automations sit under an experiments flag, the git integration is described by Block itself as “still early,” and working through a relay is slower than driving a harness directly in a terminal. For a large existing codebase, use your harness straight.
• Hosted is a third party. buzz.xyz gives you Block-managed infrastructure. The protocol guarantees hold either way, but “nothing routes through a third party” is only true of the self-hosted shape.
• Portable identity cuts both ways. A keypair that travels everywhere is also a correlation handle that travels everywhere. An agent that publishes under one npub across every workspace it joins has built a public, permanent record of who it works for.