SatsBridge — peer-to-peer bitcoin on Telegram
SatsBridge lets you buy and sell bitcoin with other people on Telegram, escrowed in 2-of-3 multisig. Below: custody, fees, payment rails, disputes, and the things people are right to be suspicious about.
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 that we could collude with your counterparty, which is inherent to 2-of-3 and is why bonds and trade ceilings exist. The security page covers it in full.
We do, as the arbitrator. It exists so that a trade cannot be frozen forever by one person walking away: the arbitrator plus whoever is still around reaches the threshold and settles.
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.
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.
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.
0.10% if you posted the offer, 0.70% if you took someone else's, with a 1,000 sat floor on the combined total. The on-chain mining fee is split evenly. Both are deducted inside the payout transaction, so there is no separate invoice. Both sides also lock a security bond, 15% by default, returned in full on a clean trade.
Because offers on the book are what makes the service usable and takers consume them. Bisq prices it the same way. If you are trading regularly, post rather than take.
Ten days. If you price it against the index rather than pinning a number, it keeps up with the market on its own for that whole time.
Before a trade starts, a take request expires after six hours and you are told. After funding, either side can open a dispute and an arbitrator settles it with whoever is still present. Your money is never stuck waiting on someone who left.
On some rails, yes — that is a property of the rail, not of the escrow. It is why rails are sorted into risk tiers and why the reversible ones carry lower ceilings: irreversible and low-risk rails get the full limit, medium-risk half, high-risk a quarter. For anything large, use cash or a wire.
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.
If you are happy giving an exchange your documents and letting it hold your coins, a normal exchange is simpler and you should use one. This exists for people who want neither of those things and are willing to trade with a person to avoid them.
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.
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.