SatsBridge — peer-to-peer bitcoin on Telegram
SatsBridge is a peer-to-peer bitcoin exchange that runs as a Telegram bot. The question that matters with any of those is what the operator can do with your money while a trade is open. Here is the complete answer, including the part that is not flattering.
| Material | Stored? |
|---|---|
| Your seed phrase | No — generated in memory, shown once, discarded |
| Your account public key | Yes, watch-only |
| Your seed, assisted mode only | Encrypted under your passphrase plus a server pepper held outside the database |
| Escrow private keys for a trade | Never — derived on demand, wiped after use |
| Chat and payment details | Deleted seven days after a trade settles |
Nothing in that database can spend coins, unless a trader opts into assisted signing, and those blobs are useless without both the trader's passphrase and a server-side secret that does not live in the database.
You do not have to believe any of this on our say-so. The escrow address is an ordinary 2-of-3 script on the Bitcoin blockchain. Open it in a block explorer before you fund it and count the keys.
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. Bisq's arbitration model makes exactly the same assumption.
Three things make it a bad bet for us. Before you approve anything, the payout screen shows you exactly where every satoshi is going, read from the actual Bitcoin transaction rather than from our database. Both sides have money locked up as a security bond, so a trader who goes along with a rigged ruling puts their own bond at risk. And the payment methods where a transaction is easiest to reverse carry the smallest trade ceilings.
It is a real limitation, which is why the arbitration key lives in a secrets manager and why every ruling is recorded with a written justification.
Value is conserved. No payout is signed unless the outputs plus the mining fee equal the inputs exactly. Value cannot be created, destroyed, or quietly diverted.
Substituted transactions are rejected. A PSBT arriving from an external wallet is checked against the stored plan — inputs, output addresses, output amounts, and their order. A tampered transaction is refused before a signature is added to it.
Illegal steps are impossible, not merely discouraged. Every state change is gated by both the current state and the role of whoever is asking. A seller cannot claim the buyer paid. A buyer cannot confirm their own payment. Nobody can release before deposits confirm.
Keys are never reused. Derivation indices are reserved monotonically and never recycled, even for trades that were abandoned.
It fails closed. Stale price feed, trading halts. Mining fee too high to leave a non-dust output, settlement refuses. Funding timeout with coins already in escrow, an arbitrator is notified rather than anything being auto-cancelled.
Telegram is the transport. Message content is visible to Telegram and to anyone with access to your account. Use a strong password and 2FA. A hijacked account can act as you, which is exactly why releasing coins takes a signature rather than a button press.
Reversible rails stay reversible. A payment can be clawed back after escrow has already released. That is a property of the rail, not of the protocol. Risk tiers and lower ceilings limit the exposure; nothing removes it. Prefer cash or a wire for large trades.
A lost recovery phrase is lost. Under the default setup we hold only your public key, so there is nothing for us to recover from.