Bisq Review: What is Bisq? How to Trade Bitcoin on Bisq? Fees

What is Bisq?

There are many decentralized exchanges. But, neither of them is truly decentralized. Most decentralized exchanges can be rather seen as trustless exchanges which allows users to trade cryptocurrencies from their own wallets.

There is more to decentralization for sure such as decentralized order matching, etc. But, just like centralized cryptocurrency exchanges, decentralized exchanges do have CEOs, companies and operate in certain jurisdictions which require them to do collect user data and block people from certain countries and so on.

Bisq, on the other hand, is just like Bitcoin itself. It is just a piece of software that you can run on desktop and trade Bitcoin for fiat currencies or other cryptocurrencies.

Bisq is an open source, peer-to-peer, decentralized Bitcoin exchange. It uses a peer-to-peer network over Tor so it has no server which means that it can’t suffer from hacking or DDoS attacks which affect most centralized exchanges.

The software does not collect any data or require registration. And, user funds are held in multisignature addresses over which Bisq has no control.

The Bisq exchange is governed by the Bisq DAO (a decentralized autonomous organization) which uses the BSQ token. BSQ token is the essential element in the DAO and underlies every action of participants.

Bisq fees

You can pay trading fees in BTC or BSQ on Bisq. Bisq trading fees are as follows:

BTC and BSQ trading fees, per 1 BTC traded

	BTC	BSQ
Maker	0.001	7.6
Taker	0.007	53.23

To start using Bisq, you need to download and install the application. It is available on Windows, Mac, Debian/Ubuntu, Arch Linux and Red Hat/Fedora.As stated by Bisq, these rates may be changed by the DAO, you can check out the fees on the website as well.

For transaction fees, makers only pay fees for the trade fee transaction and takers pay transaction fees for the trade fee transaction, deposit transaction and payout transaction.

How to trade Bitcoin on Bisq? Using Bisq

To download the application, visit Bisq’s downloads page and download the application for your operating system.

If you want to buy Bitcoin with USD or any other currency, you should first set up a payment method on Bisq. There are a lot of different fiat payment methods that you can use on Bisq to buy Bitcoin.

Some of the supported payment methods are Advanced Cash, Perfect Money, National Bank Transfer, SEPA, Western Union, Zelle and Face-to-Face (F2F).

All methods have different amount of limits per trade, you can check out the limits, trading period and other methods on the full list of the supported payment methods.

Some popular payment methods such as PayPal and Venmo are not supported on Bisq due to the relatively easy and higher risk of chargeback claims.

To make trades on Bisq, you also need to send some Bitcoin to your Bisq wallet. Sellers on Bisq require a security deposit which is usually 15% of the trade amount and it is deposited by both buyers and sellers.

Besides security deposits, there are also trading and transaction fees, so you should fund your wallet with some BTC to start making or taking offers on Bisq.

Dispute resolution on Bisq

There are three ways through which disputes between traders can be resolved on Bisq, which are trader chat, mediation and arbitration.

Traders can use end-to-end encrypted built-in chat to talk to other traders and resolve issues related to trades.

There are also mediators and arbitrators on Bisq who can evaluate a situation if it is not resolved by traders themselves.

For detailed information about how dispute resolution works on Bisq, please refer to this page. To learn more about trading on Bisq and making payments, you can check out the FAQ and this guide.