Garden Finance primary sources — 2026-05-09

Classification takeaway

Garden Finance is best cataloged as Bitcoin bridge plus intent-based swap-routing and solver-auction infrastructure. The analytically important seam is not just “BTC bridging,” but how Garden combines solver competition, score-weighted execution rights, trustless HTLC settlement, and wallet-adjacent session middleware to make Bitcoin liquidity portable across multiple execution environments.

Primary sources reviewed

1. About Garden — https://docs.garden.finance/home/about

   • Frames Garden as the “fastest Bitcoin bridge,” says swaps can complete in as little as 30 seconds, and emphasizes intents-based architecture plus trustless settlement.
   • Also shows the project wants to serve multiple constituencies: swappers, builders, solvers, and stakers.

2. Docs index (llms.txt) — https://docs.garden.finance/llms.txt

   • Especially useful because it exposes the actual operating surface: contracts for Bitcoin/Litecoin/EVM/Tron/Solana/Starknet/Sui, API endpoints, SDK docs, solver/staker/governance pages, and compliance/address-screening pages.
   • Strong evidence that Garden is a broad integration/control plane rather than a single frontend.

3. Intents / solvers / auctions docs

   • https://docs.garden.finance/home/fundamentals/core-concepts/intents
   • https://docs.garden.finance/home/fundamentals/core-concepts/solvers
   • https://docs.garden.finance/home/fundamentals/core-concepts/auctions
   • These pages are the core mechanism sources. They show Garden users sign intents, solvers act as market makers, and the order book plus auction system determines who gets to execute.
   • The auctions page is particularly important because it reveals that execution is not purely price-first: solver scoring blends settlement performance with stake-backed voting power, which means routing authority can concentrate in whoever accumulates reputation plus stake.

4. Bitcoin contracts page — https://docs.garden.finance/contracts/bitcoin

   • Shows the settlement layer is built around explicit atomic-swap script paths: initiate, redeem, refund, and instant refund.
   • Makes clear that Garden’s trust model differs from wrapped-BTC bridges because the settlement primitive is an HTLC-style script flow rather than pooled custody.

5. Developer overview / SDK overview

   • https://docs.garden.finance/developers/overview
   • https://docs.garden.finance/developers/sdk/overview
   • These pages clarify that Garden is meant to be embedded into wallets, aggregators, dapps, and backend stacks through API and SDK surfaces.
   • Good evidence that the real object to catalog is infrastructure, not only a consumer bridge UI.

6. Sessions docs — https://docs.garden.finance/developers/core/sessions

   • This is the most distinctive source in the set because it documents Garden’s session architecture: P-256 key derivation from an EIP-712 signature, IndexedDB persistence, secret management, and Bitcoin script interaction support.
   • That design makes Garden analytically interesting as wallet-adjacent middleware and not just as a swap marketplace.

7. Governance docs — https://docs.garden.finance/home/governance

   • Shows the explicit governance surface around token holders, SEED, Snapshot, and solver/staker alignment.
   • Important because the auction docs already imply that execution rights are partly shaped by stake-backed power rather than only by market pricing.

8. Official site / public GitHub org

   • https://garden.finance/
   • https://github.com/gardenfi
   • The public site is thinner than the docs but reinforces audit/integration framing.
   • The GitHub org is useful as confirmation that the project has a real public engineering surface beyond documentation.

Whitepaper / technical-doc status

• No canonical standalone Garden whitepaper or litepaper surfaced in this pass.
• The docs corpus is the primary source of truth.

Why it stays in the active corpus

• Useful comparison class for Across, UniswapX, Clip Finance, and other solver/filler systems because it swaps the usual bridge-validator trust model for atomic-swap settlement while still centralizing practical power in order-book, solver, session, and staking design.
• Also valuable for Bitcoin DeFi research because it shows one path to making native BTC legible to multi-chain apps without collapsing immediately into custodial wrapping.