Summary: Firefish is best understood as a non-custodial bitcoin-backed lending marketplace that connects borrowers, investors, and larger qualifying capital pools around on-chain-collateralized loans. The clearest signal in this pass was the combination of the borrower and investor product pages, the docs hub, and the public Firefish protocol repository: together they show a platform where users borrow fiat or stablecoins against BTC, investors fund fully collateralized loans, and the collateral is locked in Bitcoin-native escrow logic rather than handed to a centralized custodian. That makes Firefish more than a retail lending app; it is packaging marketplace matching, collateral escrow, and increasingly institutionalized funding rails into one bitcoin-credit operating layer.
What it does:
Lets borrowers request fiat or stablecoin loans backed by bitcoin collateral without selling their BTC
Supports marketplace-style matching between borrowers and investors, alongside instant-loan and automated investment modes
Uses on-chain escrow and multisig-style / smart-contract-based collateral locking rather than centralized custody of borrower bitcoin
Sends loan proceeds to bank accounts while returning BTC collateral after repayment at maturity or earlier if repayment is requested sooner
Exposes a public protocol repository whose README describes offer creation, acceptance, pre-signing flows, escrow testing, and verifiable deployed code
Operates investor products spanning manual marketplace selection, Auto Invest allocation, and an institutional / qualified-investor alternative-fund path
Key claims:
The homepage describes Firefish as “The open market for Bitcoin-backed loans” and says Bitcoiners can borrow cash while investors fund loans in EUR, CHF, CZK, USDC, and other currencies
The borrower page says loans start at €800, interest rates start at 5%, terms run 3 to 24 months, and the standard ratio is 50% loan-to-value, meaning €10,000 borrowed requires €20,000 of BTC collateral
The borrower page says users can choose custom loan terms or instant loans, lock bitcoin to an on-chain escrow address, receive loan proceeds directly to a bank account, and recover their bitcoin after repayment
The docs hub says Firefish offers borrowing with bitcoin, investing in bitcoin-backed loans, and a non-custodial protocol where Firefish “never touches, trades, or exchanges” borrower collateral
The investor page says investments are backed by bitcoin collateral worth 200% of the loan amount and that Firefish offers manual marketplace investing, Auto Invest, and a qualified-investor alternative-fund route
The Auto Invest page says the product automates allocation into instant loans, starts at 150,000 EUR or CZK equivalent, and can deliver fixed returns with current yields reaching up to 13.9% p.a. in EUR and 10.9% p.a. in CZK
The borrower and investor product pages both say Firefish operates under MiCA and is listed in the ESMA interim MiCA register under crypto-asset service providers
The public firefish-protocol README says the repository implements the main Firefish smart-contract logic for creating offers, accepting offers, pre-signing transactions, and other processing logic, and that the production deployment can be verified
Whitepaper: No canonical standalone Firefish whitepaper or litepaper surfaced in this pass. The clearest current sources of truth were the official site, docs hub, and public firefish-protocol repository; see ../whitepapers/firefish-primary-sources-2026-05-01.md.