Bitcoin-native · Co-custodial · Full bid / ask order book
Not your keys,
not your coins.
So we gave you a key.
Co-custodial during trading, with a time-delayed user recovery path.
NightTrader accounts settle into 2-of-2 or 3-of-3 multisig addresses.
One key is yours, generated in your browser. By design, the exchange cannot move funds without it.
A real order book — limit bids, limit asks, tight spreads — without an omnibus wallet holding your stack. No wrapped BTC. No IOU balance in someone else's database.
Co-custodial · No signup wall to browse the book · Withdraw whenever you want
OP_IF 2 2 OP_CHECKMULTISIG OP_ELSE OP_DROP <your_pubkey> OP_CHECKSIG OP_ENDIF
Derived in your browser from your credentials and never transmitted. Nothing moves out of the address without a signature from this key — not a trade, not a withdrawal, not a support ticket.
What you authorise is bounded by the transaction template and the signature-hash mode used: you sign a specific input and output rather than handing over your balance.
Four ways to trade bitcoin. One of them leaves a key with you and still gives you a book.
Bisq and RoboSats are honest, non-custodial venues and we say so. The tradeoff they make is cost and speed: every trade is an on-chain event, and continuous depth is hard to build on top of that. We made a different tradeoff.
Tap a side to pause and inspect
| Criterion | NightTrader | Custodial CEX | Wrapped BTC on a DEX | Atomic swap DEX |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who can move your coins | You + node quorum, per trade | The exchange, unilaterally | The bridge custodian | You |
| What you hold | A key in a multisig UTXO | A database row | A token claim on someone's reserve | A key |
| If the venue disappears | Timelock lets you recover your coins | Bankruptcy claim | Depends on the custodian | You keep your coins |
| Order book | Full bid / ask, off-chain matching | Full bid / ask | AMM pool, no bids | Thin, slow to fill |
| Chain cost per trade | None — settlement is batched | None | Gas on every swap | Multiple on-chain txs |
| Exposure while trading | Bounded by the signed template | Your entire balance | Your entire wrapped balance | The trade amount |
Off-chain matching means the book moves at exchange speed; the chain only sees settlement. The design uses native Bitcoin transaction and script features, including multisig, signature-hash modes, and CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY.
What actually happens when you place an order
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Your key is generated client-side
Your browser derives the key locally, or you keep it on an air-gapped signer and never expose it at all. It signs your deposit address into existence together with the node threshold key. The server never receives it, so there is nothing to breach and nothing to hand over.
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You sign one amount, not your balance
A bid is a signature over a specific transaction template rather than a blanket authorisation over your balance. What you commit to is determined by that template and the signature-hash mode used, and the change output is designed to stay under your control.
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The quorum counter-signs and the book fills
Matching happens off-chain against a live bid/ask book, and settlement is designed to batch to the chain. The second signature is held as a threshold signature across the node set, so no single operator is intended to be able to produce it alone.
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The timelock is always sitting behind you
Applicable coins use CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY. The locktime is designed to be refreshed while you trade, so in normal use you should not approach it. If you stop trading, the recovery branch eventually becomes spendable with your key alone — you construct and broadcast the recovery transaction yourself.
Three things the exchange hands you and cannot take back.
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Sign from an air-gapped device
Your key does not have to live in a browser tab. Pair an offline signer — an air-gapped phone running AirGap Vault or a compatible hardware wallet — and the key need never touch an internet-connected machine. Orders and withdrawals cross the gap as QR codes: unsigned request out, signature back in. Ask us which devices are supported before you rely on this.
Unsigned request → QR → signature back -
Your backup script, at signup
The redeem script is shown to you when your account is created — not buried in a support article, not available on request. Save it. With that script and your key you can reconstruct and spend the timelock branch yourself, from any wallet that speaks Bitcoin script, with the exchange gone and this domain dead.
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Node health, on screen
Logged in, you see the live state of the node set holding the other signature — who is up, whether the quorum is intact. If the backend is degrading you find out from the interface, not from a status page written after the fact. A venue that hides its own health is telling you something.
Assume we get raided tonight.
Servers seized, domain pulled, team unreachable, node operators gone. Under a custodial exchange that is the end of the story and the beginning of a creditors' process. Here it is a waiting period.
Tap a step to pause and inspect
The locktime is set per account and designed to be refreshed as you trade — the book will not fill an order that would leave you near expiry, and after a long dormancy you will be asked to roll to a new script and a current node set. Once an output carrying this branch exists, the branch is enforced by consensus rather than by us: we cannot switch it off, and neither can anyone who takes our servers.
Three numbers. There is no fourth.
Fees pay the node operators who hold the other half of the signature. There is no NightTrader token, no pre-mine, no treasury taking a cut of your trade, and no yield being promised to anyone. The exchange was launched without issuing a coin on purpose.
Fees shown as of August 2026. Check the exchange for the current schedule.
