Garden Finance goes dark after $450K HTLC heist sprouts across four chains 🌱

Cross-chain bridging and atomic swap protocol Garden Finance temporarily disabled its application on Sunday after blockchain security firm Blockaid reported an active exploit targeting the protocol's hash time-locked contracts (HTLC) across four networks. Blockaid said an attacker drained about $450,000 in USDT from Garden's HTLC contracts on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and BNB Smart Chain.

HTLCs are time-bound escrow contracts that Garden uses to facilitate atomic swaps between Bitcoin and assets on other networks. Blockaid described the exploit as ongoing at the time of its alert but did not disclose the suspected vulnerability or specify whether user funds were affected. The firm's notice included addresses associated with the attacker and the impacted contracts.

Garden said separately that it had detected "unusual activity" and was conducting a full investigation while its app remained temporarily offline. Both Garden Finance and Blockaid acknowledged Cointelegraph's request for comments.

The incident follows an October 2025 breach in which an attacker stole about $11.4 million after compromising the operating environment of one of Garden's solvers. Garden said that earlier breach did not affect its protocol contracts or put user funds at risk. Related coverage noted that WEMIX reported an attacker moved about $724,000 after a separate contract breach.