Catallax is an open protocol that enables pseudonymous contract work economies

Patrons broadcast paid gigs
Free Agents work jobs anonymously
Arbiters hold funds in escrow and judge outcomes.

Suffer no gatekeeper.

Friedrich Hayek derived the word catallax from the Greek verb katallasso (καταλλάσσω), which meant not only "to exchange" but also "to admit in the community" and "to change from enemy into friend".

This site explains an open protocol called Catallax which is intended to facilitate uncensorable, decentralized labor markets and permissionless payments.

Anybody on Earth can participate in Catallax and nobody can be stopped from doing so by anyone. Those who choose to participate in Catallax do so as one of the following roles, depending on their goals:

  • Patron: Creates tasks to be worked, finalizes agreements with Arbiters, funds escrows and assigns Free Agents.
  • Arbiter: Advertises as an escrow agent, accepts tasks, judges outcomes of work and pays Free Agents or refunds Patrons.
  • Free Agent: Applies for available tasks, delivers work and gets paid.

Arbiter advertisements, Task postings and their eventual resolutions are posted on the Nostr protocol while payments are handled via Cashu ecash and Lightning.
Thanks to Cashu-based wallets and Nostr’s permissionless identity creation, anyone (namedoxxed or nym) can participate in the Catallax economy without conforming to KYC or AML nor first having a Bitcion or Lightning wallet configured.

All you need is a web browser.

Built on Catallax

Catallax is one protocol, and it’s meant to have many faces. Each client below narrows the work to one kind of thing and leaves the protocol underneath untouched.

  • Grantless - crowdfunded grants for open-source work. Leave the boards, applications, tax structures and influencer networks to the non-profits. Teams post the work they intend to do, the community funds it with lightning, and an arbiter of your choosing releases the pooled sats when it’s delivered.
  • Canvasstr - get paid to add items to decentralized lists and apply tags. A patron puts sats up and contributors gets paid over lightning to submit items or tag things. There is no central curator / your network is the curator. Submitting entries to the “List of restaurants in my town” will probably be the easiest sats you ever make.
  • Reference client - the unopinionated reference. It exercises every part of the protocol and is where the NIP gets tested. Useful for seeing the raw machinery, but not a great place to send your friends.

Roles are nicknamed per client above, but the responsibilities stay consistent. Whoever funds the escrow is the Patron, whoever holds it and judges is the Arbiter (Canvasstr calls them the purser), and whoever does the work is the Free Agent (Grantless lets the team be its own; Canvasstr calls them canvassers). The events on the wire are the same three kinds in every case, so any Catallax client can read what any other one produced.

Rather than involving blockchains, smart contracts or complicated oracles and voting systems, the Catallax protocol relies on lindy technology: trust and reputation.

Sections

Protocols over Platforms

Catallax is a protocol, not a platform. This site acts as a schelling point to coordinate and explain the system, but doesn’t provide the service itself nor does the author take any fees from anyone running the protocol. It’s up to market actors to participate and run infrastructure according to their needs.

Because the network is built on top of Nostr, Catallax inherits Nostr’s censorship-resistance. As long as you can find a relay (or run your own), you can participate in the economy. Neither individual users nor particular tasks or work categories can be unilaterally prohibited by any central authority.
Speech is guaranteed by open protocols, but reach is not.

How it Works

  1. Arbiters advertise themselves, including what type of work they are proficient at judging, their fee, and any terms and conditions.
  2. Patrons create task proposals with detailed descriptions of what they want done and how much the gig pays.
  3. Patrons finalize tasks by funding the escrow
  • By “fund the escrow” we just mean “send bitcoin or ecash to the Arbiter’s wallet”. Remember, we’re keeping the base layer simple.
  1. Free Agents can apply for tasks and discuss with the Patron
  2. The Patron assigns a Free Agent to a task
  3. Free Agents get to work. When done, they submit the final product to the Arbiter for this gig
  4. The Arbiter judges the work. If it meets the requirement, the Free Agent is paid. If not, the money is refunded to the Patron.

For more details, see How it Works.

Value-for-Value for Real

Principles

Fully decentralized from the beginning

The author of this protocol is deeply distrustful of defacto centralization, where a nominally open protocol is implemented in one instance with overly-opinionated defaults hardcoded in such that viable alternatives never arise.
To avoid that, we will endeavour to:

  • Provide a relay + client package as a dead-simple binary for easy deployment by anyone.
    • The maintainers of this site might run an instance to help bootstrap, but it should be trivial for anyone else to do the same.
  • Optionally include a Cashu mint in the above.
  • Optionally include GrapeRank WoT in the above.

That said, all works published by this author run point-of-view-based web-of-trust deeply into the heart of the clients. The upshot is any visitor can bring their own trust graph and need not rely on the defaults they find.

Pseudonymity and user-proficiency spectrum respected

The currently-live examples of catallax sit somewhere along the way towards the ideal described below.

  • The protocol runs over nostr, but we will strive to hide these technicaliities at first
    • The ideal implementation will include simple onboarding such that a non-Nostr-user who just wants to participate in Catallax can get a Nostr identity and Cashu wallet right away via a Catallax client.
    • For the user who wants to explore the rest of Nostr, off-ramps should be provided to usher them into the rest of the ecosystem.
  • Any person, whether they have a lightning wallet and bitcoin-awarness/interest or not should be able to participate economically (thanks to NIP-60).
  • The above, taken all together, imply that fully pseudonymous interaction will be feasible.
  • Thought will be given to Tor compatibility as appropriate.

Trust and Reputation

Both Grantless and Canvasstr now lean on GrapeRank web-of-trust scores and decentralized lists instead of any central reputation system. A viewer’s own point of view decides which patrons, arbiters and workers they see first; nobody’s point of view can stop anyone else from publishing.

The one place a Catallax user must extend real trust is the Arbiter: they hold the escrow, and they could run off with it. We’ve capitulated on that up front. Pick your Arbiter well, and appreciate that their fee is your safety. Web-of-trust scores and a public record of every judgement (each resolution is a signed event with a payment receipt beside it) are how that choice gets easier over time.

Game theorists and red-teamers are invited to find the remaining holes.

Catallax will be built on Catallax

  • To every extent possible, once an MVP is ready and as budget allows, work on Catallax relay implementations, clients, Cashu integrations and GrapeRank integrations will be advertised as Catallax tasks for others to pick up!
  • We’ve put up bug bounties and feature requests for the catallax reference client, merged PRs (some from AI agents) and paid contributors, all using catallax. Sick.

Where things stand

As of September 2026.

  • Live and used: Grantless and Canvasstr both run on the protocol with real lightning payments between real people. The reference client is up and exercises the whole NIP.
  • Trust: both clients read GrapeRank scores and decentralized lists, with Brainstorm as the first provider of trusted assertions. Anyone can compute their own point of view and any client can choose a different provider.
  • Payments: lightning, as NIP-57 zaps, so every escrow deposit and every payout has a public receipt. Cashu is unstarted; NIP-60 wallets remain the plan for people who arrive with no lightning at all.
  • Relays: none required. The protocol works on any relay that stores the three kinds, and we got further without relay-side work than we expected to. The early relay implementation is retired.
  • Packaging: a one-binary deployment of client, relay and optional cashu mint is still the aspiration and still unstarted.