SatsBridge

Buy and sell bitcoin on Telegram. Your coins stay in multisig.

Find an offer you like, take it, and trade directly with another person. Or post your own offer and wait for someone to take it.

The bitcoin stays in multisig escrow while you settle the payment directly. Use whatever works for both of you — bank transfer, UPI, Pix, Zelle, M-Pesa, or cash in person.

No money passes through us. We don't hold your funds, and we can't move the bitcoin by ourselves.

Telegram handles the coordination. Multisig handles the escrow. You and the other person handle the payment.

Buyer1 key
Seller1 key
Us1 key
To move coins2 of 3

0.10% maker 0.70% taker 21 payment rails 18 currencies no account, no documents

§ 01
What it is

A peer-to-peer exchange that never touches your money

The idea is pretty simple.

Someone posts an offer at a price they're willing to trade at. Someone else accepts it and wants to fill the order.

Before the trade starts, both sides put up a security bond in a new 2-of-3 multisig address. The seller deposits the bitcoin being sold, along with their bond. The buyer puts up their bond as well.

The buyer then pays the seller directly using whatever payment method was agreed on in the offer — bank transfer, UPI, Pix, Zelle, M-Pesa, SEPA, or even cash in person. Once the seller confirms that the payment has arrived, the bitcoin can be released from escrow.

The model is basically borrowed from Bisq. You have the same kind of multisig escrow, bonded incentives, and an arbitration fallback if the trade goes sideways.

The difference is that you don't need to install a desktop client, sync the Bitcoin blockchain, or create another account just to make a trade. The whole thing lives inside a bot in an app you already use.

The bot does hold one of the three escrow keys, but that's all it can do. One key isn't enough to spend the bitcoin on its own.

And you don't have to trust us blindly on that.

The escrow address is a regular 2-of-3 multisig script on the Bitcoin blockchain. Before sending anything, you can open the address in a block explorer and verify the setup yourself. You can see that there are three keys and that two are required to move the funds.

That's the whole point: the bot helps coordinate the trade, but it doesn't get custody of your money.

§ 02
The escrow

Two signatures out of three

BUYER SELLER ARBITRATOR ANY 2 OF 3 SPENDS
Every trade derives a fresh P2WSH address. Keys are never reused.

Follow that through and three things fall out of it:

  • We cannot move your coins on our own. Not with the server, not with the database, not with our arbitration key. One signature is not two.
  • A counterparty who disappears cannot strand your money. The arbitrator plus whoever is still around reaches the threshold and settles.
  • Losing your own key is survivable. The other two still add up to two.

What you are trusting us with

Two of the three keys are needed to move the bitcoin, and we hold one of them.

That means, in theory, we could work with the person on the other side of your trade and use the two keys to take the coins. That is the trust assumption you are making when you use the service.

So why would you take that risk?

Three things make it a bad bet for us.

First, before you approve anything, the payout screen shows you exactly where every satoshi is going. The details are read from the actual Bitcoin transaction, not from our database.

Second, both sides have money locked up as a security bond. If we tried to rig a dispute and the other party went along with it, they would have to put their own bond at risk too.

Third, the payment methods where a transaction is easiest to reverse have lower trade limits. The more reversible the payment rail, the smaller the amount you can trade.

The system isn't based on you blindly trusting us. It's designed so that cheating is difficult to hide, expensive to cooperate on, and limited in how much can be taken in a single trade.

§ 03
Sequence

How a trade actually runs

  1. MakerPosts an offer: direction, currency, rail, size range, and a price either pinned to a number or tracking the index with a spread.

  2. TakerAsks to fill it for a specific amount. This is a request, not an execution. The maker can accept, decline with a reason, or reply and decide later.

  3. BothAgree to start. The price freezes at that moment and escrow addresses are derived. Nobody is put on a funding clock they did not choose.

