In this piece I want to discuss solving, and my prediction of the future of what UX/Bridging will look like over the next few years. I think as someone actively engaged in solving for existing bridges, running strategies in this space, and having been talking to many founders working on bridges and intents platforms; I’ll hopefully have an interesting prediction for you, dear reader.

Let’s first look at how interacting between chains works today.

Bridges… Intents… Bridgetents?

Today there exist two kinds of bridges:

Mint & Burn

1. Assets start on some source chain with a set supply

2. You can in contract burn them, with a destination chain set in the calldata

3. A cross chain message with this data is sent

4. You are minted tokens on the destination chain.

You can also undo this, by burning your newly minted tokens on the destination chain, and receiving them back on the source chain. The most popular implementations of this include:

1. LayerZero OFT’s

2. Wormhole NTT

3. USDC CCTP

Intent Bridging

Intents based bridges focus on having a settlement contract on some chain, with either a centralized bridging hub or utilizing a cross chain messaging protocol like LayerZero or Hyperlane to handle messages/unlocks being passed between chains. The lifecycle of an intent bridge goes as follows:

1. User submits intent on Chain A, such as bridging 1 ETH

2. Solver listens for an intent creation event

3. Solver fills intent on destination chain, by sending the expected 1 ETH to settlement contract

4. Intents protocol unlocks assets on source chain for the solver, and provides the solver a fee somewhere in this process.

Some examples of these protocols include:

1. Across

2. Everclear

3. Mayan

Normies have discussed the issues with Mint and Burn since LayerZero’s first whitepaper, and credit to them, Wormhole, and hyperlane, almost all issues of the mint and burn mechanism have been quite robustly documented. Double spends, reorgs, and infinite mints are all mostly solved problems, or at least understood entirely by the users of said protocols. The issues with intents bridges are less clear, and less understood. Intents bridges have mostly solver double spend issues, or solver gas bidding issues that are more chain based. So the double spend issue occurs when the solver fronts the user tokens on the destination chain, and the user then gets to claim the destination chain tokens, and withdraw their original deposit in step 1 of the Intents bridging section. They basically get to steal from the solver. That has been addressed by the aforementioned protocols, but is a major attack vector still.

Now I do my CONTROVERSIAL predicting…

You’ll never use a bridge, and you will be happy

I’ll start by doing a short to long term prediction, each getting progressively less believable, but more correct.

Short Term

Your life sucks.

That’s about it… no i need to talk about bridging or some shit still… ok so your life fucking sucks right now because you have to do one of two things:

1. Swap then Bridge

2. Bridge then Swap

Frankly, I’d be depressed to. That’s awful UX. There are some people working on how to make this good but I think they’re mostly bad ideas built on bad ideas that exist today. So instead of building a house on rock, it’s more like a cardboard box on top of quicksand…

Medium Term

Medium term there will be some solutions like what I really like Across doing, and Stargate. They are both moving towards building decentralized DEX’s basically. I think Stargate will remain bridging focused but on a spaces recently with Hart from Across, he brought up that Across long term is a swapping protocol, more than a bridging protocol; which I really prefer. There is this serious issue with intents bridges that the messaging protocol people correctly identify:

Intents bridges are fucking stupid.

I don’t mean the people at them, but I mean long term. If something like OTokens or Warp tokens or xERC20 or whatever fucking standard a token picks exist, that allow for zero fee bridging between identical tokens that you can unwrap, why even bother with intents through a cross chain messaging protocol? Why not just be smart and use those?

Medium term there will be a move from intents bridging, **to intents swapping. This is much better IMO, because it puts the work of rebalancing and finding the best route for a particular token on the solvers back, rather than the user. Instead of:

1. Swap then Bridge or Bridge then Swap

2. Swap

Now you can see I’m right because of how simple and nice that is :)

But I lied. It’s more like:

1. Swap (but slow)

Fine I lied again. It’s really:

1. Swap (but slow, and your pricing is awful because of how long getting the tokens to a solver takes).

We’re not all perfect!

Long Term

Now we get to my dream, and where I’m convinced we’re going; whether you like it or not. There will be only two way to get users tokens cross chain, and in a well priced manner. Those two ways are entirely dependent upon the user’s level of decentralization requirements:

1. Worse priced but decentralized swapping

2. Better priced but centralized swapping

There effectively will be only two ways to get assets between chains, and the question is who is doing that work; the solver directly or a network?

Number 2 is what I’m more interested in because I care about forkable decentralization, not consensus decentralization. I prefer a world where trading is forkable, anyone can run a P2P exchange venue, and the chains we trade on are entirely decentralized. Call me crazy (or more aligned with Bitcoin’s decentralization ethos than your dumb one).

I find this funny coin on pump fun (I do not own nor ever owned this token nor know anyone who has owned this token as an obvious disclaimer. this is the first token I saw on pump fun at the time of the writing of this article).

So my dream for a user’s transaction lifecycle (that will happen) is this:

1. User signs order, says I want to sell my USDC on Ethereum, for Retarded Dinosaur:

2. Solver pays the gas for the user on the source chain, then purchases Retarded Dinosaur for the user; sending them the tokens on Solana.

3. Solver now has USDC on Ethereum, and can use OTokens or specific token based mint/burns like CCTP to mint and burn the USDC back to Solana.

Now think about how that feels for an end user and tell me your life wouldn’t be depressing if you had this UX:

1. Sign message

2. Receive tokens within 1 block on destination chain

Wow.

Now that’s nice. OH yeah baby that’s clean.

mmk now you may discuss in replies or my dm’s about how cool that sounds. Ty for reading.