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- Garden Finance processed over 24,000 BTC in swaps, but questions now surround the source of this volume.
- ZachXBT claims more than 80% of Garden’s recent fees may be linked to funds from the Bybit hack.
- Allegations of laundering and centralization are raising deeper concerns about Garden Finance’s operations.
Garden Finance is facing heightened scrutiny following serious allegations from onchain investigator ZachXBT. This platform, which recently announced that its Bitcoin swap activity had grown impressively, has now been associated with dirty capital flows.
ZachXBT claims that more than 80 percent of the recent fees on the platform were paid through laundering. He asserts that those transactions are linked to stolen funds in the Bybit hack, and Chinese actors associated with the Lazarus Group had some involvement.
According to the statistics provided by Dune Analytics, Garden Finance transacted an excess of 24,189 BTC through the chain of more than 40000 atomic swaps. It has received fees of over 40 BTC, and the maximum volume value of a single swap is 10 BTC.
These data were published as the information shared by the founder, Jaz Gulati, in an early June post about fee expansion. The announcement was, however, met with a backlash when ZachXBT associated the fees with illegal activity.
This was the reason Gulati was defending the platform: he made such a post in Q4 2024 when he reasoned that he had been sent 30 BTC before the Bybit hack. He denied the accusations and refused to use the term “fake decentralized bridge.”
Accusations Highlight Centralization and Inaction Over Stolen Funds
Nonetheless, ZachXBT (a cryptocurrency KYC proponent and Coinbase promoter) alleged that Garden Finance had enabled one Coinbase-related entity to perform repeated top-ups of cbBTC liquidity. He said that this activity facilitated the concepts of tracing the transactions related to the Bybit hack.
By the time they had started the debate, another user, James Scaur, replied in support of Gulati. He presented the case that the Pareto distribution of liquidity providers could justify why a single wallet was executing swaps.
Nonetheless, ZachXBT explained that the mempool had been filled with Bybit-related transactions since April. According to him, warnings had been given to the team, but nothing was done, and the promotion of the figure for fees was done.
He also indicated that any hotspots observed in previous airdrop farming campaigns might have been artificially stimulated, raising questions about whether the platform should be trusted.
Garden Finance is the subject of a raging debate, as flung by ZachXBT. As accountability demands have increased, the platform could potentially be further investigated should there be a confirmation of its association with laundering.
Also Read: Ripple Lawyer Exposes Shocking New Crypto Scams Using AI and Fake Giveaways
