Bisq NetworkAvailable now

About this book

In a world where centralized Bitcoin exchanges can freeze accounts overnight, demand ever-expanding KYC and AML rituals, quietly log every trade for regulators or data brokers, suffer catastrophic hacks or bankruptcies that wipe out user funds, or simply change their terms of service with a single email, true sovereignty over Bitcoin trading feels like a distant dream. Bitcoin promised something radically different: peer-to-peer electronic cash that lets individuals exchange value directly, without intermediaries, without permission, and without compromise. For years, that promise remained largely unfulfilled when it came to actually trading Bitcoin for fiat or other assets. Centralized gateways offered convenience at the cost of control. Self-hosted or P2P alternatives were either incomplete, fragile, low-liquidity, or buried in technical complexity that only cypherpunks could navigate.

Then came Bisq.

Launched in production in April 2016 by Manfred Karrer—a German software developer and game designer whose deep commitment to Bitcoin’s original ethos had already driven him to reject every custodial or semi-centralized solution—he set out to build what no one else had: a fully decentralized, non-custodial, open-source Bitcoin exchange that runs entirely on users’ own machines. No company. No central server. No one holding your keys or your coins. Every trader participates directly in a global peer-to-peer network, with Tor hidden services enabled by default, data stored only locally on your desktop, and trades settling on-chain through carefully designed multisignature escrows. What began as Bitsquare in 2014 was rebranded to Bisq in 2017 after trademark issues, but the vision never wavered: your desktop, your keys, your trades.

The April 2019 release of version 1.0 marked a historic milestone—the launch of the Bisq DAO, the first production Bitcoin-native decentralized autonomous organization. Using BSQ (colored coins backed by real Bitcoin), the community took full control of governance and funding. Manfred Karrer, true to the project’s principles, stepped back completely, dissolving the founder role so that Bisq would never again depend on any single individual or legal entity. Subsequent upgrades, most notably the v1.2 “Burning Men Protocol” trade protocol, further strengthened decentralization by moving from 2-of-3 multisig (with an arbitrator holding a key) to pure 2-of-2 multisig between traders, combined with a time-locked delayed payout transaction that dramatically reduced trust assumptions while preserving robust dispute resolution through a three-layer system: private encrypted trader chat, mediation, and arbitration as a rare last resort.