Lately I’ve been looking into cross-chain bridges again, and the more I look, the more I feel that whether “you actually save on fees” really isn’t the point. The key is: who are you handing your money over to? Multi-sig sounds quite safe, but in the end it all comes down to whether those few people/keys are actually reliable. The same goes for oracles—if the layer that feeds the data gets skewed, then no matter how many confirmations you get, it just means you’ll have to slowly come to terms with reality… So for “waiting for confirmations,” I now understand it as giving yourself a window to spot something abnormal and retreat, not some sort of mystical thing to keep you safe.

By the way, I’ve also been seeing everyone complain about miner/validator income, MEV, and unfair ordering. Put simply, you think you’re being queued according to the rules, but it turns out someone cuts the line and charges you a toll. Cross-chain is even more absurd: with more people in the queue, there’s one more bridge administrator, one more data source, plus a whole bunch of relays—either on-chain or off-chain, they can trip you up at some point. Anyway, I’d rather spend a few extra bucks to take a route with better execution quality than try to save that little bit of gas, only to end up losing it all to slippage and “stuck waiting at the bridge.” It’s just annoying.