Cowrie Research

garden-finance

3 min read

Garden Finance

  • Name: Garden Finance
  • URL: https://garden.finance/
  • Category: Bitcoin bridge / solver-routed swap infrastructure / atomic-swap settlement layer
  • Tags: bitcoin-ecosystem ethereum-ecosystem solana-ecosystem
  • Summary: Garden Finance is a Bitcoin swap-and-bridge stack built around solver competition and atomic-swap settlement. The useful part is not the retail frontend. It is the order book, solver scoring, session middleware, and chain-specific HTLC machinery that let Garden route BTC into other environments without falling back to a custodian.
  • What it does:
    • Lets users and integrators swap native BTC into EVM and non-EVM assets, and back again, without relying on a custodial wrapped-BTC bridge
    • Uses signed intents plus an order-book/auction process where solvers compete to quote and execute user requests
    • Settles swaps through chain-specific HTLC-style atomic-swap logic, including Bitcoin script flows for initiate, redeem, refund, and cooperative instant refund
    • Exposes SDK and API products for wallets, dapps, aggregators, and mobile or backend integrations rather than limiting Garden to its own frontend
    • Uses session infrastructure to manage swap secrets, P-256-derived keys, and Bitcoin-script interactions so the UX can feel closer to a normal app session than to repeated manual Bitcoin operations
    • Adds a staking and governance layer around solver participation, solver scoring, Snapshot voting, and the SEED token surface described in the docs
  • Key claims:
    • The official About page says Garden is “the fastest Bitcoin bridge,” enables cross-chain Bitcoin swaps in as little as 30 seconds, and uses an intents-based architecture with trustless settlements and zero custody risk
    • The docs index and contracts pages show Garden supports Bitcoin, Litecoin, EVM, Tron, Solana, Starknet, and Sui contract surfaces, which makes it broader than a single BTC↔EVM bridge route
    • The intents docs say Garden wants users to sign outcomes rather than raw transactions and emphasizes direct user matching, competitive solver execution, MEV resistance, gasless flows, and access to multiple liquidity sources
    • The solvers and auctions docs say solvers act as market makers, stake 210,000 SEED as collateral, submit quotes through the order book, and can win execution priority based on a score that blends settlement performance and stake-backed vote power
    • The sessions docs describe a distinct UX/control surface where a P-256 key derived from an EIP-712 signature is stored in IndexedDB and used to manage secrets and Bitcoin-script interactions, revealing that Garden is also shipping wallet-adjacent middleware rather than only a routing market
    • The developer docs and SDK docs show Garden positioning itself as embeddable infrastructure for wallets, aggregators, dapps, and backend services through APIs and TypeScript SDK packages
  • Whitepaper: No canonical standalone whitepaper or litepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest primary materials were the official docs corpus, contracts pages, developer docs, governance pages, and public GitHub organization. See ../whitepapers/garden-finance-primary-sources-2026-05-09.md.
  • Sources:

Internal linkages

  • Keep the comparison set tight: across, bitvm-bridge, and clementine.
  • Useful cut: Garden is solver-routed Bitcoin swap infrastructure with atomic-swap settlement, not just another bridge frontend.

Control surface

  • The leverage sits in solver admission, score weighting, session-key handling, liquidity access, and which chain integrations get first-class support.

  • The HTLC settlement path is the hard part worth tracking. The rest is middleware and market structure wrapped around it.

  • Last reviewed: 2026-06-03 UTC

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