Kilian Rausch, the CEO Boltz, didn’t find Bitcoin — Bitcoin found him, sideways, in Shanghai, after his employer went bankrupt and left him with no plan and an unexpected afternoon free. He walked into a meetup, met some people from a Bitcoin exchange, and days later was running mining pool operations without knowing what a mining pool was.
Boltz is building non-custodial submarine swaps — moving value between Bitcoin’s layers without ever holding someone’s funds. In a world full of custodial shortcuts and ‘just trust us’ bridges, why did you bet your energy on the harder, more principled path, and what do you think happens to the people who didn’t?
I’ll be honest: the decision to build non-custodial wasn’t purely Bitcoin ethics. It was also deeply selfish. Non-custodial services occupy a fundamentally different regulatory category. In the EU, the U.S. and most major jurisdictions, if you never control or hold user funds, you’re not a custodian, and the crushing compliance burden of KYC and AML requirements that applies to exchanges and custodial services simply isn’t applicable.
Most swap services online are, knowingly or not, operating in a deeply gray zone they haven’t fully reckoned with yet. Holding user funds, even briefly, even technically, puts you in a different legal category.
One of our strong suits is providing the best possible privacy to our users, meaning we don’t request or collect data we don’t crucially need to execute a swap. Boltz does not require accounts, sign-ups, emails or phone number. Not even an IP address (you can use our service via TOR). This also means we don’t use any telemetry at all. That’s great for privacy, but also makes it much harder to detect user pain points.
We’re a team of five (myself and four engineers),
We run one of the oldest and largest Lightning nodes on the network – seven years and counting.
-We optimize our nodes to serve our swap business, not to maximize routing profit.
-A Lightning business with real transaction flow attracts liquidity and channel opens organically.
-liquidity has real opportunity costs, and we run a liquidity-intense operation that demands high automation and constant fine-tuning like knowing when to close which channels is crucial.
-We learned the hard way that using smaller node implementations that might be superior in some technical aspects sounds appealing until something breaks at 2am on a Sunday morning. Nobody ran into the issue because you are the largest player running that implementation. Dev support and a thriving operator community matter far more than diversification for its own sake.
More recently we started using local AI models to help monitor our stack, and that’s where it starts feeling genuinely magical.
But the more immediate opportunity is AI making it possible for tiny, lean teams to run infrastructure at a level of reliability and professionality that previously required much larger headcounts
Boltz is increasingly an SDK and API that other services integrate, a silent layer beneath wallets, swap aggregators, and platforms that own the end-user relationship.
I can imagine a future where we have no direct end user relationship at all, and I find that genuinely exciting rather than unsettling.
Big fan of boltz