Trading

Libre runs an on-chain orderbook DEX with no protocol trading fee, no listing process and no KYC — open to anyone, including bots.

Libre has an on-chain orderbook — real bids and asks in a contract, not an automated market maker curve. Two pairs trade today: BTC/USDT and LIBRE/BTC.

Trade →

What's different about it

There is no protocol trading fee. Not a low fee — none. The dex.libre contract has no fee parameter, no fee recipient and no fee action; its entire configuration is a pause switch. What you bid is what you pay.

Nobody approves you. No KYC, no account application, no listing committee. An account is a keypair. If you can sign, you can quote.

It's an orderbook, not an AMM. You place a limit order at your price and it rests in the book until it fills or you cancel it. No slippage curve, no impermanent loss, no LP position to manage.

Orders land in well under a second. Libre produces a block every half second. Full irreversibility takes about three minutes, which matters if you're settling something on top of a trade, but not for placing and cancelling quotes.

How an order works

Orders are placed by sending tokens to the DEX contract with a structured memo. The transfer is the order; the memo is its terms.

• Buy BTC: transfer USDT to dex.libre with memo buy:<amount> BTC:<price> USDT. The transfer locks amount × price of USDT.

• Sell BTC: transfer BTC to dex.libre with memo sell:<amount> BTC:<price> USDT. The transfer locks the BTC.

• Cancel: call dex.libre::cancelorder with the order id and pair. Locked funds return to you immediately.

Prices for librebtc carry 10 decimal places, not the 8 that BTC itself uses — LIBRE is cheap enough in BTC terms to need them.

The live book is table orderbook2 on dex.libre, scoped by pair; fills land in history2.

You don't have to build memos by hand. The MCP server composes orders, cancellations and everything else for you — as unsigned transactions you sign yourself.

The state of the book

Being honest about this: the book is thin and the spread is wide — frequently several percent between best bid and best ask, with days passing between fills.

For anyone hoping to hit a tight market, that's a real limitation, and you should check the live book before assuming you can trade size.

For a market maker it's the opportunity. There is no fee to earn back, no rebate scheme to game, and very little competition. A bot quoting both sides inside the current spread, hedged against the oracle price, is the most obvious unclaimed edge on the chain.

Trading and borrowing compose

The thing Libre can do that a standalone DEX can't: your collateral and your execution live on the same chain.

You can lock BTC in a vault, borrow USDT against it at up to 60% LTV, and trade that USDT on the same chain in the same transaction sequence — no bridge, no exchange deposit, no custodian in between. Repay whenever you like and withdraw the Bitcoin.

That also means leverage is available without a perp venue: deposit BTC, borrow, buy more BTC, redeposit. At 60% maximum LTV that tops out near 2.5× in theory, and realistically 1.5–2× before you're sitting at the liquidation threshold.

Check the spread before you loop. Every turn of that loop buys BTC on the book. While the spread is several percent, a single loop can cost you more than a year of borrow interest. The strategy is only as good as the price you actually fill at.

→ Borrowing · Liquidation

For bots

Everything above is reachable programmatically, and the protocol makes no distinction between a person and an agent — there is no API key, because there is no API to be granted access to. There is a chain, and there are signatures.

→ Building agents on Libre