Block has released Buzz, a new open-source workspace that treats AI agents and humans as first-class participants in the same channels. The tool arrived this month with a freshly acquired domain at buzz.xyz and a philosophical stance worth examining: every message, reaction, workflow step, and git event lives in a single signed event log. The author field doesn't distinguish between person and process.
Buzz is built on Nostr, the decentralized protocol favored by Bitcoin maximalists and censorship-resistant messaging enthusiasts. Every action in Buzz is a cryptographically signed event, which means there's a unified audit trail regardless of whether a human or an AI agent created it. The identity model stays consistent across both.
The technical stack is Rust-heavy, with services including Postgres storage, Redis-based presence and typing indicators, authentication via Schnorr signatures, and a hash-chain audit log. Self-hosting is the default posture. Block built it so that any organization can run Buzz on their own infrastructure without vendor dependencies.
The Corporate Backstory
Block's interest in agent-centric workflows is well documented at this point. In February, the company cut more than 4,000 jobs, reducing headcount from over 10,000 to under 6,000. Jack Dorsey explicitly framed the restructuring around AI tooling, writing on X that smaller and flatter teams "paired with intelligence tools" were changing how companies operate. He predicted most companies would reach the same conclusion within a year.
Internally, Block had already gone deep on agentic infrastructure. Goose, the company's open-source AI coding agent, sees weekly use from roughly 60% of remaining employees across engineering, design, product, sales, and customer success. The company later donated Goose to the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. Builderbot, another internal tool, now processes around 200,000 operations per day and merges approximately 1,500 pull requests weekly.
Buzz is the next logical step. When AI agents are generating meaningful output alongside human workers, those workers need a place to see it happening. Traditional chat tools treat agent messages as afterthoughts or integrations. Buzz treats them as equals.
Open Source as Strategy
The Apache 2.0 license on Buzz is consistent with Block's approach to Goose, and it signals something specific: this is infrastructure the company wants others to adopt, extend, and potentially build businesses around. There's no hosted monetization play here. If anything, Block appears to benefit from the ecosystem effects of wider adoption.
That model has quietly become a thesis at Block. CTO Dhanji Prasanna has described open-source contributions as ways to expand access to capabilities Block develops internally. The calculation seems to be that a flourishing ecosystem of agent-first tools benefits Block's products and reduces friction for potential customers. It's a bet that interoperability wins.
Other frontier AI companies have circled similar territory, though with different strategies. The interesting question is whether Buzz's agent-native architecture will resonate beyond the companies already restructuring around AI workflows. For teams skeptical of vendor lock-in or uncomfortable piping every message through a third party, a self-hostable workspace with cryptographic audit trails has obvious appeal.
Whether the broader market is ready for workspaces that blur the line between human and machine collaboration remains to be seen. Block has at least shipped something concrete, and done so in the open.
