Itchy Sats

CFD trading on Bitcoin - non-custodial, peer-to-peer, Bitcoin only.

Trading on ItchySats is secured by DLCs (Discreet Log Contracts). Here is some material to read up on DLCs and ItchySats' protocol implementation:

• The ItchySats Roadmap which includes a simplified example of how the protocol works
• Blogpost by @luckysori of the COMIT team, describing the protocol in detail
• DLC overview on Bitcoin Optech for information beyond ItchySats

Quickstart: Users / Traders

This guide is for how to use ItchySats as a taker. Currently, ItchySats does not officially support multiple makers. Please note that trade execution is already fully peer to peer, but there is currently only one maker out there. We are working on adding support for maker discovery and trading with multiple makers for a more competitive market.

ItchySats is available in the Umbrel appstore. ItchySats is available as bonus features on RaspiBlitz.

We recommend using ItchySats on Umbrel or RaspiBlitz for the time being.

If you want to try ItchySats without Umbrel you can use the latest binary or latest docker container but that might not be as straightforward.

To open a position:

1. Install the App on Umbrel (or start the binary / container)
2. Transfer funds into the ItchySats wallet
3. Open a long or short position - this will lock the funds in a multisig on chain
4. Wait for the price to move
5. Close the position - this will spend the locked up funds according to the price

With the current maker you can close positions at any point in time. Trades are limited to a contract size between 100 and 1000 contracts.

If the market maker is not available you can close by using an independent oracle attesting to the price. Oracle price outcomes can be found here.

Can't find what you are looking for? Check out the 👉 FAQ 👈.

ItchySats Wallet

ItchySats includes an internal wallet that is used to sign transactions during the DLC setup. Additionally, when a CFD is closed, your payout is sent to an address owned by this wallet. This wallet is completely under your control. You can withdraw from the wallet at any time.

On Umbrel this wallet is derived from its app seed, so the only thing you have to back up is the Umbrel seed.

When running the binary / docker container a random seed will be used to derive the wallet. Make sure to back up the taker_seed file that can be found in the data directory of the application.

Safety

ItchySats is currently Beta software. We are doing our best to make ItchySats stable, but there could be unexpected bugs that result in positions being closed at an unfavorable point in time. Please be mindful of how much money you transfer to the internal wallet and how much you are willing to risk when opening a new CFD.

Quickstart: Developers

To start the local dev-environment all the components can be started at once by running the following script:

./start_all.sh

Note: Before first run, you need to run cd maker-frontend; yarn install; cd../taker-frontend; yarn install command to ensure that all dependencies get installed.

The script combines the logs from all binaries inside a single terminal so it might not be ideal for all cases, but it is convenient for quick regression testing.

Pressing Ctrl + c once stops all the processes.

The script also enables backtraces by setting RUST_BACKTRACE=1 env variable.

The maker and taker frontend depend on the respective daemon running.

Starting the maker and taker frontend

We use a separate react projects for hosting taker and maker frontends.

Building the frontends

The latest version of the built frontends will be embedded by cargo inside their respective daemons and automatically served when the daemon starts. Embedded frontend is served on ports 8000 and 8001 by default.

This means that it is highly recommended to build the frontend before the daemons.

Taker

cd taker-frontend
yarn install
yarn build

Maker

cd maker-frontend
yarn install
yarn build

Developing frontend code

If hot-reloading of the app is required, frontend can be started in development mode. Development frontend is served on ports 3000 and 3001 by default.

Taker

cd taker-frontend
yarn install
yarn dev

Maker

cd maker-frontend
yarn install
yarn dev

Linting

To run eslint, use:

cd maker-frontend && yarn run eslint
cd taker-frontend && yarn run eslint

Contact

Feel free to reach out to us on Twitter, Telegram or Matrix.

Contributing

We encourage community contributions whether it be a bug fix or an improvement to the documentation. Please have a look at the contributing guidelines.