TL;DR
- Garden Finance suffered a multichain hack that drained between $5.5 million and $10 million in assets, including BTC, WBTC, WETH, cbBTC, and SEED.
- The SEED token plummeted 64% to $0.19 after the hacker sold into low-liquidity Uniswap pools, reducing its market capitalization to $2.5 million.
- ZachXBT noted that up to 25% of Garden Finance’s activity originated from stolen funds in previous hacks, including Bybit and Swissborg.
Garden Finance was exploited through its multichain bridge, causing estimated losses of $5.5 million to $10 million across multiple digital assets, according to on-chain data.
On-chain researcher ZachXBT detected the first unauthorized withdrawals and warned that the total outflows could increase. The Garden team acknowledged the attack, confirming that its systems were compromised across several blockchains, including Arbitrum. In an on-chain message, the protocol offered the attacker a 10% bounty in exchange for returning the funds and assisting in identifying the vulnerability, but no response has been received so far.
The stolen assets were quickly moved and swapped using the MetaMask router, a costly but fast method that complicated tracking or freezing. Among the stolen funds were Lombard, BTC, WBTC, WETH, cbBTC, and SEED, Garden Protocol’s native token. According to the monitoring firm Cyvers Alert, the total compromised amount is around $6 million, although some analysts estimate the real value could be double. Ecosystem researchers attribute the attack to the North Korean group Dangerous Password, linked to several recent exploits in bridges and DeFi protocols.
Garden Finance Used to Process Stolen Funds from Previous Hacks
The crisis intensified as the SEED token crashed 64% minutes after the attack, falling to $0.19 and cutting its market capitalization to $2.5 million. The decline was triggered by the hacker’s sales into low-liquidity Uniswap pools, accelerating the loss of value and sharply undermining user confidence in the protocol.
ZachXBT also revealed that Garden Finance had been previously used to launder funds from other hacks, including Bybit and Swissborg. He estimated that nearly 25% of the protocol’s total activity originated from illicit deposits. The researcher stated that the Garden team earned at least six-figure fees from these operations and failed to cooperate in returning the stolen funds to victims.
Prior to the hack, Garden processed roughly $2.5 million in daily volume and generated around $2.52 million in annualized revenue. This incident ranks among the most severe recent attacks on a DeFi bridge and highlights ongoing security risks in decentralized protocols
