Lightning, now on Garden

TL;DR: Garden now swaps between Lightning Network and onchain Bitcoin and more, with zero protocol fees at launch.

Home of HTLCs

Every Garden swap settles through a hashed timelock contract. Funds lock behind a hash on both sides, and revealing one secret settles both. That construction is why a Garden swap works without anyone holding your crypto along the way.

We didn’t invent it. Lightning did. The 2015 whitepaper used HTLCs to route payments through strangers, so a payment could hop across the network with every hop locked to the same hash. Reveal the secret at the destination and the whole path settles at once. Lightning proved that at scale for payments. Garden took the same primitive cross chain.

Which makes this integration unusually clean. A Lightning invoice and a Garden swap already speak the same language.

Why now

The Bitcoin community lost two of its swap providers recently. Boltz took its service offline first after months of AI-assisted attacks outpaced what a small team could patch. A week later, Atomiq made the same call, citing the same pressure. Wallets like ZEUS, Aqua, and Bull Bitcoin lost the rails they were built on overnight.

Worth pausing on what actually failed there. In both cases user funds stayed safe the entire time, because the swaps were trustless by construction. The protocol held. What broke was the economics of a small team defending open source infrastructure against attackers who now scan code at machine speed.

We’ve been rebuilding our own security posture around that exact threat since the start of the year, and when Boltz went down, we started work on extending our HTLC infrastructure to Lightning. Garden exists because we think moving Bitcoin should feel as effortless as moving a stablecoin, and Lightning is Bitcoin’s payment rail. Watching it lose swap coverage while the primitive itself keeps proving sound is precisely the gap we’re here to close.

We’re launching Lightning routes with zero protocol fees.

What’s live now

Starting today, you can swap into and out of Lightning using the following assets. Wider stablecoin coverage and support for every asset on Garden is rolling out in the coming weeks.

What it unlocks

For users, any Lightning wallet works from day one, because paying an invoice is the entire flow. Phoenix, Zeus, Strike, Cash App, or a direct exchange withdrawal over Lightning. Pick Lightning as your source, pay the invoice Garden shows, and receive any supported asset on the other side. Going the other way, paste an invoice from your wallet and a solver pays it.

For developers, Lightning routes are live in the Garden API today. If your wallet or app lost its swap backend, the docs cover everything from quotes to settlement, and if you need help getting set up, reach out. We’ll get you live.

Accept sats over Lightning and settle in stablecoins on the chain your treasury lives on, or run payouts in the opposite direction. An exchange balance can move into a defi position through a single Lightning withdrawal.

How it works

Pick Lightning as your source or destination on app.garden.finance. Swapping from Lightning, we show an invoice and you pay it from any wallet. Swapping to Lightning, you paste an invoice and a solver pays it. Both directions settle atomically, delivered or refunded, nothing in between.

Satoshi drew up peer to peer money. Lightning made it instant. We’re making it go everywhere.

FAQs

Where can I swap Lightning to onchain Bitcoin?

Garden supports Lightning to onchain BTC in both directions, so you can move sats out of a Lightning channel into a regular Bitcoin address, or send onchain BTC and have a solver pay a Lightning invoice for you.

How do I integrate Lightning payments into my app/wallet?

Use the Garden API. Lightning routes are live, and the developer docs take you through the process. Integration is the same quote, initiate, settle flow you’d use for a Bitcoin or EVM route. You request a quote, your user pays a Lightning invoice, and the destination asset lands on the chain you specified. No node to run and no channel management.

What are the alternatives to Boltz for Lightning swaps?

Garden is a direct alternative for Lightning to onchain swaps, and it covers a wider surface than Boltz because Lightning connects to every chain Garden supports rather than just Bitcoin and a handful of L2s. Both use HTLCs, so the trust model is the same. The practical difference is coverage and that Garden runs a solver network rather than a single service.

How do I move Bitcoin from Lightning Network to another chain?

Open app.garden.finance, pick Lightning as your source and your destination asset, then pay the invoice Garden shows you from any Lightning wallet, the swap settles atomically.

Can I swap Lightning to USDC/USDT?

Yes. Lightning to USDC on Arc is live today, with USDT and stablecoins across Base, Arbitrum, Solana, Hyperliquid and other supported chains rolling out in the coming weeks. The reverse works too, so you can send stablecoins and have a solver pay a Lightning invoice for you.

Do I need Garden to send Bitcoin over Lightning?

No. If both sides are Lightning wallets, that’s a normal Lightning payment and your wallet handles it. Garden comes in when one side isn’t Lightning, so Lightning to USDC, Lightning to onchain Bitcoin, or an asset on another chain back out to a Lightning invoice.