How it works

What counts

A stone goes up for a company when all of this is true:

• Its product was built on Bitcoin — an exchange, wallet, payment processor, lender, custodian, miner, hardware maker, marketplace or infrastructure provider. A Bitcoin company is one that would not have existed without Bitcoin, not one that later added a crypto tab.
• That product no longer operates — shut down, seized, bankrupt, absorbed into an acquirer and discontinued, or pivoted away from Bitcoin. A company that was acquired but whose service still runs under the new owner is not dead. A product line a living company killed can be an entry: the list is companies, and the Bitcoin products they killed.
• There is a source. A news report, a court filing, a regulator’s notice, or the company’s own announcement. The cause of death is one of a short list of words, and unknown is the right one more often than a guess. The obituary sticks to what the sources say.

Multi-asset crypto firms and darknet markets are judged case by case. Lenders whose books were mostly bitcoin are in; a marketplace whose business was contraband is not, however much bitcoin it moved. Companies whose founders were charged are described in the words of the charge, the plea or the verdict — nothing more.

Kind 31888 events

Each report is a Nostr event of kind 31888 — a custom addressable application kind this project defines. The event carries the company’s name, what it was, when it was founded and died, the cause, any losses, its sources and repositories, and an obituary, in its tags and content. Because it’s addressable, you can edit your own report later: republishing with the same identifier replaces the old version. Every report is a reply to a kind 31889 schema event, which is what defines which fields a report may carry — so the list is the thread of replies to its own schema. The pubkey that published the schema can sign off on a report by republishing it as a kind 31890 curated entry, which is what the graveyard shows and what is marked Curated here. Anyone can report, and every report stays readable on the relays either way.

Reporting a death

To add a company you need a Nostr signer — a browser extension such as Alby or nos2x. The extension holds your keys and signs the event; this site never sees your private key. Browsing the graveyard needs nothing at all.

A dead company’s website is only ever linked through the Wayback Machine — dead domains get resold — and every repository is paired with its copy at Software Heritage, because a dead company’s code is one takedown from gone.

Report a death →

Relays we read

• wss://ephemeral.mantra.press