Grantless

The Invisible Handout.

A decentralized, crowdfunded grants program for open-source work, built on the Catallax protocol over Nostr. Open-source teams post crowdfunded gigs for their apps or features, the community funds them with Lightning, teams self-assign and build the work themselves, and an arbiter releases the pooled sats when it's delivered. No board, no application, no grantmaker — the market does what the committee used to.

The name is a nod to every dev who never got a grant from a managed fund. The mechanism is deliberately the opposite of the OpenSats playbook: instead of a foundation doing diligence and picking winners, community-curated OpenSets (Nostr lists) power discovery and trust, and funders steer with their sats and their social standing.

Open, permissionless, Web-of-Trust based

This is the most important property of the system. No pubkey, relay, arbiter, or host holds any special privilege or capability. Trust is social — derived from the Web of Trust — never granted by the client. Hardcoded values (the default relay, suggested curators) exist only to make first-run convenient; every one is documented as a default, trivially overridable, and free of elevated status. Anyone can clone this, point it at their own relay/curators/arbiters, and run an identical Grantless. See .pi/AGENTS.md for the full prime directive.

The core loop

1. You pick a curator to browse — you see the applicants that curator vouches for, and their projects.
2. An applicant posts a project (a crowdfunding task) and assigns an arbiter from the curator's trusted-arbiter set.
3. The community funds it. Contributions are custodied by the arbiter as escrow — not by Grantless and not by any central treasury.
4. A worker (often the team itself) delivers the work and marks it submitted.
5. The arbiter concludes it: release the pooled sats to the worker, or refund the crowd.

Discovery and trust run on OpenSets — curated Nostr lists (kind 30000/30392) published from a curator's point of view. Choosing a different curator switches whose world you see. Anyone can be a curator, an arbiter, or an applicant; visibility in a given instance is the viewer's chosen curation. Open by default, filterable by choice.

Getting started

npm install
npm run dev

npm run dev spins up a local strfry relay in Docker, seeds it with a fixed, browsable dataset, and starts Vite pointed at it — so you get a working Grantless world with zero external dependencies. Open http://localhost:5173 and log in with a Nostr extension (Alby, nos2x, …). Requires Docker for the local relay.

Configuration

Everything is an optional, overridable convenience — see .env.example:

Env var	Purpose
VITE_DEFAULT_RELAY	Override the shipped default relay (wss://relay.grantless.org).
VITE_RELAY_URL	Point the whole app at one relay (e.g. a local strfry).
VITE_GRANTLESS_CURATORS	Seed the curator picker with specific npubs (merged with discovered curators).
VITE_GRANTLESS_OPERATOR	npub(s) that see a read-only operator helper panel at /admin. Unset → hidden for everyone. No privilege — just convenience queries.

The default read set also includes wss://tags.brainstorm.world/relay, where curators mint their OpenSets — none of these is privileged, and the in-app Settings let users repoint or remove any of them.

Testing

Three levels, real events over mocks (the point of building on Nostr):

npm test                                    # tsc + eslint + unit/integration (vitest) + build
npx playwright test                         # browser e2e against a seeded local relay

• Unit/integration (Vitest): pure helpers and the wrapper layer; relay-touching paths are exercised with real events via a local strfry + nak, never mocked.
• E2E (Playwright): drives the real browser against the seeded relay. On NixOS, set PLAYWRIGHT_CHROMIUM_PATH to a working chromium.

Deploying

• App → Vercel. The repo ships vercel.json (Vite + SPA rewrites); connect the repo and point your domain at it. No env vars are required; defaults work.
• Relay → the always-on default wss://relay.grantless.org is a plain strfry. See relay/README.md for the production config and reverse-proxy setup. (It's a default, not a dependency — run your own and repoint VITE_DEFAULT_RELAY.)

Project layout

• src/ — the app (UI in src/components/grantless, shared protocol layer in src/lib/catallax.ts).
• relay/ — strfry configs for dev/test and production.
• test/ — the nak harness, dev seed, and Playwright specs.
• NIP.md — the Catallax protocol document.
• .pi/ — the engineering-team harness (roles, workflows, stories, ADRs, reviews) this project is built with.

Relationship to upstream

Grantless is a narrowed, opinionated front-end forked from the unopinionated catallax-reference-client. The Catallax protocol layer and the wrapper around Nostr stay shared with upstream; the grants framing, OpenSets curation, and self-assignment flow live only here. Merges flow one way (upstream → Grantless).

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