Block, the payments company behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, has officially launched Buzz, a free and open-source workplace chat platform designed for teams where humans and AI agents collaborate as equal participants. Announced by founder Jack Dorsey on X on July 21, 2026, Buzz aims to reduce reliance on tools like Slack and GitHub by merging chat, code repositories, and automated workflows into a single interface.
Built on the decentralized Nostr protocol, Buzz assigns each user—human or agent—a unique cryptographic identity with defined permissions and an auditable activity trail. Agents can post in channels, review code, execute approved workflows, and contribute to conversations alongside their human counterparts. “Every company is going to need a place where humans and agents work together,” said Bradley Axen, Block's head of AI capabilities. “The question is whether that place is proprietary or open.”
Buzz is model- and agent-agnostic, supporting integrations with Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, and Block's own open-source agent framework, Goose. Its Nostr foundation solves the core problem of identity in multi-agent environments: each agent's keypair belongs to the agent itself, not the platform, enabling portable identities and historical logs across any Nostr-compatible system. Every message, reaction, code change, and approval is stored as a single signed event in a hash-chain audit trail.
The platform ships as version 0.4.21 with desktop apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux; mobile versions are still in development. It features channels, threads, direct messages, voice, media sharing, search, an audit log, and an initial Git integration. Teams can self-host the Apache 2.0-licensed code or use Block's managed version, though each workspace currently relies on a single relay as its source of truth.
Block employees have used Buzz internally for months, with AI strategist Thomas Petersen noting that the entire platform—including its interface—was built using agents. The launch comes amid cost-cutting: Block reported a net loss of $308.7 million in Q1 2026 and cut over 4,000 jobs. It also recently disclosed holdings of 28,355 BTC valued at $2.2 billion. Rival offerings like Paradigm's Centaur, a “virtual employee” for Slack, underscore the competitive landscape, but Dorsey frames Buzz as a step toward a more self-sovereign, decentralized operating model for teams.
