The operator everybody used stopped

On 3 August 2026 Boltz suspended every swap indefinitely, after months of automated, AI-assisted probing of its infrastructure. Several exploits were contained, and the team's own account was that attackers had come to iterate faster than a group its size could patch.

No user funds were lost. The swaps are built on hash-timelocked contracts, so the operator could be compromised without being able to keep anybody's money — it absorbed the losses on its own books, and unilateral refunds went on working without its service.

That distinction is the whole lesson. The contracts did exactly what they were designed to do under exactly the conditions they were designed for: the operator failed and the money stayed where it could be recovered by the people who owned it.

What did not hold was everything downstream. ZEUS, Aqua, Bull Bitcoin and Electrum all lost swap functionality on the same day, because each had wired itself to one operator. Four independent wallets, one point of failure, and no user of any of them had been told which one they were depending on.

The software is open and several independent people still run it. Nobody publishes which of them is answering, which is the gap this site's Lightning page exists to fill: every operator asked live, and the ones refusing listed beside the ones quoting, with what each actually said.

Cheapest depends on size, and the order inverts. A percentage fee and a flat chain fee cross over. One operator charging five times the percentage can still be cheaper on a small swap — and when the measurements for this page were first taken, the crossover sat below a floor one of them enforces, so across the whole band where it would have won, it could not be used at all.

Leaving to Liquid costs a fraction. The chain fee dominates small swaps completely. Measured at 2,000 satoshi, exiting Lightning to Bitcoin cost about 15% and exiting to Liquid about 2.75% — the same swap, the same operator, a different chain to land on.

The floors differ by orders of magnitude. One operator will reverse from a hundred satoshi where another starts at twenty-five thousand. If a swap has been refused as too small, it was probably refused by one operator rather than by Lightning.

None of these operators runs accounts. That is why they are worth listing, and it is also why there is no commission on any of them: nothing on that page is ranked by what we earn from it, because there is nothing to earn. The providers we do earn from all carry the same half percent, for the same reason — a ranking is worth reading only if the ranking cannot be bought.