Blockstream is launching Blockstream Swaps, an in-house feature designed to move funds between Bitcoin’s mainchain, Lightning, and Liquid networks.
The announcement follows Boltz disabling its own swap services on August 3, 2026, after facing a rising wave of automated attacks.
Why Boltz stepped back
Boltz described the cause as an ongoing pattern rather than a single breach.
The company stated:
“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.”
Blockstream confirmed no user funds were ever at risk, since Boltz’s architecture is self-custodial by design.
How swaps work
An atomic swap is a trustless peer-to-peer exchange where two parties trade assets, guaranteeing both sides complete in full or the transaction fails and funds return to their owners.
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 through a hashlock, while a timelock provides a refund path if the swap stalls.
Boltz later wrapped this in Taproot and aggregated keys with MuSig2, so a cooperative swap settles as an ordinary key path spend.
What Blockstream Swaps offers
The feature removes the complexity of running a Lightning node for everyday users, letting them hold a simple BTC or LBTC balance that converts at the moment of payment.
Lightning even becomes reachable from cold storage, with incoming payments settling as LBTC in a Jade-secured wallet while Jade stays offline.
The feature is currently in beta testing with select participants.
Blockstream said it is not seeking to replace existing providers but sees the tool as a much-needed addition for redundancy and resilience.
