On August 3, 2026 Boltz announced that its swap services would stay disabled until further notice. Boltz described the cause as a pattern rather than any single incident: "over the past months we have seen a steady rise in automated, AI-assisted probing of our infrastructure, and we have dealt with several exploits. Each was contained, but the pattern is clear: attackers now iterate faster than a team our size can find and patch."
First and foremost, we wish the Boltz team the very best as they work through this. They have been excellent partners to Blockstream and the broader Bitcoin ecosystem, particularly at the intersection of layer-2 networks like Lightning and Liquid, and we sincerely hope they remain an important part of it. They also confirmed that no user funds were ever at risk, because their architecture is self-custodial by design.
In support of the broader Bitcoin and Liquid ecosystem, Blockstream is launching Blockstream Swaps. This initiative was already under development to ensure a resilient suite of utility for the ecosystem, and it complements the providers already doing this work rather than replacing any one of them.
What a Swap Actually Does
An atomic swap is a trustless P2P exchange where two parties trade assets. The swap guarantees that both sides either complete in full or the transaction fails and funds return to their original owners. Atomic swaps come in several forms. Boltz used a specific type, named for the hashed time-locked contract (HTLC) that holds both sides of the trade together.
Say you hold bitcoin on the mainchain and want to pay a Lightning invoice. A swap pairs the two payments and binds them with a shared secret.
The mechanism is a hashlock. One side generates a random secret and publishes only its hash, and both payments lock to the same condition: whoever produces the secret claims the funds. Revealing it to claim one payment makes it available to claim the other. Either both parties settle or neither does, which is where "atomic" comes from. The timelock is the other half. Every side carries a refund path that activates if the swap doesn't complete in time, so a stalled swap returns the money instead of losing it. Boltz later wrapped this construction in Taproot and aggregated the keys with MuSig2, so a cooperative swap settles as an ordinary key path spend and the script path stays as the fallback.
Each direction of the swap has its own distinct name, too. A submarine swap transfers mainchain bitcoin (BTC) or Liquid bitcoin (LBTC) into Lightning, and a reverse submarine swap moves Lightning back out to the mainchain or Liquid. A chain swap involves the trustless exchange of BTC and LBTC.
Not every atomic swap needs a hash lock. LiquiDEX, a swap protocol developed by Blockstream, swaps two Liquid assets in a single transaction. The maker signs one input with SIGHASH_SINGLE and SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY, which lets the taker add their own inputs and outputs without invalidating that signature. The trade either happens or it doesn't, with no secret to reveal and no timeout to wait out. Today, it is used under the hood on platforms such as SideSwap and is one of the building blocks for trustless OTC desks and order books.
Why Lightning Swaps Matter for Bitcoin
Running Lightning natively means running a node, opening channels, locking up capital, sourcing inbound liquidity, staying online to watch for stale channel states, and paying to close and reopen when the topology shifts. This is what routing node operators should be focused on. It's not what your everyday coffee buyer wants to focus on.
Swaps remove the complexity for the end user. You can hold a simple BTC or LBTC balance and let a swap convert at the moment of payment. All you see is a simple send and receive.
This means:
- A Lightning invoice gets paid from a balance the user already holds, with no channel to fund first and no inbound liquidity to buy.
- Lightning becomes reachable from cold storage. For example, in the Blockstream app, an incoming Lightning payment settles as LBTC in a Jade-secured wallet, with Jade offline the whole time it arrives.
- You can move funds across layers while never losing full control over your funds.
- Merchants can accept payments over Lightning and hold them on whichever network they prefer.
Blockstream Swaps
Blockstream is building an in-house swaps feature.
This feature is well into development as part of a broader effort to build a more resilient set of tools for the Lightning and Liquid networks. It's currently in beta testing with select participants.
We are not seeking to replace any providers. We see Blockstream Swaps as a much-needed addition to improve redundancy and resilience to the ecosystem. Recent events have only reinforced that need, and we're accelerating the work to bring it to market.
Request Beta Access
If your organization is interested in testing and helping us bring Swaps to market, request beta access.