Last night I couldn’t sleep again, so I casually went and did a cross-chain transfer. The more I moved, the more uneasy I felt. Others think that “IBC/message passing” is just moving tokens from A to B with a click—done. In reality, you’re placing trust in a whole chain of things: the source chain won’t rollback, the target chain won’t glitch out, the relayer/validator in the middle won’t mess around, the light client/proof logic won’t have loopholes, and—on top of that—the contract on the destination side shouldn’t be written to blow up… Put simply, the more links there are in the chain, the tighter my loss-cut (stop-loss) becomes; I’d rather go slower.

Recently, these new L1/L2s have started rolling out incentives again to pull in TVL. I can understand why old users curse “mine/put in–sell”; when you’re constantly hopping across chains, it’s lively, and when things go wrong, they’re even more lively. Anyway, for now when I cross-chain, I only do small trial amounts plus split batches. If I lose, I recognize it—I’ll do it like this for now.