Blockaid flags Garden Finance exploit draining $450,000 in USDT across four chains

Garden Finance temporarily suspended its services after a security incident that led to the loss of about $450,000 in USDT across Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum and BNB Chain. Blockaid said the funds were drained from hash time-locked contracts, or HTLCs, used by the cross-chain bridge and atomic swap protocol, but Garden later said the protocol and its smart contracts were not hacked. Instead, the company said an attacker breached the off-chain database of an independent solver and inserted false transaction records, causing the solver to release funds for swaps it had not actually received. Garden said the stolen assets were the solver’s own funds and that user funds were not lost or exposed. The company took its application offline, isolated the affected infrastructure, and said it is working with zeroShadow, Quantstamp and Blockaid to trace and recover the funds before resuming services. The incident is the protocol’s second security issue after an October 2025 breach that resulted in losses of about $11.4 million following a compromise of a solver’s operating environment; Garden said then, as now, that protocol contracts and user funds were not affected.