Garden Finance Takes App Offline After $450,000 Solver Exploit

Cross chain bridge protocol Garden Finance temporarily disabled its app after an attacker compromised an independent solver’s off-chain database, resulting in roughly $450,000 in losses.

What Happened

Blockaid reported that an attacker drained about $450,000 in USDT from Garden’s hash time-locked contracts across Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and BNB Smart Chain.

These contracts function as time-bound escrow accounts that enable atomic swaps between Bitcoin and other network assets. Blockaid initially described the exploit as ongoing and published wallet addresses linked to the attacker.

Garden Clarifies the Breach Scope

A Garden Finance spokesperson told Cointelegraph that neither the protocol nor its smart contracts were compromised. Instead, the attacker breached an independent solver’s off-chain database and inserted fraudulent transaction records, tricking the solver into releasing funds for swaps that were never actually funded by the counterparty.

Recovery Efforts Underway

Garden said it is working with security firms zeroShadow, Quantstamp, and Blockaid to trace and recover the funds, and expects to restore services soon pending completed security checks, though no firm timeline was given. The company cited its recent SOC 2 Type II attestation as evidence of its security investment.

Second Incident for Garden’s Solver Network

This follows an October 2025 breach in which an attacker stole approximately $11.4 million after compromising a different Garden solver’s operating environment, an incident the company also said did not affect its protocol or user funds.