Jack Dorsey is back with another crypto-native product. The Block founder and Bitcoin maximalist this week announced Buzz, an open source group chat application built on the Nostr protocol. Buzz is described as a 'native workspace for human and agent teams' and is designed to reduce reliance on platforms like Slack.
What Buzz is
Buzz is model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign, and fully open source. Bradley Axen, head of AI capabilities at Block, said the company built Buzz because it believes the workspace for humans and agents should be open rather than proprietary. The app runs on Nostr, the same decentralized protocol that powers many Bitcoin-adjacent social tools.
Dorsey has long been vocal about the need for open protocols. He left Twitter in 2021 to focus on Bitcoin and payments through Block, which owns Cash App and Square. Cash App already lets users send, receive, buy, and sell Bitcoin. Square point-of-sale terminals accept Bitcoin via the Lightning Network. Block also debuted a Bitcoin mining rig with swappable parts in 2023 to cut repair costs for miners.
Buzz fits into that broader vision: a stack of open, permissionless tools that don't depend on a single company. Dorsey has described Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin whitepaper as 'poetry,' and Buzz extends that ethos into workplace communication.
Open source vs. proprietary
The timing isn't accidental. Slack and Microsoft Teams have faced growing criticism over data ownership, walled gardens, and pricing. Buzz offers an alternative where users control their own data and can run their own servers. Because it's open source, anyone can audit the code or fork it.
Axen's comment about openness vs. proprietary cuts to the core of the debate. If AI agents are going to work alongside humans, the argument goes, the underlying infrastructure shouldn't be locked into a single vendor.
Buzz is live now, though Dorsey hasn't announced a specific release date for a polished consumer version. The app is likely to attract developers and Bitcoin enthusiasts first. Whether it can dent Slack's enterprise grip is an open question — but Dorsey has never shied away from long bets.
