ZK Bridges Have Arrived, Though They're Heavyweight
ZK light-client-based bridges from providers like Succinct and Polyhedra have finally achieved the performance needed for production. Trust assumptions are minimized, but operational costs run an order of magnitude higher than Optimistic alternatives.
As a result, the industry has converged on a de facto division of labor: "assets you can't afford to lose" — stablecoins and government-backed tokens — flow over ZK bridges, while frequent small transfers use Optimistic bridges.
A World Without Bridges
Meanwhile, the maturation of native cross-chain messaging (CCIP, LayerZero v2, and others) has driven abstraction on the application layer. Users no longer need to think about "using a bridge" at all. Before long, the term "cross-chain" itself may largely disappear from the user's vocabulary.