Tear down the "Berlin Wall" of the crypto world

Author: Arjun Chand

Original Title: Interoperability: Crypto’s Invisible Switchboard

Translation and Editing: BitpushNews

The crypto world has always been like a collection of tribes, built around the “highest belief” of the chain. You choose a chain, learn its tools and applications, integrate into its community, follow its conference tracks, and rarely step outside this bubble.

Initial choices are often influenced by what initially attracted you to the crypto world. Since early decentralized finance (DeFi) mainly developed on Ethereum, many early adopters stayed there. Later, the NFT boom and meme coin cycles brought new users into another ecosystem—Solana. As a result, a “chain-first” onboarding pattern emerged: once you settle on a chain, you tend to stay there.

For most users, the crypto world is like a series of independent worlds, each interacted with one at a time. This mindset is now being broken.

Today, the crypto world is increasingly experienced as a single market rather than a collection of multiple chains. Activities are distributed across multiple thriving ecosystems. Capital flows to the highest-yielding places, and assets are bought where liquidity is deepest. Users no longer choose chains; they choose actions and focus on outcomes. They want to swap, earn yields, send, or pay, and care about the results these actions produce: profits, returns, or fund transfers.

Therefore, the dominant user model has shifted. The crypto world is no longer “chain-first,” but “asset-first.” Wherever the assets are, users now expect to be able to access them.

This new “asset-first” economy relies entirely on interoperability (commonly called interop) to enable value to flow freely across chains.

What is interoperability?

Interoperability connects the entire crypto ecosystem, making it usable as a whole. Without it, each blockchain becomes its own closed garden.

As defined in the “2026 State of Interoperability Report”:

“Interoperability is the ability for value, state, and intent to flow seamlessly between independent blockchains. It enables composability to operate at scale within the crypto world, facilitating coordination between otherwise separate ecosystems. For users, interoperability compresses multi-chain ecosystems into a single, interconnected mental model of crypto usage.”

A helpful analogy is: consider each chain as its own financial backend. They are not inherently interconnected. Assets, liquidity, and applications exist in different environments, each with its own rules, costs, and trade-offs.

Interoperability is the layer that connects these backends.

If this sounds abstract, a familiar analogy from traditional finance helps. Banks are not inherently interconnected. Making the global financial system usable is not because there is one giant bank, but because shared channels like Visa, SWIFT, and ACH exist on top of it, transferring funds between them. When you wire money, you don’t think about which banks’ systems are involved; you just expect it to go through.

The crypto world is undergoing a similar transformation. Interoperability makes each chain feel less like isolated networks and more like a single financial system. It allows users to swap assets across chains, chase yields, or transfer capital without starting from scratch each time.

For a long time, this was mostly theoretical. Tools existed, but users weren’t ready. Now, the situation has changed.

Users Are Living in a Multi-Chain World

Today, active crypto users typically hold assets across multiple chains. While many still have a “main chain” (usually Ethereum, especially for high-net-worth users), their on-chain behavior shows they are inherently multi-chain users. Capital flows based on risk, cost, and opportunity, not loyalty to a single chain.

Data from Jumper, a cross-chain swap and bridging platform, reveals this shift. Most users distribute funds across multiple chains. They tend to keep most of their funds on one or two main networks, then transfer smaller amounts elsewhere when market opportunities arise.

This reflects how the crypto world is actually used.

Users keep funds where they feel most comfortable. When new opportunities appear—such as higher yields, new applications, or speculative narratives—they use interoperability channels like bridges to move funds to where the action is happening.

Thus, “bridging” capital (transferring funds from one chain to another) has become a routine operation in crypto. Since 2022, cross-chain transaction volume has increased by 100 times. During periods of high speculation and attention, bridging activity peaks as users move funds to the latest hot chains.

Three simultaneous trends amplify the importance of interoperability:

First, users are embracing the multi-chain reality of crypto. Liquidity will never be confined to a single corner of the global market. It flows to the highest returns, and ordinary users no longer expect everything to happen on one chain.

Second, the pace of chain launches is unprecedented. 2025 saw one of the broadest waves of new chain launches in industry history. This includes native crypto ecosystems and chains operated by fintech companies like Stripe. The surface area of the crypto world has expanded significantly.

Finally, asset tokenization is accelerating. Everything from stocks and government bonds to private credit and real-world assets is being tokenized on-chain. Meanwhile, regulatory clarity (especially through the GENIUS Act) has unleashed a wave of stablecoin issuance.

