On the User Experience of Cross-Chain Bridges

Quick Take Interoperability protocols are becoming more relevant for the continued development of increasingly fragmented blockchain ecosystems. While most existing bridges provide a straightforward approach towards bridging assets, they introduce trade-offs that most users are not privy to. For mass adoption, understanding these trade-offs would be sub-optimal, so the focus would be on creating a seamless user experience, as LiFi has done. However, LiFi aggregates bridging options instead of bridge liquidity, though the latter introduces various technical challenges. As interoperability protocols grow more robust, they ultimately face the possibility of breaking transactions’ atomicity, though this possibility may not eventually be entertained.