  4. BothFund the multisig. Seller sends the coins plus their bond, buyer sends their bond.

  5. BuyerOnce deposits confirm, the seller's payment details are revealed. The buyer sends the fiat and marks it paid.

  6. SellerConfirms the money arrived. The payout is built, the bot adds its signature, the seller adds theirs, and it broadcasts.

If it goes wrong at any point, either side opens a dispute. Coins stay locked while an arbitrator reads the timeline, the chat and the chain, then signs a settlement with whichever party the ruling favours.

§ 04
Cost

What it costs

Charged once per completed trade
ItemRateNotes
Maker commission0.10%You posted the offer. Posting is cheaper on purpose.
Taker commission0.70%You filled someone else's offer.
Floor1,000 satsApplies to the combined total when the percentage lands under it.
Security bond15%Both sides. Returned in full on a clean trade. Makers can lower it or waive it entirely.
Mining feesplitHalved between the two of you, deducted in the same transaction that releases escrow.

On a 0.01 BTC trade the maker pays 1,000 sats and the taker pays 7,000. There is no separate invoice, no deposit to top up and no way to skip the fee, because it comes out of the payout itself.

§ 05
Rails

Payment rails, and which ones can be reversed

Fiat never touches the bot. You pay the other person directly on a rail you both already use. Each one carries its own settlement window and its own chargeback risk, and reversible rails get a lower ceiling per trade.

21 rails across 18 currencies
RiskRails
Irreversible Cash in person, cash deposit machine, cardless cash withdrawal, domestic and international wire
Low UPI, IMPS / NEFT, Pix, M-Pesa
Medium SEPA, SEPA Instant, Faster Payments, Zelle, Interac e-Transfer, PayID / Osko, Revolut, Wise
High ACH transfer

Currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, INR, NGN, BRL, CAD, AUD, ZAR, TRY, ARS, MXN, PHP, IDR, VND, JPY, KES, CHF.

§ 06
Questions

The things people ask first

What stops you running off with my bitcoin?

Arithmetic. Spending from the escrow address needs two signatures and we hold one key. A completely compromised server, database and arbitration key still produces one signature. The honest caveat is the one in section 02: we could collude with your counterparty, which is inherent to 2-of-3 and is why bonds and trade ceilings exist.

Do I have to KYC?

There are no documents, no selfies and no identity checks. The bot knows your Telegram account and whatever payment details you hand to the person you are trading with. Your bank still sees the fiat leg, though, so a trade is unintermediated rather than invisible. Do not confuse the two.

What happens if the bot goes down mid-trade?

Your coins are in a multisig address, not in our custody, so downtime delays a trade instead of freezing funds. The escrow descriptor can be rebuilt from the trade record, and the buyer and seller keys reach the 2-of-3 threshold between themselves without us.

What if I lose my recovery phrase?

We cannot get it back for you. On the default setup the phrase is shown once and we keep only your public key, which is exactly what stops us from touching your coins. Write it down before you fund anything. There is also a stored-key mode where the seed stays encrypted under a passphrase only you know, which is easier to live with and less safe.

Why Telegram, and not a real app?

What kills a P2P exchange is having nobody to trade with, not bad design. A bot sits where people already are, runs fine on a cheap Android phone, and needs no install and no signup. The cost is the transport: bot chats on Telegram are not end-to-end encrypted, which is covered above.

How is this different from Bisq or RoboSats?

Same escrow model as Bisq without the desktop client and without the DAO. Different from RoboSats in that it settles on-chain rather than over Lightning, and that it carries local rails such as UPI, Pix and M-Pesa rather than a generic transfer list. If you already run Bisq happily, it is a more mature system than this one and you should probably keep running it.

Is any of this legal where I am?

Depends where you live, and the rules vary a lot by country. We are not qualified to tell you what applies to you, so ask someone who is.

§ 07
Start

Post an offer before you need one

If nothing on the book is worth taking, put up your own at a price you would be happy to get filled at and leave it there. Offers last ten days, makers pay 0.10% instead of 0.70%, and if you price it against the index it keeps up with the market on its own.