The Bisq DAO
Decentralizing funding and governance to make Bisq self-sustaining and censorship-resistant.Bisq's DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is built on Bitcoin.See more ↓
Why?

Revenue distribution and decision-making cannot be decentralized with traditional organization structures—they require legal entities, jurisdictions, bank accounts, and more—all of which are central points of failure.

The Bisq DAO replaces such legacy infrastructure with cryptographic infrastructure to handle project decision-making and revenue distribution without such central points of failure.

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What Is The Bisq DAO?

Through the BSQ token (colored bitcoin), the Bisq DAO enables value transfer from traders to contributors without centrally-held bank accounts or wallets.

This enables trading fees to be distributed to project contributors without any banks, corporations, or other legal entities—keeping Bisq stateless & sovereign.

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How Does It Work?
Revenue distribution

To distribute revenue from trading fees to contributors, Bisq uses BSQ—a Bitcoin-based colored coin. Contributors are issued new BSQ for their work, and BSQ is "burned" when traders use it to pay trading fees.

There is no central entity that collects or creates BSQ—Bisq stakeholders vote on each issuance request.

There was never an ICO. No BSQ is sold to raise capital.

Decision-making

With no CEO or central leadership team, Bisq stakeholders—traders and contributors—are the owners of Bisq.

Through social consensus (via voting) they determine Bisq's project strategy.

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Benefits
Traders: Make Bisq sustainable
  • Help Bisq deliver consistent professional development and support by buying BSQ from contributors
  • Help make Bisq the go-to censorship-resistant bitcoin-to-fiat and bitcoin-to-crypto marketplace
  • Enjoy a discount if you use BSQ to pay trading fees
  • You can still pay trading fees with plain BTC if you like
Contributors: Earn BSQ
  • Do valuable work, request compensation, earn BSQ
  • Sell BSQ on Bisq for BTC
  • Vote on compensation requests of other contributors
  • Work on cutting-edge technology with a cutting-edge culture—Bisq collaboration is permissionless, non-hierarchical, and fluid
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Want to learn more?

You can learn more about the Bisq DAO from the resources below, from high-level ELI5-style docs and videos to the technical specification for developers.
Conceptual Overview - Doc

Plain-language description of the DAO.

Bisq DAO in Brief - Videos

Quick, short video series on the Bisq DAO.

Technical Overview - Doc

Specification of the workings of the Bisq DAO and BSQ token.

Not convinced a token is required?

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See more resources on our All About the Bisq DAO doc.