Funding Proposal: SIP-01 Protocol & Reference Stack — Anders (NostrDanish)
Goal: 2,000 USDC per month · Initial term: 3 months, then community review · Settlement: 1st of each month, on-chain via the community Safe
The standard already exists
While the rest of us were asking whether a community-run search engine was even possible, Anders (github.com/NostrDanish) went and built the foundation for one.
SIP-01 is an open standard for a shared, decentralized web index on Nostr: any crawler can publish signed observations of web documents, any relay can store and replicate them, any search engine can consume and rank them — with no single company, crawler, relay, or key in control. It's not a whitepaper. It's a versioned, 27-page specification with reproducible test vectors, running in production across five interoperating implementations he built: Crawlstr (a browser-based crawler anyone can run), the UNCAGED Index Relay, the UNCAGED search engine, indexstr, and presearchstr.com — which you can search right now. There's a live dashboard showing the index growing in real time.
And here's the part that should tell you who you're funding: he then commissioned a line-by-line audit of his own spec against all five implementations, published the nine things it got wrong, and fixed them. That's the engineering culture this community said it wanted after what happened to Presearch. He's already practicing it, unpaid.
This proposal asks the community to fund him to do it full-time.
What this funds
1. Stewardship of the SIP-01 standard. The specification, its test vectors, and the extension registry through which the protocol grows — including review of proposed extensions (SIP-02 and beyond) from other contributors, and the path toward formal NIP submission so the standard outlives any one of us. A standard maintained part-time stays a hobby; a standard maintained full-time becomes infrastructure.
2. The reference stack. Continued development of Crawlstr, the UNCAGED relay and engine, indexstr, and presearchstr — the working proof that the standard isn't theoretical, and the forkable starting point for anyone who wants to build their own engine on the shared index.
3. Growing the index and the indexer network. A shared index is only as strong as the number of independent people contributing to it. This workstream is recruitment and evangelism: getting more community members running crawlers and relays, more sites indexed, more engines built on the standard — turning a one-builder ecosystem into a many-builder one.
Why full-time, and why now
The index is growing, other developers are beginning to build against the standard, and proposals to extend it are already arriving. This is exactly the moment a protocol either compounds — because its author is present to review, integrate, and ship — or stalls, because he's doing it in the margins around paid work. $2,000/month is a deliberately lean ask for the author and lead implementer of a working protocol stack; it's the commitment level that lets him prioritize this while the ecosystem gets on its feet.
How you're protected
- Payouts go through the community Safe — a 2-of-3 multisig. No single person can move funds.
- Settlement is on-chain and monthly. Every payout is publicly verifiable on Base.
- All code and specs are open. The spec text is public domain (CC0, like the Nostr NIPs); every repo is public. You can watch the commits — and the index — grow.
- Monthly progress updates. A short public dev log on this forum every month: what shipped, what's next, with links to the work.
- You can stop any time. This is a monthly goal, not a lump sum. Funding is re-earned every single month.
- A defined review point. After 3 months, we assess openly: what got built, whether to continue, and whether the target should change.
Surplus policy: contributions above the 2,000 USDC monthly target are paid out to Anders along with the rest of the period balance — treat anything over target as direct recognition of over-delivery.
100% developer time. This goal is part of the Core Development subproject and funds one thing: Anders' time.
What contributors receive
Beyond moving the project forward: contributions are recorded on-chain, factor into governance credibility and voting weight, and contributors are credited on the contribution record. And uniquely for this goal — you can contribute without money too: run Crawlstr in your browser and you're literally building the index this funding exists to grow.
How to contribute
Contribute USDC on Base directly through the goal page: [link to goal]