Incident Overview
On October 30, 2025, Garden Finance, a cross-chain DeFi platform, suffered a major exploit resulting in approximately $10.8-11 million in losses across multiple blockchains. The attacker drained liquidity pools containing WBTC, USDC, and USDT before converting them to ETH, with Garden offering a 10% white-hat bounty for fund recovery.
The sophisticated attack targeted Garden Finance's multi-chain infrastructure, with initial losses estimated at $5.5-6 million before being revised upward to $10.8-11 million as forensic analysis continued. The attacker systematically drained liquidity pools across multiple chains, focusing on wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), USD Coin (USDC), and Tether (USDT), then rapidly converting stolen tokens to Ether in what investigators described as a well-coordinated and premeditated operation. Garden Finance disputed claims that its core smart contracts were compromised, attributing the attack to vulnerabilities in third-party integrations, though independent investigator ZachXBT provided data suggesting the breach was multi-chain in scope affecting components spanning several networks.
The platform quickly paused certain functions and sent an on-chain message offering a 10% white-hat bounty to the attacker. The incident occurred just days after ZachXBT accused Garden of facilitating money laundering, claiming over 25% of its traffic came from illicit sources.
Exploiter Addresses:
0x98bcc6c3…ea2d12 (EVM chains)
WZy4xxpqktWa1b6MPMRiWsD487CT8mDcapB6GufBJCH (Solana)
Incident Report
Protocol Information
What the Attacker Needed to Succeed
Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.
What Auditors Should Check
If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to Garden Finance, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (October 2025).
- Verify all logic paths related to Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
- Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs
Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.
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