Transition metal phosphides have great potential to optimize a number of functionalities in several energy conversion and storage applications, particularly when nanostructured or in nanoparticle form. However, the synthesis of transition metal phosphide nanoparticles and its scalability is often limited by the toxicity, air sensitivity and high cost of the reagents used. We present here a simple, scalable and cost-effective 'heating up' procedure to produce metal phosphides using inexpensive, lowtoxicity and air-stable triphenyl phosphite as source of phosphorous and chlorides as metal precursors. This procedure allows the synthesis of a variety of phosphide nanoparticles, including phosphides of Ni, Co and Cu. The use of carbonyl metal precursors further allowed the synthesis of Fe 2 P and MoP nanoparticles. The fact that minor modifications in the experimental parameters allowed producing nanoparticles with different compositions and even to tune their size and shape, shows the high potential and versatility of the triphenyl phosphite precursor and the presented method. We also detail here a methodology to displace organic ligands from the surface of phosphide nanoparticles which is a key step towards their application in energy conversion and storage systems. 1. INTRODUTION Transition metal phosphides (TMP) are widely used in ion battery anodes 1-4 , as absorbers in photovoltaics 5 , supercapacitors 6 and as a catalysts in several processes including hydroprocessing 7-13 , water-gas-shift reaction, 14 and water splitting, 15-19 replacing costly and scarce noble metal catalysts. In spite of their high potential, reports on catalytic properties of fairly well-shaped phosphide nanoparticles (NPs) are scarce, 13, 20-27 and generally carbon based nanostructures, decorated with phosphide nanoparticles have been tested as catalysts. Actually, very few routes for the synthesis of TMP nanoparticles with some control over their parameters exist. 28,29 These previous works described the synthesis of phosphides of