Blockstream has begun beta testing for its trustless Bitcoin swap service, Blockstream Swaps, in an announcement made on August 17. The service is designed to move Bitcoin across the main chain, the Lightning Network, and the Liquid sidechain without requiring an intermediary.
The beta launch arrives about one week after Boltz indefinitely suspended its own swap service, citing repeated AI-assisted attacks. Blockstream said the project was already in development before Boltz shut down, but the closure created additional urgency. The company stressed that it is not seeking to replace any providers, instead positioning Blockstream Swaps as a redundancy and resilience improvement for the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Blockstream Swaps uses atomic swaps and hashed time-locked contracts, similar to the primitive used by Boltz. It completes the connection between Bitcoin’s three layers following Blockstream's Lightning-Liquid atomic swaps shipped in December 2025. Liquid is a federated sidechain built and maintained by Blockstream, with LBTC serving as its Bitcoin-pegged asset.
Boltz’s suspension followed waves of AI-assisted probing and exploit attempts. The team said attackers were iterating faster than it could find and patch vulnerabilities. Despite the attacks, Boltz never lost customer funds because it did not hold customer coins. The shutdown also affected wallets built on top of Boltz, including Bull Bitcoin and Aqua Wallet. ZEUS later pulled its infrastructure offline on August 5 after a contained security incident, becoming the third prominent Lightning operator to suspend services in roughly 72 hours.
According to analytics firm Amboss, Lightning’s public capacity actually rose by 28 BTC and public channels grew by 256 during the week of those disruptions, suggesting the issues were concentrated at specific operators rather than within the Lightning protocol itself. The episode highlights an industry-wide security race: a16z crypto found that an off-the-shelf AI agent’s success rate at exploiting known vulnerabilities rose from 10% to 70% when given structured attack knowledge, and more than 40 Bitcoin firms have requested vetted defender access to frontier AI models.
