Starmark is the world’s decentralized global message network with no owners wherein the identity layer, social graph and network access remains firmly in the control of the end users. The network is based on proof of work to ship blocks between all peers and is capable of scaling to planetary scale and thousands of messages per second. The network incentives ensure the miners will ship data blocks between each other and end users own their data and can monetize their identities how they deem appropriate.

Just like Bitcoin itself, Starmark is electronic cash, and Digital Gold. The currency of the Starmark network is called the $MARK which is a hard money with provable scarcity (only 1.68 billion $MARK shall ever exist) and are distributed 100% to miners via a Fair Launch and no pre-mine. However thanks to the unique design of the Starmark blockchain node, it can actually scale to planetary scale and as a high speed electronic cash for the world while simultaneously powering the world's global digital identity and messaging service.

The Nostr Protocol was chosen as the base construction for the message posts to ensure maximum compatibility and openness. Specifically, the network accepts any type of Nostr event provided that it follows the basic envelope structure and fields are valid, including the sig field signed by the owner of the pubKey. The primary limitation of the network is the restriction of the maximum size of events permitted. In particular a text message event has content limited to 300 bytes, tags are limited to 300 bytes as well as the other fixed length fields. Reposts of text messages have an expanded size allowance permitting the ability to embed the repost directly in the content. The Starmark node validates, via consensus rules, that all text messages and text reposts have valid signatures.

All Nostr events created on Starmark are compatible with third party Nostr relays, however the opposite is not true owing to the size limitations of the Starmark network consensus rules. This may seem like a serious limitation, however this is actually a core strength and makes Starmark fundamentally focused on textual content. The reasons for the size and content restrictions may be obvious to some and is a topic that we may go into at a future point in time. The elegance of the Nostr protocol makes it the simplest possible protocol that could possibly work, and Starmark is the simplest possible digital currency and blockchain network that could possibly work to be the world's open decentralized message network.