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44 sats \ 0 replies \ @boltz 12 Jun \ parent \ on: E A R L Y D A Y S with Kilian of Boltz builders
Haha, it's pretty public that we did Tether and Litecoin before, see e.g.:
https://blog.boltz.exchange/p/tether-efill-your-lightning-channels-31e40e46164d and also the fate we suffered due to the free option problem:
https://blog.boltz.exchange/p/the-problem-with-free-options-69f9f59a2d48
Wouldn't say the only reason and btw the free option problem is only a problem with Lightning and we do have non-Lighnting pairs now, but yes it definitely shaped our journey to become Bitcoin only. Pretty open about it and definitely talked about it on other occasions ✌️
We discussed (and shipped) that, here you go @Jon_Hodl: https://nitter.net/Boltzhq/status/1927025154665632246
I guess this is about creating a Boltz-powered wallet from scratch? Answer: Fork https://github.com/breez/misty-breez and take it from there.
Is there any chance that this can somehow be integrated with ZapRite or made into a Wordpress plugin so I can just offer lightning payments at checkout and receive all payments into my on-chain wallet?
We should resume our zaprite integration talk @john
Curious to understand how Boltz makes money?
We take a cut for each swap. Our Web App exposes this as "Boltz Fee" which ranges from 0.1% to 0.5% depending on layer and direction.
Is it just through fees or are there other areas to generate capital behind the scenes?
Just the fees.
And if so how profitable or close to break even are y’all?
We are profitable. And no VC capital/external investors involved.
Seems like a pretty good way to lose the on-chain association with the UTXO you eventually end up with.
For the public observer, yes. But always consider that we, Boltz, do have the association.
However, for people swapping out to on-chain via lightning, what sort of exposure do they face?
The exposure is that we might be forced by law enforcement to reveal the association between two payments of a swap. This didn't happen so far and we expect El Salvador authorities to only require this for serious crime, but it might in future and we'll have to comply, see https://boltz.exchange/privacy.
That all being said, sending Lightning to Boltz provides very decent privacy and we don't have a way to tell where a payment came from. That's the sender privacy part. With Bolt12 and blinded paths receiver privacy on LIghtning is getting a massive boost too and we are working together with the team at Breez to ship something very soon that makes Boltz fully Bolt12 compatible. Here the main PR that was merged just 3 days ago: https://github.com/BoltzExchange/boltz-backend/pull/859
Tl;dr: using Lightning is a very good idea as it doesn't reveal origin and with Bolt12 blinded paths neither destination to us and thus there is nothing much to reveal in the first place ✌️
what do you think differentiates you from your competitors?
Pragmatism. We focus on shipping features that are real-world useful for Bitcoiners.
What excites you most about the next year?
The sheer endless possibility of new use cases we can build with new Bitcoin Layers launching.
https://canary.boltz.exchange, also check https://boltz.exchange/privacy. "Assume we keep all data we have forever" - you can't and shouldn't trust us if we said otherwise.
More automation options, improve the manual option via https://pro.boltz.exchange. And also make pro swaps useful with e.g. https://github.com/BoltzExchange/boltz-backend/issues/197
We are working on an Ark integration, which is probably the most significant thing we'll launch this year. Yes, we are profitable and we actually worked with Evan and the team to get sth up for them, but leaving it to them to announce ✌️
Absolutely, we got a BTCPay plugin that does exactly that. Read more about it here: https://blog.boltz.exchange/p/launching-the-boltz-btcpay-plugin (ignore the "Beta", it's a stable product by now).
Use another swap provider running Boltz backend that handles things differently via https://swapmarket.github.io
Or even better: launch your own swap service! All our code is Open Source: https://github.com/BoltzExchange.
Complaining doesn't change things, go and launch something! 🙌
We run a real world company with a legal entity.
This was a very pragmatic business decision. We were swamped with support tickets users reporting "Exchange A/B/C froze my account because I used onchain Bitcoin from a Boltz swap". We had to act to not make Boltz incompatible with regulated services.
Also: Boltz is not a privacy tool. Boltz is a tool to (atomically) swap between different Bitcoin layers. We respect users privacy by not requiring more data than strictly necessary to execute the swap, but Boltz is not to be confused with technologies that are meant to enhance your privacy, like coinjoins.
Great meme, but luckily we are not alone. There are more entities running Boltz backends by now (see e.g. https://swapmarket.github.io/) and then there is Acinq/Phoenix, Zeus and many more all build very solid payment infrastructure.