Recently, I again saw the “gossip” about cross-chain bridges being stolen, and it suddenly made me want to break down what “cross-chain” really means: once an IBC/message is sent, who are you actually trusting? On the surface, it’s about sending assets/messages to another chain, but the components you need to trust behind the scenes are plenty: the source chain itself shouldn’t roll back, the light client/verification logic shouldn’t be written wrong, the relayer shouldn’t pull any shady tricks, and the target chain’s execution shouldn’t get stuck… if anything in any step goes wrong, it turns into a big consensus stand-off that’s basically “waiting for confirmation,” and the vibe is exactly the same as last time when oracle errors triggered the whole network to freeze up and do nothing.

My colleague just watched from the sidelines and said one line: you people’s cross-chain is even more prone to losing packages than shipping by courier. Anyway, before I do a cross-chain transfer now, I always think it through first: am I trusting the security of the chain, a group of people/multisig, or trusting that the code has no bugs… once I’ve got it figured out, then I act—otherwise, even if the floor price structure is great, it can’t withstand a mental breakdown.