Nanostructured transition-metal phosphides (TMPs) have recently emerged as a new family of non-noble-metal catalysts to drive water splitting due to their unique electronic and redox properties. However, most progress focused on developing mono-metal phosphide nanostructures. In this work, a facile template-based method and low-temperature phosphorization process are proposed to fabricate self-supported Ni-based bimetallic phosphide encapsulated in amorphous carbon by using metal-organic framework (MOF) as the precursor and three-dimensional nickel foam (NF) as the support, which is termed as Ni2P-Co2P@C/NF. This composite demonstrates remarkable electrocatalytic activities towards both oxygen evolution reaction (OER) and hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) in alkaline electrolyte (1 M KOH, pH 13.6), affording low overpotentials of 290 and 167 mV to deliver the current density of 50 mA cm(-2) for OER and HER, respectively, preceding the majority of recently reported MOFs-derived TMPs. This excellent performance is considered as the results of its large catalytic surface area, concerted synergy from composited structure as well as the increased electrical conductivity. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.