Learn · Seed catalog
Did Lightning FM seed its own catalog?
Yes. Four house artist identities, all created and controlled by Lightning FM, tested the publish, sell, and delete pipeline before any real artist existed to test it with. All four are retired. Every event is below, downloadable, and verifiable with a tool we didn't write.
Building a catalog pipeline needs a catalog to build against. Before a single real artist had a key, a track, or a wallet on Lightning FM, four identities we made ourselves stood in: they published tracks, listed one for sale, and eventually got retired, so every stage of the lifecycle got exercised honestly before it was asked to hold a stranger's money or catalog.
Lightning Louise
2 tracks, 1 sale listing, 1 relay list. Retired with a signed deletion event; the identity's key is still held today, so this is the one full lifecycle Lightning FM can attest to directly.
The Relay Operators
10 tracks. Retired; the key was reissued afterward, so the events verify but Lightning FM can't re-sign with the original key today.
Satoshi Sounds
10 tracks. Same status as The Relay Operators: verifiable, key reissued after retirement.
Keypair
10 tracks, the plainest placeholder name of the four. Same status: verifiable, key reissued after retirement.
Using Lightning Louise's events as the worked example, because it's the one Lightning FM can attest to end to end:
"Voltage ghost transmissions. Cypherpunk lullabies from the routing table." lud16: lightninglouise@coinos.io
"Voltage Ghost" (d: voltage-ghost), then later "Cypherpunk Lullaby" (d: cypherpunk-lullaby).
"Voltage Ghost" listed at 1,500 sats. The exit-rights structure applies retroactively too: nothing about this listing routed through a platform-held wallet.
Published the same day as the final profile update.
"test catalog retired, content moved to a private test network." Fifteen events named for deletion. relay.lightning.fm honored it the same way it would for any onboarded artist.
Download the archive and check any event's signature locally with nak[2], a Nostr CLI Lightning FM didn't write:
curl -O https://lightning.fm/seed-catalog-archive.jsonl
cat seed-catalog-archive.jsonl | while read -r line; do
echo "$line" | nak verify || echo "FAILED: $line"
doneseed-catalog-archive.jsonl[1] holds all 39 events: the four profiles, 30 track events across The Relay Operators, Satoshi Sounds, and Keypair plus Lightning Louise's 2, her one sale listing, her relay list, and her deletion request. Every line verifies with no failures.
One deliberate omission: Lightning FM will not republish these events to any relay. relay.lightning.fm honored Lightning Louise's deletion request[3]; sending the same events back to a relay, including our own, would undo that. The archive exists so the record is checkable without asking any relay to serve deleted content again.
The signatures on all 39 events are cryptographically valid, full stop: that part needs no trust in Lightning FM at all, only in the math nak checks. Custody is a separate claim. Lightning Louise's key is still held exactly as it was when these events were signed, so Lightning FM can attest to that identity directly, today. The Relay Operators, Satoshi Sounds, and Keypair were each reissued a new key after retirement, and the original keys weren't kept, so Lightning FM can't produce a fresh signature proving present-day control of those three. That's an honest gap, not a hidden one, and it's exactly why this page names it instead of only showing the parts that look clean.
Wait, Lightning FM used fake artists?
Four house identities, created and controlled by Lightning FM itself: Lightning Louise, The Relay Operators, Satoshi Sounds, and Keypair. They existed to build and test the publish, sell, and delete pipeline before any real artist had onboarded to test it with. All four are retired. The live catalog today is 0GGM3NT3D (Matt's own artist project) plus onboarded artists.
How do I know this page isn't just asserting this happened?
Don't take the page's word for it. Every event described here is in the downloadable archive below, exactly as originally signed. Run nak verify against any of them and check the signature yourself, using a tool Lightning FM didn't write.
Why isn't this catalog still live on relay.lightning.fm?
It was formally retired with a NIP-09 deletion event, honored by the relay the same way any onboarded artist's deletion request is honored. Republishing the events now would undo that deletion, which is why the record lives here as a static file instead of a relay you can query.
Can you still prove you control all four identities today?
Only Lightning Louise's. That key is unchanged and held the same way our other artist keys are held. The other three were reissued after retirement, so we no longer hold the exact key that signed those archived events. The signatures are still fully valid; we just can't produce a fresh one from those specific keys anymore.
Does hosting this archive violate the deletion?
No. NIP-09 asks relays not to keep serving the events, and relay.lightning.fm honors that. It doesn't erase history or forbid describing what happened. The distinction that matters: this page never asks a relay to serve these events again. It's a static download, verified locally, not a live query.
Facts change. Every claim above links to its source as of the date shown. Check the source, and if we're out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.
Or see what's open source today.