BTC bridge flagged for laundering money got hacked

Just days after boasting about reaching a multibillion-dollar milestone, Garden, a protocol for swapping bitcoin (BTC) across different blockchains, was hacked, resulting in millions of dollars lost.

Today, Jaz Gulati, the co-founder of Garden, confirmed that the platform was exploited to the tune of $11 million. The root cause hasn’t been identified yet, as the team is "working with security partners to trace the event and prevent similar incidents moving forward," while also aiming to bring the app back online.

Gulati also claims that the protocol itself is unaffected, no user funds were lost, and the system's design "continues to work as intended."

"This incident was isolated to a single solver, with no impact on the protocol at all," the co-founder said. Solvers are the market makers on this platform that help users offer better pricing, among other things.

Blockchain sleuth ZachXBT was the first to report the incident. According to him, an address related to the Garden team sent a message on-chain to the alleged exploiter offering a 10% whitehat bounty.

The message says that Garden is "fully committed to resolving this situation peacefully and ensuring that no further harm is done," and that its intent is to “address the issue with cooperation, not punishment."

"Ironically, a few days ago I pointed out on X how Garden Finance was ignoring victims for returning fees after an estimated >25% of its total activity for Garden Finance has related to stolen funds (Bybit exploit, Swissborg, etc)," ZachXBT said.

Meanwhile, according to crypto security specialist Cyvers, which initially reported that the losses totaled $6 million, most of the stolen funds are in stablecoins such as USD coin (USDC), tether (USDT), wrapped bitcoin (WBTC), or a tokenized version of BTC, and other crypto assets.

"However, most of the freezable assets are swapped to $ETH," they added.

As reported by Cybernews.com, Garden was recently once again accused of helping North Korean hackers launder stolen funds.

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