Gift wraps: what a relay sees

Summary. Everything private on Floonet travels as a NIP-59 gift wrap: a kind 1059 event encrypted with NIP-44 to a throwaway key, containing a kind 13 seal, containing the real message (NIP-17). A relay sees ciphertext, a random-looking recipient key, and a deliberately fuzzed timestamp. Nothing else.

The three layers

1. The rumor. The actual message (for a wallet, a Grin slatepack riding a NIP-17 private direct message). It is never signed on its own, so it cannot be leaked and attributed.
2. The seal (kind 13). The rumor is encrypted with NIP-44 to the recipient and signed by the real sender. The seal proves authorship to the recipient only.
3. The gift wrap (kind 1059). The seal is encrypted again, this time signed by a one-time throwaway key, and addressed to the recipient’s key in a p tag. This is the only layer a relay ever stores.

What the relay can and cannot learn

A Floonet relay storing a gift wrap sees:

• A kind 1059 event, signed by a key that will never be used again.
• A p tag naming the recipient key (which wallets rotate independently of their funds).
• Ciphertext of unknowable content.
• A created_at that is deliberately wrong: NIP-59 tooling backdates both the seal and the wrap by a random amount up to two days, so the timestamp does not reveal real send time.

It cannot see the sender, the content, the amount, or whether the envelope is a payment, a message, or anything else. This is why NIP-11 metadata stays payment-neutral: the relay genuinely does not know.

One operational consequence: event size

Gift-wrapped slatepacks are much larger than typical Nostr notes. Both packages ship with a maximum event size large enough for wrapped slatepacks:

• floonet-strfry: events.maxEventSize in strfry.conf.
• floonet-rs: max_event_bytes in config.toml.

Do not tighten these below the shipped defaults or wrapped payloads will bounce.

References

• NIP-17 (private DMs): https://nips.nostr.com/17.
• NIP-44 (encryption): https://nips.nostr.com/44.
• NIP-59 (gift wrap, kind 13 and 1059): https://nips.nostr.com/59.
• Kind pages: https://nostrbook.dev/kinds/1059.