Early Launch — Product Notes
What's live today, what's still being built, and what to know before you trade real sats.
Colabonate is a live marketplace built on Nostr and Lightning. Every identity is a real Nostr keypair, every listing and trade event is a real cryptographically-signed Nostr event, and every payment moves real sats. There is no test network, no demo wallet, and no simulated money anywhere on this platform.
Trade
Buy, sell, and cooperate — for real, with your own wallet
Check reputation
Look at a seller's reviews and history before you pay — see the next article for why this matters today
Feedback
Use the feedback widget to report bugs, rough edges, or ideas
Expect change
The platform is young — features, the catalog, and this help section are all still growing
This is real money. Treat every trade the way you would on any other marketplace — nothing here is a sandbox.
Colabonate is early. If something feels rough or missing, it probably is — tell us.
We do not custody your Nostr key
Your Nostr private key lives in your own browser extension (Alby, nos2x, Nostr Signer, etc.) or your NIP-46 bunker. Colabonate only ever sees your public key. We cannot sign anything on your behalf, and we cannot recover a lost key for you.
We collect error logs and feedback
We collect error logs and feedback submissions to improve the platform. Logs include request metadata, error stack traces, and the Nostr pubkey associated with an action. This data is used only to diagnose issues and prioritise fixes.
Colabonate uses Stage 1 Direct-Pay: when you buy something, you pay the seller's own Lightning address, NWC wallet, or Cashu eCash wallet directly. The platform never touches or holds your funds for these trades — it is fully non-custodial by design.
Connect your wallet
A real Lightning wallet (WebLN, e.g. Alby) or Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) is required to pay
Pay the seller directly
Your payment goes straight to the seller's configured rail — Colabonate is not in the money path
No forced refund today
Because the platform never holds the funds, it cannot claw back a payment if a trade goes wrong
A safety cap applies
Every transaction is capped at 210,000 sats while the platform is early — this is a deliberate, temporary limit, not a bug
There is no built-in refund mechanism for a Direct-Pay trade gone wrong — check a seller's reputation and reviews before paying, the same way you would on any peer-to-peer marketplace.
A held, on-chain Bitcoin escrow for higher-value trades (via an ICP canister) is planned but not yet available to buyers — see the section below.
Escrow is planned, not live yet for everyday trades
A second, non-custodial escrow mechanism — Bitcoin held by a verifiable, open-source ICP smart-contract canister rather than by Colabonate — is designed and substantially built, intended for higher-value trades. It is not yet turned on for buyers. Until it is, every trade on the platform runs on Direct-Pay: no held funds, no platform-mediated reversal.
Disputes today
Colabonate has a DAO Arbitration Council for reviewing disputes on completed tickets. For an un-escrowed Direct-Pay trade, though, the Council can rule on a dispute but cannot force money back from a seller who has already been paid — there is nothing held to release or return. Resolution today rests on reputation, reviews, and goodwill, the same trust model most peer-to-peer marketplaces run on before an escrow layer exists.
Alongside your Lightning wallet, Colabonate offers an opt-in, fully non-custodial Cashu eCash wallet (NIP-60/61). Enable it under Settings → Wallet → "Enable non-custodial eCash (Cashu)".
The app ships two default mints: mint.minibits.cash (the Colabonate-recommended mint, real value) and testnut.cashu.space (a public test mint with no real value, useful for exploring the feature risk-free).
Cashu proofs are bearer tokens you hold yourself — losing your wallet state (e.g. clearing browser storage) means losing the balance, with no way for Colabonate to recover it.
Non-custodial by design
You hold the Cashu proofs — the Colabonate server never stores or sees them. You can add mints beyond the two defaults yourself; any mint outside the two shipped defaults is shown as unvetted.
No mint publishes an audited proof-of-reserves
This is a disclosed, ecosystem-wide gap today — no Cashu mint, including the recommended one, currently publishes an independently audited proof-of-reserves. Treat mint balances with the same caution you would apply to any custodial-adjacent bearer-token system.