ZachXBT criticizes Garden Finance Bitcoin bridge
Garden Finance accused of laundering Lazarus Group funds
Blockchain investigator ZachXBT has accused Garden Finance, a Bitcoin bridge platform, of playing a key role in laundering stolen crypto assets.
He claimed that over 80% of Garden’s recent fee revenue came from illicit transactions associated with the North Korean Lazarus Group, reports Cointelegraph.
These funds reportedly trace back to the high-profile Bybit hack. The allegations follow public statements by Garden co-founder Jaz Gulati, who boasted that the platform collected nearly $300,000 in fees in less than two weeks. ZachXBT retorted: “You conveniently left out >80% of your fees came from Chinese launderers moving Lazarus Group funds.”
Centralized Control Alleged Behind a “Decentralized” Front
ZachXBT also challenged the decentralization claims of Garden Finance, stating that a single actor repeatedly replenished the platform’s liquidity from Coinbase — undermining its supposed trustless model. “Explain how it is ‘decentralized’ when I watched in real time for multiple days as a single entity kept topping up cbBTC liquidity from Coinbase,” he wrote.
Garden Finance promotes itself as a rapid, zero-custody cross-chain Bitcoin bridge, boasting 40,571 atomic swaps worth over 24,984 BTC ($1.5 billion). In response to the allegations, Gulati insisted that 30 BTC in fees were collected before the Bybit incident and labeled the decentralization critique as baseless.
Wider Crackdown on Crypto-Linked Laundering
The accusations against Garden come amid increased global scrutiny of illicit financial flows in crypto. Just days earlier, Iurii Gugnin, the founder of crypto payments startup Evita Pay, was arrested in New York and charged in a $530 million laundering operation. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Gugnin helped Russian clients tied to sanctioned banks skirt restrictions by processing large-scale stablecoin transactions. His charges include wire fraud and money laundering and could lead to a life sentence. These back-to-back cases underscore growing concerns about the misuse of decentralized finance tools for sanctions evasion and cross-border crime.
Recently we wrote that CoinMarketCap has removed a fraudulent popup notification that appeared on its website prompting users to “verify” their cryptocurrency wallets.