This is the current reality of crypto, with interoperability at the core of these three major shifts.

For users, interoperability is how crypto is used. Bridges are the main way for users to transfer, trade, and express intent across chains.

For chains, interoperability is the infrastructure. Without bridging connections, chains cannot attract external capital or large-scale users. Chains without interoperability are like countries without trade routes—isolated, limited, and irrelevant in a globalized market.

For asset issuers, interoperability is a distribution requirement. Issuers no longer want to issue assets only on a single chain; they want assets to be everywhere. This means assets need to be available across markets, across chains, and across liquidity venues. Achieving this efficiently and at scale can only be done through interoperability channels.

In summary, interoperability now represents the layer of expansion for the crypto world. As users, chains, and assets multiply, interoperability becomes the mechanism to maintain market liquidity. Interoperability is the essence of crypto. It is unstoppable.

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State of Interoperability 2026

Since we’ve established the importance of interoperability, what does the actual interoperability market look like?

It is entering the consolidation phase—an inevitable stage every infrastructure category will go through.

This pattern is visible in every corner of finance and technology. In early stages, value distribution is sparse. Many participants coexist. Differentiation is weak. Growth is driven more by early entry than by becoming the best.

Recall the early days of fintech. Before Stripe became the default payment layer, there were dozens of payment gateways. Before Plaid, every bank integration was custom. Before Bloomberg integrated financial data, traders had to piece together information from multiple terminals and sources.

Interoperability follows the same trajectory. As blockchain proliferation surged, almost no interoperability protocols gained widespread attention. That phase is now over.

As the category matures, value is no longer accumulated in the middle layer but concentrated at the two ends. You either excel at a specific task or operate at scale to become indispensable. Everything in between is squeezed out.

In practice, this means two things:

1. Users tend to seek the best solution for specific jobs.

2. Developers default to proven, reliable, and widely adopted infrastructure.

Today’s interoperability is a typical example of this dynamic.

One end is specialized players. These teams obsess over a single outcome and optimize everything around it. They don’t try to be platforms but aim to win a specific task.

Think of Stripe, which started with payment APIs; Wise, focused on cross-border foreign exchange; Robinhood, making trading simple and cheap. In interoperability, intent-based bridges like Relay and Gas.zip fall into this category. They recognize most users just want fast, cheap cross-chain swaps, so they build for speed and low cost, nothing more.

The other end is infrastructure giants. These are general-purpose platforms with real distribution channels, deep integrations, and network effects.

Think of SWIFT in banking, Visa in payments, or AWS in cloud computing. In interoperability, large platforms supporting many applications, wallets, and chains—like LI.FI, LayerZero, and Wormhole—fit here.

Once a team proves it can reliably scale operations, the market allows it to expand into adjacent products. This is happening in interoperability, with teams branching into swaps, yield aggregation, and other new areas.

The struggle is in the middle layer.

Projects that are neither focused enough nor widely adopted risk becoming a dangerous no-man’s land. They are too generic to dominate niche markets and too small to be foundational infrastructure. They act slower than specialized players and lack the coverage of platforms.

This is where consolidation occurs. Some teams pivot, some shut down, others are acquired for talent or technology, such as Circle acquiring the team and IP of Interop Labs.

By 2026, interoperability will no longer be “good enough.” Like every mature market, specialization and scale are what create value.

Future Directions

Taking a step back, this shift is obvious.

The crypto world now asks: what do you want to achieve, regardless of where you are?

Users no longer need to be aware of which chain they are on. They just act: swap, earn yields, send funds, gain asset exposure—no matter which chain they are using.

Moreover, these actions are increasingly automated, even when multiple chains are involved at the underlying level.

This is the new reality of crypto. Chains still exist, but mainly as infrastructure. For users, crypto is beginning to feel like a single, global market and monetary system.

However, this still requires users to know which interoperability tools to use and how.

The next step is coming: everything will soon be embedded in app buttons, and things will be done automatically.

Today, interoperability helps you move across chains. Soon, it will help you act across chains—automatically, atomically, seamlessly within a single flow. Swapping, lending, rebalancing, paying, issuing assets, coordinating agents—all with a single click, even across ten different chains.

This is the asset-first, action-first crypto experience.

For readers, this means on-chain capabilities are rapidly increasing. Tasks that once required planning, bridging, and manual coordination are collapsing into single decisions and clicks.

In summary:

The chain-first era is over, and the action-first era is coming.