Introducing PingKey: a worry-free way to let people reach you

Jun 16, 2025

A stress-free way to stay reachable—without running a server, leaking your inbox, or spinning up “yet another chat.”

Why We Built PingKey

If you publish open-source code, write a blog, or tinker in public, you probably paste an email address or social handle everywhere “just in case someone needs me.” Sooner or later that channel drowns in spam, bots harvest it, or it vanishes behind a banned domain. You deserve something lighter.

PingKey is our answer: a single, shareable link that lets anyone drop you a one-off, signed message—no account, no app, no server of yours to babysit.

What Makes It Different

1. Zero Infrastructure

PingKey sits on the Nostr relay network, so you don’t host or maintain anything. Spin up a key pair in seconds and you’re live.

2. Censorship-Resilient

Relays are interchangeable. If one disappears, flip a switch and your PingKey keeps working. Your “contact me” link never dies.

3. Proof-of-Work Stamps

Each sender solves a tiny proof-of-work puzzle in their browser. It costs them fractions of a second, but bots hate it. The solved puzzle turns into a unique pixel-perfect “stamp” that travels with the message—geeks love collecting them, spammers skip the hassle.

4. One-Shot by Design

PingKey is not another chat thread. After you read a message you can reply or let it fade into an encrypted archive. It keeps your mental inbox clean.

5. Private by Default

Messages ride over end-to-end encryption; only your key can open them. We never see plaintext, and there’s no hidden analytics pixel tracking your visitors.

How It Works (Plain English)

  1. Generate your PingKey One click in the web UI creates your private link—nothing to download.

  2. Paste it anywhere README, personal site, Hacker News profile—wherever people might need you.

  3. Visitor writes & mines When someone types a note, their browser spends a heartbeat solving a micro PoW. Success forges a colorful stamp.

  4. Message relays to you Only you have the key to decrypt and read the message that sending to you.

Who Should Try It Now

  • Open-source maintainers tired of public email spam
  • Indie hackers & bloggers who want feedback without a full comment system
  • Privacy maximalists looking for a contact lane that can’t be censored
  • Hackers & collectors who appreciate proof-of-work art and novel protocols

If that sounds like you, we’d love your early feedback. PingKey is open-source—fork it, file issues, or just drop us a stamped hello.

Roadmap Sneak Peek

  • Custom stamp themes—print your logo inside the PoW mosaic

Get Started

  1. Visit pingkey.xyz
  2. Click Build My Contact Link.”
  3. Paste it where the world can see.

That’s it. No servers, no sign-ups, no stress. Just peace-of-mind reachability for the independent web.

See you in the pings!

PingKey