tl;dr - a number of other bitcoiners will take over boltz and get it running again asap. Former team will step down.
Over the past couple of months, AI-assisted attackers have been targeting Boltz with increasing frequency, intensity and sophistication. Several of these attacks succeeded, but because Boltz is non-custodial, user funds were never at risk. The entirety of the risk was ours, and as a result of the losses incurred, on August 3rd we made the difficult decision to suspend the service to prevent further damage.
While working on a plan to bring Boltz back over the past days, we had to accept one painful insight: as a bootstrapped five-person startup, we simply don't have the resources to withstand the current level of attacks in the long run.
Today, we are happy to announce that a group of veteran Bitcoiners came forward to help, bringing the capital and engineering power the project needs. They have agreed to take over Boltz and continue the service. Work to find and fix the vulnerabilities is already under way, with the goal of bringing swaps back as soon as possible.
As we want to give them the freedom to introduce themselves in their own time, we are not attaching any names today.
All original founders of Boltz have stepped down from the company, effective immediately. None of us will have any formal or authoritative role with the Boltz project going forward, and any future open-source participation by us is strictly on a voluntary basis.
We are grateful for the community's support all these years, for the patience and understanding of our integrators affected by the disruption of our service, and to everyone who reached out offering support over the past week.
It was a hell of a ride, and we are proud of our contributions to the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Godspeed to the new Boltz team as they navigate these perilous times. We know Boltz is in good hands.
- Kilian, Michael & Karl
Having used boltz a few times myself, I always found it to be a quality service. I hope the former bolts team all move on to big things, they are certainly capable of them.
Ahem
this ^
Having no insight into how they ran their business, this reads pretty weird.
Getting attacked by AI-enabled attackers forcing you to suspend service makes sense (though slapping the AI-enabled blame label is getting old).
Being open to outsiders stepping in to help fix the issues makes sense.
Immediately removing the entire founding team and turning the company over to other people who are not named is weird.
Why can't the other people just help?
Why do the original founders need to leave immediately?
Why aren't the other people just taking the IP of the product and making a new one, instead of running under the same name while having 0 overlap with the prior team?
This feels sketchy.
The devil will be in the details. Matt & Marty's Ten 31? Ego Death crew? Chaincode?
For some reason, when I read it, I didn't get the vibe that it was a VC fund. My feeling is that maybe one of the Ark things will take it up...or something completely different.
Interesting development post canary
That's too bad. Boltz was very good.
That pretty much lines up with when they decided to go into shitcoins!
I was thinking this same exact thing, the moment they supported poop-coins they started experiencing issues. Poop coins are so convoluted and sloppy in code that they are just ripe for exploiting. Boltz should have just killed off support for such things and go back to btc and btc layer 2s only. onchain, lightning, liquid. Keep it simple.
Boltz canary expired, then they shutdown then change team. Suspicious.
I was wanting some good news. Thank you.
https://twiiit.com/Boltzhq/status/2087636521746674168
'user funds were never at risk' is doing a lot of work in that announcement. five people getting hammered by sophisticated attackers and the worst case was their own losses, not their users'. non custodial swaps just survived the exact scenario they were built for. and the next crew already stepped up with capital and engineers