An still-anonymous group of Bitcoin veterans will take over Boltz, bringing capital and technical expertise to resume swaps. Founders Kilian, Michael and Karl have left all formal roles following the AI-assisted attacks that had halted the service.
An still-anonymous group of Bitcoin veterans has agreed to take over Boltz and continue the service. In a statement published on X, the company explains that the new owners will bring the capital and technical expertise needed to fix the vulnerabilities and resume swaps.
The ownership transfer comes ten days after the suspension of Boltz swaps. The team attributes the 3 August decision to months of increasingly frequent and sophisticated AI-assisted attacks. Some attempts succeeded and caused losses for the company, while user funds were not exposed thanks to the non-custodial structure of the service.
Boltz was a bootstrapped startup of five people. The founders concluded they did not have sufficient resources to sustain the pace of attacks and patches over the long term. The new group has already begun identifying and resolving vulnerabilities, though the announcement gives no date for the return of swaps.
The change is also clear at the governance level. Kilian, Michael and Karl, the three signatories of the message, have left the company with immediate effect. They will retain no formal roles or decision-making powers; any future involvement in the open-source code will be voluntary. The identity of the buyers, the financial terms, and the new corporate structure have not been made public.
The outage had affected wallets and services using Boltz to bridge the mainchain, Lightning Network and Liquid. In the meantime, Blockstream launched its own trustless swap service between Lightning and mainchain, a sign of how quickly the ecosystem sought alternative routes. Boltz had also extended its offering to USDT atomic swaps on Lightning.
The brand and project will continue under new leadership as the original team exits. Swaps will remain suspended until the new owners consider the vulnerabilities that forced Boltz to halt fully resolved.
