SEC-06: Identity & Signers

The internet is going from frustrating to unusable at an accelerating rate—especially if you want to maintain any semblance of privacy online. Your digital identity isn't yours, and neither is your data, but having to show your passport to watch a YouTube video or rent a VPS is a sign of the times.

This morning, we tried to create an account to transfer our VPS hosting to a new provider. After begrudgingly handing over our Credit Card details, our account got flagged immediately, "High risk." No apparent reason, no explanation, and only one path forward to remedy the issue: a selfie with a government-mandated ID to prove identity.

We believe there's a better way.

Cryptographic Identities

The wonderful thing about cryptographic identities is that they exist outside of the computer. You can literally generate a keypair by locking yourself in your bathroom and throwing a couple of dice. You can generate one or a million of them, without asking anyone for permission. No email or phone number required. Cryptographic identities are a large part of what makes Bitcoin & Nostr so powerful.

Your public key is your identity across the protocol. Every event is cryptographically signed. Take your keys, take your identity, your social graph, your content, and your money anywhere. It is this aspect that we want to explore in our upcoming cohort, SEC-06.

Upcoming Cohorts

Starting in 2026, we are introducing shorter, more focused sprints to concentrate on specific problems. We will be starting the year with two such sprints in quick succession, followed by our 6-week cohort in the summer:

• SEC-06 – Identity & Signers (March 2 - March 20)

• SEC-07 – Networks (March 30 - April 17)

• SEC-08 – Summer Cohort (July 20 - August 28)

Applications for SEC-06 are now open, and we encourage all developers and vibe-coders to apply!

SEC-06: Identity & Signers

While Nostr is still small, it managed to bootstrap a social network of users that hold their own keys, giving rise to a permissionless and self-sovereign Web of Trust in the process. Tools like Vertex and the ContextVM-based relatr are using this social graph to compute personalized trust scores, among other things. Your network becomes your reputation layer, just like it is in meatspace.

How do we best leverage trust and reputation? And how do we improve the issues around key management and signing? That's exactly the kind of questions we want to focus on in this cohort:

• Key management & signers - we agree with hzrd that signer UX sucks. How can we improve it?

• Novel uses of Nostr identities - what can we build if users (humans or machines) have permissionless wallets and spending from the get-go?

• Leveraging WoT - Nostr gives us a Web of Trust for free, primitive as it may be. What can we do with it?

As mentioned in the SEC-05 report, Sovereign Engineering is slowly but surely moving past the crazy experiment phase. The program is maturing, and the protocols and substrates we are most interested in—Bitcoin, Nostr, and ecash—are maturing too.

We are excited that the

team, led by BDK maintainer Alekos Filini, is joining us for SEC-06. The team just released the Portal SDK, which makes it easy to integrate Nostr-based auth, lightning payments, and Cashu tokens into any app. We're looking forward to exploring the possibilities of this SDK with their team.

We expect great weather, blue ocean as far as the eye can see, and interesting problems to solve. Apply for SEC-06 today and see you in sunny Madeira soon!

More: sovereignengineering.io | No Solutions

NOTE: Applications for the other cohorts will open soon.