Garden Finance Takes App Offline After Blockaid Reports $450,000 HTLC Exploit
Key Takeaways
- •Blockaid reported that about $450,000 in USDT was drained from Garden Finance HTLC contracts on four blockchain networks.
- •Garden Finance took its application temporarily offline while it investigates the unusual activity.
- •The reported exploit affected HTLC escrow contracts used to support atomic swaps between Bitcoin and other network assets.
- •Blockaid described the exploit as ongoing but did not disclose the suspected vulnerability or confirm whether user funds were affected.
- •The incident follows an October 2025 breach involving a compromised Garden solver environment that resulted in about $11.4 million being stolen.
Cross-chain bridging and atomic swap protocol Garden Finance temporarily took its application offline after blockchain security firm Blockaid reported an exploit targeting the protocol’s hash time-locked contracts, or HTLCs, across four blockchain networks.
On Sunday, Blockaid said an attacker had drained about $450,000 in USDT from Garden Finance’s HTLC contracts on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and BNB Smart Chain. HTLCs are time-bound escrow contracts used in atomic swaps, and Garden uses them to facilitate exchanges between Bitcoin and assets on other networks.
Because HTLCs act as escrow infrastructure for swaps, any issue involving those contracts can affect how a cross-chain protocol processes pending exchanges. In this case, Blockaid described the exploit as ongoing at the time it issued its alert, but the firm did not disclose the suspected vulnerability and did not say whether user funds had been affected. Its alert included addresses associated with the attacker and the affected contracts.
Garden Finance said separately that it had detected “unusual activity” and was carrying out a full investigation. The protocol said its app would remain temporarily offline while the review continued, making the outcome of the investigation and any clarification on affected funds the next key disclosures for users to watch.
Garden Finance and Blockaid acknowledged Cointelegraph’s request for comment.
The incident comes after an October 2025 breach in which an attacker stole about $11.4 million after compromising the operating environment of one of Garden’s solvers. At the time, Garden said that breach did not affect its protocol contracts and did not put user funds at risk.
