Bitcoin Researchers Introduce Civ Kit, A P2P Marketplace Built On Nostr And The Lightning Network

Civ Kit aims to become a fully-fledged marketplace while retaining the censorship resistant and permissionless nature of open-source tech.

Bitcoin enthusiasts have introduced a new academic white paper detailing the Civ Kit, which aims to establish a peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic market system that is resistant to censorship and permissionless. The paper was authored by Antoine Riard, Nicholas Gregory and Ray Youssef, who have shared the paper with the Bitcoin developer community for feedback. The Civ Kit combines the Nostr architecture with the Lightning Network, prioritizing “privacy and security through escrowed trades, decentralized identity, moderation, a P2P messaging protocol, and know-your-peer (KYP) oracles for adjudication,” a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine stated. The system aims to support all kinds of trading, including goods and services.

“The researchers will gradually release code and modules, extensively building on top of the Lightning Dev Kit and Nostr libraries,” the press release explained. “Civ Kit development will bind to the same open-source and transparency standards as Bitcoin Core and libsecp256k1.”

The Civ Kit's design will emphasize trust and reputation within the marketplace, and the press release described how borrowing and lending can be added by using a universal credit score for all traders calculated by a combination of success of trades (Web-of-Stakes) and Web-of-Trust techniques that act as a “trustless source of truth.” The Civ Kit has been “peer-reviewed by some of the best minds in the Lightning and Discreet Log Contract engineering communities,” the press release said.

Nicholas Gregory, one of the authors of The Civ Kit, has been involved in developing Bitcoin infrastructure since 2016, and hopes that the initiative will boost Bitcoin's circular economy. He stated, "I truly hope this initiative serves as a unique piece of the puzzle to boost Bitcoin's circular economy, which, if we're honest, has not reached its full potential in 2023."

Ray Youssef, founder of Paxful and the Built With Bitcoin Foundation, another of the paper's authors, said he is committed to carrying on the work of Satoshi Nakamoto to provide the world with the ability to build unstoppable free markets.

“The title of the Bitcoin white paper spoke about ‘a peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ — yet the P2P industry is under attack from international powers who feed off centralized fiat currencies and the control they wield,” Youssef said. “At the same time, billions of people have been relegated to non-existence by this failed system. Bitcoin is the solution and we’re not backing down.”

The team behind the white paper is working to integrate the research into Noones, a new company dedicated to financial freedom in the Global South. The Civ Kit is open for collaboration and publicly available on GitHub.