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Run a relay

Summary. Goblin’s payment messages ride ordinary Nostr relays, so any relay works, as long as it accepts connections from Tor exit nodes (Goblin dials relays over Tor whenever a wallet’s Tor routing is on, and many wallets keep it on). The default relay (relay.floonet.dev) is a Floonet relay: stock strfry with a small write policy that restricts stored event kinds to the handful Goblin needs. Running your own keeps your community’s traffic on infrastructure you control.

Motivation

A relay only needs to do one thing for Goblin: accept and serve the gift-wrapped payment events (and the profile / relay-list events that make delivery work). Restricting which kinds it stores keeps a payment relay lean and uninteresting to abuse; it isn’t a general-purpose social relay.

How it works

  • strfry, unmodified, plus a write-policy plugin that only admits the kinds Goblin uses: profiles (kind 0), contact/relay lists, gift wraps (kind 1059), and the relay-list kinds (10002 / 10050). Everything else is rejected, so the relay won’t fill with unrelated content.
  • Clients reach it over wss://, over Tor: every wallet connection arrives from a shared Tor exit IP, which is why abuse controls are per-connection rather than naive per-IP.
  • It’s typically fronted by the same TLS reverse proxy as the name authority, with the websocket location proxied to strfry’s loopback port.
  • Payment retention. The point of a payment relay is to hold a gift-wrap until its recipient comes online, so don’t set an aggressive expiry or eviction policy that could drop an unfetched payment. The project’s relay.floonet.dev guarantees payment-message retention (it cannot prematurely delete a payment), which is why it ships as the default relay in every wallet; run yours the same way.
  • Optional NIP-42 auth. Goblin wallets do opportunistic NIP-42 auth automatically, so a relay may enable it and wallets will answer. Do not make it mandatory or paid, though: the wallet’s pool gate refuses any relay that requires payment or AUTH.
  • Make sure Tor exit traffic isn’t blocked. Any wallet with Tor routing on reaches your relay over a Tor exit, so a CDN or WAF rule that blocks Tor exit nodes (Cloudflare’s “Block Tor” toggle, for example) will silently cut those wallets off. An earlier build ran a dedicated Tor onion service in front of the relay; that requirement is retired (see Tor and your relay), and a plain clearnet-reachable relay works fine today.

Deploying

The recommended path is a Floonet relay package: floonet-strfry (Docker Compose: relay + name authority + auto-HTTPS) or floonet-rs (a single hardened binary with the same features built in). A minimal strfry write-policy setup also lives under goblin-nip05d/deploy/strfry/ if you’d rather assemble it by hand. Then advertise the relay in your wallet: Settings → Nostr Relays → add wss://relay.yourdomain → Save & reconnect.

Reference

References