Blockstream has announced the start of beta testing for its trustless service for moving Bitcoin between the main chain, the Lightning Network, and the Liquid sidechain.
The Blockstream Swaps service, which was announced as a solution to a problem created in the Bitcoin ecosystem by Boltz, launched about a week after Boltz shut down its own exchange service, citing issues caused by waves of AI-powered attacks.
In the August 17 announcement, interested users were invited to request access. Blockstream has not yet announced a general launch date.
Blockstream Did Not Replace Boltz
An atomic swap is a transaction in which two parties exchange assets without an intermediary. The transaction either completes entirely or fails, and both parties retain what they started with.
Blockstream's atomic swap version operates on the same underlying principle as Boltz, relying on Hash Time-Locked Contracts (HTLCs). However, the Adam Back-led company specifically emphasized that it is "not seeking to replace any providers."
On the contrary, Blockstream Swaps was presented as "a sorely needed addition to improve the resilience and reliability of the ecosystem."
The company added that it was already developing swaps before Boltz suspended its service. However, it acknowledged that the news created a sense of urgency for them.
Blockstream Swaps completes the triangle between all three Bitcoin layers by adding on-chain Bitcoin to the Lightning-Liquid atomic swaps launched in December 2025.
Blockstream itself already develops and maintains Liquid, a federated sidechain platform, whose LBTC is a Bitcoin-pegged asset.
Why Did Boltz Shut Down?
As Cryptopolitan reported, Boltz explained the indefinite suspension of its crypto exchange service as due to waves of AI-powered hacks being carried out with increasing regularity.
As the announcement also reminded, Boltz wrote that "malicious actors are now deploying patches faster than a team of our size can discover and neutralize them."
Despite all the attacks it endured, Boltz never lost a single customer coin because it never held them in the first place.
The consequences of the shutdown extended to wallets built on Boltz, including Bull Bitcoin and Aqua Wallet.
This is a Cluster of Lightning Outages, Not a Network Failure
Boltz was not an isolated case. ZEUS shut down its infrastructure on August 5 following a localized security incident, becoming the third major Lightning operator to suspend services in roughly 72 hours.
The timing of these issues alarmed users, but data points to operators, not the protocol. Analytics firm Amboss reported that during the week of the Boltz, Aqua, and ZEUS outages, public Lightning capacity actually increased by 28 BTC, and the number of public channels grew by 256.
An industry-wide arms race is unfolding in the background. As Cryptopolitan reported, a16z crypto found that the success rate of a ready-made AI agent exploiting known vulnerabilities jumped from 10% to 70% after being given structured data about the attacks, and since then, more than 40 Bitcoin companies have approached leading AI labs seeking vetted access to the same models malicious actors are already using.
