A reaction, and the time where you are — without telling the relays
Alpha.15 adds emoji reactions and a private local time. Both travel inside the encrypted chat. Relays see ordinary ciphertext, not a public like and not your timezone.
Vincenzo Palazzo
vincenzopalazzo@sonarprivacy.xyz
American by style, European by nature
| ex- @amazon
The wallet is now Cashu
Sonar 1.15 moves the wallet to Cashu. Balance, send, receive, in-chat pay, and your handle all live there. Breez stays only as a legacy wallet, and it is never deleted out from under you.
Sending money should feel like sending a message
Sonar can now pay someone without opening a chat first — pick a contact, paste an address, or scan a code. No invoice to request, no claim step for them, and it works even when their phone is asleep in a pocket.
What happens to your chats if you lose your phone
Sonar can now keep an encrypted backup of your conversations that only you can open — no cloud account, no company holding a spare key. Here is what it saves, what it deliberately does not, and the one thing you should do before you need it.
v0.1-alpha.13 — the release that stopped getting killed
You can now pay someone without opening a chat first. Plus six rounds chasing a single iOS crash signature, Lightning that arrives while the app is dead, a pile of transcript bugs that all looked like "my message disappeared", and a full walkthrough of how encrypted account backup works — down to what deliberately is not in the archive.
v0.1-alpha.12 — one name to chat, one name to pay
Sonar's biggest release yet: one @sonarprivacy.xyz handle now starts an encrypted chat (NIP-05) and receives Lightning payments (BIP-353) from any wallet — plus a production cutover to Signal-style transcripts, the Trill nudge, and mesh/group security fixes from an adversarial review.
Trill (nudge) — an MSN-style attention signal that respects privacy and abuse resistance
A nudge shakes the screen, fires a haptic, and plays a bell — but unlike MSN Messenger's notorious feature, Sonar's trill is persisted, muted, and throttled so attention never becomes harassment.
Nicknames, handles, and readable group links — names people can share without becoming the account
Sonar separates free-form nicknames, claimable NIP-05 handles, and Signal-style HTTPS group invites so people stay discoverable and shareable — while the account key stays the only durable identity.
Dogfooding a Signal-shaped transcript engine — patterns first, packages later
We extracted Signal’s open / pin / owned-inset patterns into monorepo twin packages so Sonar can ship Signal-comparable chat performance without cloning Signal chrome — and without freezing a public Maven/SPM API before a second consumer forces semver.
How Sonar is built — two networks, one conversation, no phone number
Sonar is not "Signal plus Bluetooth." It is one portable Nostr identity driving two transports — Noise over a BLE mesh when you're nearby, MLS (Marmot) over Tor and open relays when you're not — folded into a single conversation without accounts or a central message vault.
Chat Control, explained — what Brussels just voted on, and why your private messages are the battlefield
On July 10 the European Parliament revived message scanning even though more MEPs voted against it than for it. If you've never heard of "Chat Control", start here — what it is, what just happened, and what actually protects a conversation.