Recently, I’ve been looking into the IBC/message passing setup again. Basically, when it comes to cross-chain once and for all—who do you actually trust: the chain’s own finality, the light client/verification logic, whether the relayer(s) keep running diligently, and whether the other side’s module has any traps. People think that “using IBC means you don’t have to trust a bridge,” but in practice you still have to trust a whole stack of components—it’s just that the trust is distributed, and the parts that are verifiable are increased.

In the past couple of days, testnet incentives and point farming have been going through the roof, and the chat group is starting to speculate whether the mainnet will issue tokens… I’m actually a bit on guard. The more you “hard cross-chain for points,” the easier it is to overlook who you’re really handing your assets to. Anyway, before I cross-chain, I always ask myself one thing: if this system goes wrong, can I withstand the worst-case outcome? If I can, I’ll test with a small position; if not, I’ll just give up.