Bitcoin bridge Boltz, which recently suspended its services after repeated attacks from AI-powered hackers, has come under fire after it allowed its warrant canary to lapse for over five days.
The lapse indicates to several critics that Boltz is possibly under government investigation.
A warrant canary is a colloquial term for a recurring public notice that a service has not received a secret legal process.
Because subjects of a legal or criminal investigation often may not lawfully disclose service of legal proceedings once a process server or law enforcement agency begins work, developers proactively and periodically state that they have not received such service by renewing their warrant canary.
A missed renewal of a warrant canary, including silence after a regular time period, is an alarm that something is amiss. Boltz’ own text told readers to “assume the worst” if it failed to renew on-time.
Boltz renewed its warrant canary notice today with a valid, PGP-signed message that claims zero government data demands. A defender said the team simply forgot during the swap freeze.
Not everyone was convinced, and the timing was unfortunate.
Indeed, Boltz is in the middle of a proverbial five alarm fire this week.
It just told users its Boltz Swap Service for bridging BTC between mainchain, Liquid, and Lightning Network, will stay disabled “until further notice.”
It said it had suffered months of “AI-assisted probing” with attackers able to “iterate faster than a team our size can find and patch.”
Critics took the combination of its service suspension plus its warrant canary lapse as a signal of duress.
Read more: Ethereum Foundation ditches ‘warrant canary’
What happened during Boltz’s lapsed warrant canary?
Companies that used the Boltz Swap Service, such as Bull Bitcoin, warned that Lightning payments and liquid-to-BTC swaps in its wallet would fail. Aqua and other Boltz-dependent Lightning wallets hit the same brick wall.
Boltz’ prior signed canary dated itself May 31. It promised a 60-day refresh, a timeframe that closed on July 30.
Swaps went dark on August 3. It didn’t sign a new canary until August 5.
Its renewal message now claims, “0 requests for information of any kind by any third parties including but not limited to government agencies.”
Besides the time lapse, everything else checks out normally. An admin published the valid, PGP-signed notice. As usual, it included a latest BTC block hash for a timestamp.
On social media, Adam Simecka, a vocal critic, cast the stale canary as an “authenticated Deadman Switch.” It warned, he claimed, that “a government agency has taken over Boltz.”
There was probably no AI attack, he opined, claiming that was a ruse for “a state-level attack.”
Later he urged followers to “Ignore any further communication from them,” arguing that its workers were “likely captured and being held at gunpoint (hopefully not literally).”
A Stacker News post flagged the same gap a day earlier. It noted Samourai Wallet’s canary history and quoted Boltz’ own “assume the worst” line from its prior canary.
The alarm rang, and Boltz scheduled it in advance
A defender rejected the coup theory. They highlighted that canary renewals are “a manual process,” and that the absentminded lapse is unremarkable given that Boltz is “offline and fighting for survival.”
The team “simply forgot about the update. Nothingburger,” this defender continued.
Others dismissed panic as sensational, calmly reminding alarmists that the canary had already been updated within a reasonable timeframe.
By design, warrant canaries are blunt instruments. They work with infrequent communication and promise periodic attestations of a negative, even though they are merely words on a computer screen.
When they lapse, that negative reality becomes a possible reality.
Boltz chose the strictest possible warning language in its own version — “assume the worst” — then missed its own deadline.
Even though its renewed canary still says zero government demands, whatever happened during the days in which it lapsed are what everyone is debating today on social media.
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