How that compares
Fees at other venues vary by tier, product and pair, and change over time. Rather than publish a snapshot that quietly goes stale, we suggest comparing against each venue's current published schedule. Note that on an automated market maker you should also count gas and slippage, and on a custodial venue you are also accepting custody risk.
Listing a coin costs the project, not the traders. Integration and contract auditing are quoted per project. Nothing on this page is a promise of returns, liquidity, or execution quality.
Every claim above is checkable. Go check it.
A landing page is marketing. Script is not. If any line here disagrees with the code, the code is right and we have a bug to fix — tell us.
- Sourcegithub.com/NightTrader — the public web front end. The signing and key-derivation implementation is not published in this repository; ask us for its status before you deposit.
- Run it localClone the repo and serve it yourself. No packages to install, no need to visit this domain to trade.
- PaperA Decentralized Multisignature Electronic Cash Wallet — the full construction, including the Monero and EVM cases.
- Your scriptDerived deterministically, and material changes are burned on-chain. You should be able to reconstruct your own redeem script without asking us for it.
- DataWe collect the minimum to operate and encrypt what we hold. This page loads no fonts, no analytics and no third-party scripts — check the network tab.
We collect the minimum required to run an order book and encrypt what we hold. There is no advertising pixel, no session replay, no behavioural profile, and no data broker relationship. This page makes zero third-party requests — no fonts, no analytics, no CDN. Open the network tab and confirm it rather than believing us.
If we are ever compelled to verify a user, that process runs through zkMe. According to zkMe, document checks happen on your own device and nothing is transmitted to us in the clear: what we receive is a zero-knowledge proof that you passed verification rather than the underlying documents. On that basis NightTrader does not see or store your identity data; zkMe's role is limited to that verification and proof generation.
And note what verification cannot do here: an account under review still has a timelock branch. Freezing an account does not put your coins beyond reach — once the locktime passes, the recovery branch is spendable with your key, whatever we decide.
Node operators hold the other half of every signature and take a share of the fees. There is no signup form and no email list. Reach us over Bitmessage:
BM-2cU2YA1q5UEyxUedNkgKnLsn3jurKpzuWR
If that channel is inconvenient for you, you are probably not the operator we are looking for.
The part other exchanges leave off the front page.
- This is not self-custody
- It is co-custody with a timelocked recovery path. You hold one of two required keys, which is materially different from an exchange balance and materially weaker than coins in your own cold storage. Trade here; do not store here.
- Nodes can go offline
- If the quorum breaks mid-trade, half-signed transactions are simply never broadcast. You do not lose principal, but you can lose a fill and the profit that went with it.
- The browser is the attack surface
- Your key is derived from your credentials. A weak password, a compromised machine or a phished login is the realistic way to lose coins here — not a hack of our servers. Use a long passphrase and 2FA, and keep your backup off the machine you trade on.
- We can be asked for KYC
- We reserve the right to request verification, run through zkMe. According to zkMe, documents are checked on your device and are not transmitted to us in the clear; what we receive is a zero-knowledge proof of a pass rather than your identity data. Note what that cannot do: freezing an account does not put your funds beyond reach forever, because the recovery branch still becomes spendable with your key after the locktime.
- Not everything here is bitcoin
- Bitcoin is the base pair and the design target — the first integrations were chosen for CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY support. Other assets are listed where the same guarantees can be reproduced. If a coin cannot be secured this way, we would rather not list it.
- Not Lightning, not a rollup
- Different tool. Lightning is excellent for payments and awkward as a venue for a large order book; rollups and atomic swaps are the long-run answer and are still too expensive or too slow for daily bid/ask. We will move when they are ready.
It started with an ATM on a street corner in Tijuana.
bitcoin42 didn't begin as an exchange. It began as a bitcoin ATM operator — putting Genesis1 machines on the ground in Tijuana, Mexico in 2014, among the first of their kind anywhere.
The same team spent that year building BitHalo — one of the first working smart-contract systems on Bitcoin, enforcing two-party agreements with multisig escrow and no trusted third party, years before Ethereum made "smart contract" a household word. BitBay followed in 2015: a fully decentralized marketplace built around its own multisig wallet with contracts built in, still running today. Nobody else was doing multisig this seriously on Bitcoin back then.
Running machines was never the point. The order book was the plan from day one: a real exchange that never took custody of your coins, at a time when every exchange did exactly that. It took over a decade of building non-custodial multisig systems — and watching custodian after custodian fail in the meantime — to get it right.
Coverage from the time: CoinDesk, March 2014 — Genesis1 bitcoin and dogecoin ATMs arrive in Tijuana. CoinDesk, August 2014 — BitHalo ships smart contracts without the blockchain bloat. Bitcoinist, November 2016 — BitBay's decentralized marketplace, explained. Eleven years later: GlobeNewswire, September 2025 — Bitcoin's first true high-speed DEX, NightTrader, launches.