Blockaid Reports $450,000 Exploit as Garden Finance Disables App

According to Garden Finance, an outside solver hacked into the off-chain database. This attack prompted the cross-chain bridge and atomic swap protocol to take their application offline. Blockaid claimed that hackers withdrew $450,000 (roughly Rs. 4.3 crore) in USDT via Garden's hash time-locked contract (HTLC) on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and BNB Smart Chain. HTLC contracts are timed escrow contracts used by Garden to carry out atomic swapping between Bitcoin and assets on other blockchains. Blockaid reported the attack as ongoing and listed the addresses of the attacker and the exploited contracts.

External Solver Breach Triggers Service Suspension and Recovery Efforts

According to Garden, there was no loss of users' money or putting money at any risk, and the problem only impacted the solvers' property. The company is now in the process of determining the total amount of money as well as assets and networks impacted. It said services were paused as a precaution while the affected infrastructure was isolated and reviewed. 

The attackers were able to hack into the off-chain database of an independent solver and plant false transactions. The result was that the solver released the funds even though no money had been deposited by the counterparty. Garden explained that they are working with zeroShadow, Quantstamp, and Blockaid in tracking and recovering the funds. The protocol plans to restore its services soon, pending the completion of security reviews, but provided no timeline for this.

The firm also highlighted the SOC 2 Type II attestation that it had recently undertaken as proof of its security investment. This follows an October 2025 hack attack where the hacker managed to steal nearly $11.4 million (roughly Rs. 109 crore) after gaining access to the operating system environment of one of the Garden's solvers. According to the firm, this attack did not compromise its protocol contracts. 

Earlier this month, Blockaid had reported another incident that involved two crypto bridges managed by decentralised perpetual exchange AFX and Verus Protocol. The incident led to a loss of more than $31.6 million (roughly Rs. 305 crore) through two separate hacks carried out within a period of just hours. The decentralised perpetual exchange AFX, which operates on Arbitrum, has lost $24.15 million (roughly Rs. 233 crore), whereas the attack on the Verus Ethereum Bridge cost approximately $7.5 million (roughly Rs. 72.3 crore) worth of cryptocurrency.