It’s been almost 1 year 1 month since the birth of Routstr, these 13 months have been the most fulfilling months of our lives. Soon it’ll be a year since Jack tweeted about us. Against all odds, we’ve kept on building what we think should exist in the ecosystem in the exact form we desperately desire for it to exist.

The Temptations

In the last one year, we’ve been approached by VCs a couple of times to invest in us, we’ve been told to take VC funding by some, and we’ve also talked about it internally, to us it wasn’t even a question, funding of any kind creates problems.

We have also had many internal debates on

• whether to register ourselves a company,
• focus on building MOATS,
• push api.routstr.com as the main node so that we could take a cut,
• offer a subscription model as some people don’t want to pay per request,
• build an evaluation service just so we can have people being depended on us (not against the idea, but the intention)
• and more.

We’ve resisted these pressures because we know short-term incentives would compromise long-term resilience. We’ve stuck to our principles, but it hasn’t been free.

Independence

Our intention was never to NOT earn Bitcoin. We are truly grateful for HRF for supporting us when we needed it the most. Grants help us push through the uncertainty phase. But relying on grants forever doesn’t seem like the right approach. If we learn to feed ourselves, grants can fund more teams through the phases of uncertainty. Plus, we believe that we cannot build a system that’ll survive us if we relied on external grants forever.

So we’ve decided that the only way to get paid for our effort while staying true to our principles is to add a default dev cut to Routstr nodes. It’s not a brand new approach, many protocols already do this, Robosats, Shopstr, etc. being some of the prominent ones. Unlike grants, this scales with actual usage. If the protocol is valuable, the default dev cut should sustain the effort that goes into maintaining the protocol.

What This Means For You

We believe it aligns our incentives better. If you don’t want to pay the devs, you can turn it off by modifying the code or asking your agent to do so. We appreciate every node that contributes back, but the choice is entirely yours. Just… don’t be that guy. You know what we mean. There’s no enforcement.

Here’s how it works: the cut is 2.1% of per-request revenue, sent periodically from your node’s Cashu wallet to the Routstr dev Lightning address. End users simply see a price for the model they want. Nothing changes on their end. Revenue is openly posted on Nostr, and we’ll publicly share what we receive from each contributing node.

If you want to continue running a Routstr node while not paying us, you can choose not to upgrade to version 0.4.3. Newer clients will target features and protocol improvements introduced in 0.4.x, so staying on older versions may mean missing out on compatibility improvements.

You can also fork from 0.4.2 and build your own Routstr node that follows the standard! We encourage competition, our ultimate goal is to have a system like Routstr in the wild, whether we build it or not.

We hope most Routstr nodes choose to keep the dev cut active. At just 2.1%, it is a small way to keep the protocol independent of grants and fund continued work on clients, standards, and tooling that ultimately brings more users and revenue to your node. Our incentives are aligned.

Also, if you like the way we think and believe in the vision of a decentralized AI inference protocol built on Nostr using Bitcoin, please join us!

Adios.