Non-custodial Bitcoin bridge Boltz has suspended its swap service indefinitely after a surge in AI-assisted attacks outpaced the company's ability to secure its infrastructure. Boltz enables
Non-custodial Bitcoin bridge Boltz has suspended its swap service indefinitely after a surge in AI-assisted attacks outpaced the company's ability to secure its infrastructure.
Boltz enables users to swap Bitcoin between the main Bitcoin blockchain, the Lightning Network and the Liquid sidechain without relinquishing control of their funds. Because it never takes custody of users' assets, customers retain ownership of their Bitcoin throughout the swap process.
In an Aug. 3 statement, Boltz said it had seen "a steady rise in automated, AI-assisted probing" over recent months, with attackers discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities faster than its small team could deploy fixes.
The company said the pace of attacks had accelerated sharply in recent days, forcing it to keep swap services offline while it reviewed its security.
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Boltz said no user funds were compromised because its platform is non-custodial by design. "No user funds were ever at risk," the company said, adding that any losses were absorbed by the company itself.
Yan Pritzker, co-founder and chief technology officer of Swan Bitcoin, said the incident highlights a growing challenge for smaller crypto companies.
"AI attackers are getting more and more sophisticated and small teams are going to have a tough time keeping up with the attacks," Pritzker wrote on Aug. 4.
"There's a significant overhead to building and running enterprise security in the age of LLMs, which will price out many innovative startups wanting to work on services related to client funds — even non-custodial ones."
The broader threat landscape continues to worsen.
On July 28, blockchain security firm Blockaid reported that crypto projects lost more than $1 billion to hacks during the first half of 2026, with the number of verified exploit incidents already surpassing the total recorded in all of 2025.
The Boltz incident comes as artificial intelligence is rapidly changing both offensive and defensive cybersecurity.
Coinbase announced on July 29 that it was scaling back payouts in its public HackerOne bug bounty program after AI dramatically increased the volume of duplicate, low-quality and non-actionable vulnerability reports.
The exchange said AI can now identify many "commodity" bugs cheaply and at scale, prompting it to focus rewards on complex, high-impact vulnerabilities that require human expertise.
GitHub has made similar changes to its bug bounty program, citing an influx of AI-generated submissions that overwhelmed security teams.
Ledger chief technology officer Charles Guillemet has also warned that AI is shifting the security landscape by lowering the barrier to discovering vulnerabilities and accelerating attackers' ability to analyze code, making continuous security reviews increasingly important for crypto firms.
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