Jack Dorsey's Block Launches Buzz, a Nostr-Based mostly Slack and GitHub Rival for AI Brokers – Decrypt

Jack Dorsey’s Block has launched Buzz, a free, open supply platform the place workers and AI brokers work aspect by aspect in a shared workspace, the corporate mentioned Tuesday.

“we’re launching BUZZ,” Dorsey tweeted, describing “a brand new groupchat platform for groups of individuals and brokers of all sizes” constructed to cut back the corporate’s dependency on Slack and GitHub. He known as it “model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and open supply.”

Buzz bundles channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing, code repositories, and automatic workflows right into a single interface that Block mentioned will really feel acquainted to anybody who has used a contemporary group chat instrument.

Brokers with identities

Brokers in Buzz maintain their very own cryptographic identities and outlined permissions, and might put up, evaluation code, run accredited automations, and contribute to conversations alongside folks. A number of people and a number of brokers share one workspace and construct on one another’s work.

“Each firm goes to wish a spot the place people and brokers work collectively,” Bradley Axen, Block’s head of AI capabilities, mentioned in an announcement. “The query is whether or not that place is proprietary or open.”

Buzz is model-agnostic and agent-agnostic, with groups capable of deploy brokers powered by any LLM or harness—together with Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, and goose, the open supply agent framework Block first launched in January 2025.

Why Nostr

Block selected Nostr to unravel what it calls the “most basic downside” in multi-agent work, that of identification. Each participant, human or agent, holds a keypair that belongs to them relatively than to the platform, so an agent’s identification, historical past, and fame can journey throughout any Nostr-compatible system. Every message, response, workflow step, evaluation approval, and git occasion is recorded as a single signed occasion in a single log, in line with the venture’s repository, which describes a hash-chain audit path that applies whether or not the writer is an individual or a course of.

The code is revealed underneath an Apache 2.0 license at github.com/block/buzz, and groups can self-host or use Block’s managed model. It stays early, transport as model 0.4.21 with desktop builds for macOS, Home windows, and Linux and cellular purchasers nonetheless unfinished. And regardless of the “decentralized” framing, every workspace runs on a single relay, which the venture’s repository calls its “single supply of reality.”

Rethinking the working mannequin

Block workers have been contemplating how groups ought to work as soon as the instrument not dictates the method. Lucas Isaza, who works on AI and product at Block, argued in a thread that instruments resembling Asana, Jira, and Linear as soon as baked sprints and Kanban into firm rituals, shaping the working mannequin as a lot because the work.

A configurable workspace removes these constraints, he mentioned, so “the bottleneck turns into the working mannequin.” In Buzz, he wrote, a single thread can maintain the analysis, process, repair, and surrounding dialog, condensing what used to span a number of instruments into one report of why a call was made.

Brokers can take user-level actions by means of CLI instructions, create their very own channels, and replace their very own reminiscences, whereas customers set channel- or thread-specific guidelines for every agent. Isaza mentioned he had experimented with brokers that generate a shared whiteboard for each thread, producing “higher context handoffs with no extra work.” Block has examined the strategy internally for months and has “but to determine” the mannequin that will get essentially the most from Buzz, he added, noting that the majority work is collaborative and “that does not have to cease with AI.”

Certainly, Block constructed the Buzz platform itself utilizing brokers, in line with Thomas Petersen, a principal designer and AI strategist on the firm. Petersen mentioned he rejoined Block wanting to alter “the lonely expertise of working with AI brokers,” including that “your complete platform” was developed utilizing brokers, together with its interface, which he described as “extra sculpted over time than designed up entrance.”

A protocol streak

Buzz extends the open protocol push that has outlined Dorsey’s work since he left Twitter. He stepped away from the Bluesky board in 2024 and has since backed a string of instruments no single firm controls, most of them constructed on Nostr, the relay-based protocol he has personally funded.

That features Bitchat, his Bluetooth mesh messenger, which China ordered pulled from Apple’s App Retailer in April, echoing Beijing’s 2023 ban on the Nostr-based Twitter various Damus. He has additionally seeded andOtherStuff, a nonprofit for open supply social instruments.

Block lower greater than 4,000 jobs in February, roughly 40% of employees, with Dorsey noting on the time that AI “basically modifications what it means to construct and run an organization.” A month later, Dorsey introduced that the agency’s Money App would construct assist for stablecoins into its core fee movement, although the Bitcoin maximalist was vocal about his reluctance to take action. In April, the agency disclosed holdings of  28,355 BTC price $2.2 billion in its proof-of-reserves report.