where we started
Garden is a trustless Bitcoin bridge. We launched in December 2023, out of an earlier product called Catalog. For the first six months it ran like a consumer app. A trader shows up, swaps Bitcoin for something else, we take a fee. An incentive program kept the flywheel spinning, and we did around $813M in volume in the first half of 2024.
Then the incentives cooled off. So did the volume. From about June 2024 we hit a lull. Few new users, a quiet app, and a team staring at the question of what comes next.
the read
I didn't buy that more consumer growth was just sitting there waiting for us.
Crypto users are slow to trust and slow to switch. The people still active in a quiet market are the entrenched ones. They've tried everything, they've got their favourites, and prying them loose takes time-in-market we hadn't earned yet. We had no real wedge to make someone switch.
We were a team of engineers selling to retail traders, built to win a different game entirely.
But look at who we were. Everyone at Garden was an engineer. We spoke a builder's language, and our network was other builders and BD people, not retail traders. The consumer pool is millions of strangers. The B2B pool is a few hundred builders, a lot of whom already knew us and trusted us. We were built to win the second game, not the first.
So I proposed we lead with B2B. Build an API/SDK and sell Bitcoin on/off-ramping to wallets, aggregators, anyone who wanted it inside their app.
And there was a hidden upside. It's a masked consumer flywheel. Someone meets Garden inside their wallet, clocks the name, and a chunk of them eventually come to us direct. Distribution and brand reach in one move.
the hard part was internal
One of the founders wanted to build a consumer brand, and pushed back hard. Fair. That was the original dream.
Arguing taste against taste goes nowhere. So I went and got data instead. I scraped our competitors' volume and split it by source: how much came direct from their own app versus through integrators.
The assumption in the room was that this category is mostly consumer-direct. It wasn't. For the players that mattered, integrator volume was the bigger, steadier share. More uniform, less dependent on incentives.
That chart did the convincing the argument couldn't.
what i actually built
repositioning. Old Garden talked like a lifestyle brand, closer to Revolut than to infrastructure. Light on jargon, heavy on memes and Discord, all aimed at the retail trader. One message: speed. "Swap Bitcoin to any asset in 30 seconds." But a builder already knows what a bridge is. Speed isn't the hook. So I moved us to the real differentiator: a trustless, peer-to-peer, non-custodial Bitcoin bridge. Stop educating, start differentiating.
docs and content. I rebuilt the docs from a simple trader walkthrough into a real developer surface: basic and advanced sections, API reference, cookbooks, deep dives into the protocol. Socials shifted to technical deep-dives, because the people we needed to impress had changed. And I built the offline layer we'd never needed: primers and whitepapers for actual sales conversations. We learned how to run a sales process.
the launch playbook. This is the part that put us on the map. We built a co-marketing playbook for integrator launches and kept adding to it, including IRL-style, on-brand launch videos (like our Hyperliquid and Solana launches) that were genuinely unusual for crypto. It got to the point where new integrators were asking for their video before they'd even launched. For one launch into a degen-trader community, we built a game tuned exactly to people who love to farm and dig. For Maestro, an institutional solver, we ran a side event at BTC Vegas to unveil a fintech instrument we'd built together, and got Tim Draper on stage. Then a podcast to activate partnerships, plus side events and conference moments.
the site. Reworked the landing page around partner logos and direct API/SDK links, while keeping the hero deliberately balanced. Both traders and integrators land there, so it can't fully belong to either.
what happened
From a standing start in September 2024, integrators went from 0% to 50% of daily volume. Garden's now live in 30+ apps: Metamask, Phantom, LiFi, Kraken, Coinbase Wallet, and more, with others mid-integration. On the current trajectory we expect that to hit ~80% by December 2026 (projection).
The part that surprised even us: average swap through an integrator is about $2,500. Direct on our own UI, it's about $36,000.
AVERAGE SWAP SIZE
~14× difference in ticket size. Integrators catch the long tail; the direct UI catches the depth, so we build deliberately for each.
The small fish never leave their wallet to do a Bitcoin swap. Their ticket's too small to bother optimising. The whales come to us direct because they care about every basis point. Integrators catch the long tail, the UI catches the depth. So instead of bending one product around two opposite users, we now build deliberately for each.
The masked-flywheel bit is still a thesis (clean attribution is hard), but every wave of integrations and campaigns shows up as a bump in site visits and new users trickling in direct.
what i'd take anywhere
None of this was really about crypto.
It was reading a market honestly, noticing the company's real strengths pointed at a different buyer than the one we were chasing, and rebuilding the whole marketing motion around that buyer: positioning, content, docs, sales material, launch craft.
That move travels. Same job whether you're selling a Bitcoin bridge, AI infrastructure, or developer tooling.