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Discovery

Routstr uses Nostr as a decentralized directory for service discovery. Your node announces its presence, models, and pricing on Nostr relays, allowing clients to find you without a central server.

How It Works

  1. Provider Advertisement (Kind 38421): Your node periodically publishes an event with its URL, models, and pricing
  2. Client Discovery: Clients query relays for these events to find suitable providers

When announcements are published

Your node publishes an advertisement as soon as it has both a Nsec and at least one reachable endpoint (a public HTTP_URL, or an .onion address). Saving the Nsec in the dashboard is enough — the announcement follows within a minute, and no restart is required. After the first publish it re-announces every 24 hours, and immediately whenever the Nsec, endpoints, mints or relays change.

A node that has no Nsec yet simply waits, and starts announcing the moment one is configured. Note that HTTP_URL defaults to http://localhost:8000, which is not a reachable endpoint: a node with the default value and no onion address has nothing to advertise and will not publish until one is set.

Configuration

Configure discovery in Dashboard → Settings → Nostr.

Required Settings

Field Description
Npub Your node's public identity (clients use this to verify your node)
Nsec Your node's private key (used to sign advertisements)
Relays Where to publish your announcements

Default Relays

If not configured, Routstr publishes to:

  • wss://relay.damus.io
  • wss://relay.nostr.band
  • wss://nos.lol

Your node publishes events like:

{
  "kind": 38421,
  "content": {
    "name": "My Routstr Node",
    "description": "Fast GPT-4 access via Lightning",
    "endpoints": {
      "http": "https://api.mynode.com",
      "onion": "http://xyz...onion"
    },
    "models": ["gpt-4", "claude-3-opus"],
    "pricing": { ... }
  },
  "tags": [
    ["d", "routstr-provider"],
    ["g", "US"]
  ]
}

Tor Integration

If you're running with Tor (see Tor Support), your .onion address is automatically included in announcements. This allows clients to connect anonymously.

Verify Your Announcements

Check if your node is broadcasting:

  1. Copy your Npub
  2. Search on Nostr.band or Primal
  3. Look for Kind 38421 events

Generating Keys

If you don't have a Nostr identity:

  1. Use any Nostr client (e.g., Primal, Damus)
  2. Create an account
  3. Export your keys (npub and nsec)
  4. Enter them in the dashboard

Or generate keys programmatically:

from nostr_sdk import Keys

keys = Keys.generate()
print(f"npub: {keys.public_key().to_bech32()}")
print(f"nsec: {keys.secret_key().to_bech32()}")