Author: Jae, PANews

True interoperability will only begin when users no longer need "cross-chain".

Dune data shows that the daily active addresses (DAU) of cross-chain bridges has been declining for several consecutive months. Since October 2025, the DAU of cross-chain bridges has been declining, from a peak of 30,000-35,000 to the current approximately 13,000.

For the crypto community, which is accustomed to the narrative of a "multi-chain universe," cross-chain bridges were once the arteries connecting isolated islands, and their activity was often interpreted as a thermometer of ecological prosperity.

Today, the mercury column of this thermometer is declining. Is it due to user churn, or the waning of the cross-chain craze? The answer is far more complex than it appears.

The shrinking of the DAU metric is essentially a technological evolution of cross-chain bridges from "explicit consumer-facing interactions" to "implicit business-facing infrastructure." These are being "folded" into the underlying layers of wallets, DEXs, and aggregators, still silently driving every asset flow in the multi-chain world.

Frequent security incidents coupled with a liquidity crunch have plunged cross-chain bridges into a trust winter.

The sharp drop in DAU of cross-chain bridges is a result of the collapse of security trust combined with the market's deflating bubble.

Security has always been the sword of Damocles hanging over cross-link bridges.

In 2025, cross-chain bridge-related hacking attacks will result in a total loss of $2.8 billion, accounting for approximately 40% of all Web3 losses.

This month, the crypto industry suffered a devastating wave of hacking, with losses reaching $620 million in a single month. The attacks were highly concentrated on vulnerabilities in cross-chain infrastructure and management permissions.

The most typical example is Kelp DAO. Due to its vulnerable configuration of a single validator, hackers poisoned the validator nodes and forged withdrawal instructions worth $292 million in rsETH, directly triggering nearly $200 million in bad debts on Aave and creating a chain reaction of credit risks.

Related reading: KelpDAO's cross-chain failure leaves AAVE as the "foot of the bill," prompting industry calls for risk repricing.

This incident severely damaged market confidence in LayerZero. When users witnessed even a star protocol with a top valuation causing a major disaster due to misconfiguration, their trust in third-party cross-chain bridges plummeted.

Another variable that cannot be ignored is the cooling of liquidity. JPMorgan Chase points out that in the first quarter of 2026, net inflows into digital assets will be only $11 billion, equivalent to one-third of the same period in 2025.

More notably, despite stablecoin market capitalization reaching a record high of $3.2 trillion, funds have remained remarkably "calm." A significant amount of liquidity has abandoned cross-chain arbitrage, choosing instead to remain stagnant within relatively safe asset pools.

This shift from "high-frequency movement" to "low-frequency storage" has led to a decline in the DAU of cross-chain bridges.

The decline in data is merely a symptom; cross-chain bridges are taking a backseat.

On the surface, the decline in cross-chain bridge activity seems to be a direct signal of waning user enthusiasm and slowing growth in the sector. However, the deeper reason is not the disappearance of demand, but rather that the technical architecture itself is causing cross-chain bridges to move from an independent entry point to an invisible underlying layer, gradually pushing them out of the user's view.

For example, NEAR's concept of Chain Abstraction has been widely adopted and has changed the development path of the cross-chain bridge track.

Leveraging chain signatures and MPC technology, users can operate assets on the Bitcoin, Solana, or EVM chains with just one main account, without being aware of any cross-chain process.

Cross-chain bridges have evolved from front-end applications that users must actively access to underlying infrastructure that is automatically invoked in the background. Just like internet users don't need to understand the TCP/IP protocol, yet they use it all the time.

Cross-chain operations are still happening, but they won't be reflected in the official DAU of the cross-chain bridge.

If blockchain abstraction protocols divert players from the blockchain, then CEXs (centralized exchanges) intercept the vast majority of ordinary users.

To date, leading centralized exchanges (CEXs) such as Binance and Coinbase have covered almost all mainstream public blockchains. For ordinary users, the easiest and most familiar way to transfer assets from Ethereum to Coinbase is to first deposit the assets into a CEX (such as the Ethereum network), and then withdraw them to a wallet (such as the Coinbase network).

In short, CEX is the most convenient "cross-chain bridge", but this part of the activity is also outside the statistical scope of the cross-chain bridge chain.

Furthermore, the past prosperity of cross-chain bridge DAU was largely supported by airdrop hunters. After a large number of new protocols complete their token distribution, massive amounts of Sybil addresses and short-term speculative traffic withdraw. DappRadar research points out that post-airdrop retention rates have always been a weakness of new protocols, with their activity falling back to about 20% to 40% of pre-airdrop levels on average within a few weeks.

In addition, with the optimization of the project's anti-Symania algorithm, meaningless interactions have been greatly reduced, the inflated DAU data has been squeezed out, and the protocol's utility has returned to the real needs.

The new battleground for cross-chain bridges is entering the B2B infrastructure phase.

The business model of cross-chain bridges is also being restructured. Leading protocols have shifted their business focus from C-end traffic to B-end infrastructure.

The main players in cross-chain transactions are shifting from retail investors to institutions. In 2025, Fireblocks processed over $6 trillion in stablecoin transactions, averaging $200 billion per month. Most of these transactions are completed within enterprise-grade wallets via cross-chain communication standards.

Institutional-level cross-chain transactions are characterized by high transaction amounts and low daily active users (DAU): a single cross-chain transaction from an institutional address can be equivalent to the funds of 100,000 retail addresses.

Therefore, measuring the prosperity of cross-chain bridges solely by DAU may no longer be appropriate.

It is worth noting that the cross-chain ecosystem is forming a three-layer architecture with a clear division of labor.

1. Rails layer: Such as Circle CCTP, LayerZero OFT, and Wormhole NTT. They are low-level message handlers, similar to the TCP/IP protocol.
2. Orchestration layers: such as Across, Eco Route, and LiFi, are responsible for route optimization and risk management.
3. Application layer (Apps): Such as MetaMask, Coinbase and various financial aggregators, which handle all user DAU.

In this layered architecture, all DAU is stored in the application layer. A single click by a user in the application layer frontend will invoke the API of the orchestration layer, and finally be transmitted via the track layer.

Orbit layer protocols typically charge based on the number of calls or value. For them, DAU is no longer a valid KPI; system throughput and value capture capability are.

The so-called DAU loss is actually flowing to a more seamless and efficient backend.

While the web-based front-end of cross-chain bridges is being phased out, the vitality of the cross-chain ecosystem is quietly growing at the code level.