(With existing solutions and why they suck)
| Pain Point | What It Looks Like Today |
|---|---|
| Capital inefficiency | Vaults rely on proof of fills or manual swaps. Capital sits idle till certain conditions are achieved or need to rely on support of market makers to upfront the liquidity. |
| Limited Route Coverage | Even though there is liquidity across the chains routes are a lot of times unavailable between blue chip ecosystems. |
Non-EVM ↔ non-EVM is basically broken. | | Execution Drag | Arbitrage and NFT mints expire before funds arrive. It takes multiple clicks and multiple seconds to safely bridge your fund across and use them in apps, which is unacceptable when speed is truly the alpha.
Low speed = High slippage | | Onboarding Friction Paradox | Apps require specific chains/tokens (like USDC on Polymarket), while users hold other assets and don’t want forced bridging/swaps - resulting in drop-offs at signup and first transaction. |
Existing “big bridges” aren’t it.
LayerZero, Wormhole, Axelar are all fine tech, but built for message-passing, not market flow.
Current bridges don’t really align well with ICM apps who want to let users participate from any token or any chain, this is still a 3-5 step process and users still have to onboard to these apps through assets which are accepted on apps, not assets they would like to hold.
Bridges do patch connectivity, but they also leave capital efficiency, route depth, UX speed and user incentives on the table.
If we’re serious about internet-scale markets, we can’t just throw more bridges at the problem. We need a unified liquidity layer which lets apps and users jump capital between chains instantly, while LPs stay risk-hedged, and capital keeps working for LPs every millisecond it exists.