Routstr

Routstr is a decentralized AI inference router built on Nostr and Cashu. Providers announce available models, capabilities, and prices on the Nostr network using standard relays; clients discover providers through those relays and pay per request using Cashu ecash, a Chaumian e-cash protocol denominated in Bitcoin sats. Settlement is instant and the payment tokens are unlinkable from the inference request, so the marketplace has no central operator, no account creation, and no card-on-file requirement. Providers can also accept BOLT12 Lightning payments alongside Cashu notes.

The architecture separates three concerns: Nostr handles censorship-resistant discovery and metadata (provider listings, model menus, pricing), Cashu handles the payment, and the inference itself is provided by whoever the client selects. The open-source otrta-client is the reference payment gateway (github.com/Routstr/otrta-client) and exposes an OpenAI-compatible API, so existing client code that targets the OpenAI SDK can route requests through Routstr with a base-URL change. Documentation lives at docs.routstr.com.

The project was built during Sovereign Engineering cohort SEC-05 in Madeira and is maintained by the Sovereign Engineering team and Routstr contributors. The design intent is censorship resistance: when a national government or a corporate provider blocks an activist's access to a particular model, Routstr allows continued inference by routing through other participants who still have access to it. The marketplace structure prices that residual capacity instead of relying on volunteer donation of accounts.

HRF awarded Routstr in its November 24, 2025 AI for Individual Rights round. The Cashu-plus-Nostr combination is the same primitive stack used by other freedom-tech projects in the Bitcoin space; Routstr is the most developed application of it to the AI-inference layer. The competing alternatives are direct API access (KYC and geographic block exposure) or VPN plus single-account hopping (slow and account-suspension prone). The structural argument is that pseudonymous market access to inference is the only design that survives both provider-level deplatforming and state-level network filtering, because no single party holds the routing table.