These past couple of days, people have been talking about testnet incentives and farming points and the like, and I couldn’t help but look into the common cross-chain routes everyone uses. To put it plainly: doing a cross-chain transfer isn’t “just press a button and you’re there.” There’s a whole stack of things you have to trust in the middle. Not to mention the security of the source chain and the destination chain themselves, the IBC/message-passing layer has to be trusted too—its light-client/verification logic can’t be written the wrong way. If you go the bridge route, then you also have to trust that the relayer/relay node is doing its job normally, that the bridge contract doesn’t have any weird upgrade permissions, and that the validators/multisig group won’t somehow make a slip one day. And don’t even get started on bridges with “emergency pause” and “replaceable validator sets” type switches—when everything’s fine, you treat it as if it doesn’t exist; but when something goes wrong, you suddenly realize you were actually trusting a team wallet all along. As for whether the mainnet will issue tokens—anyway, when I look at cross-chain tasks I see now, the very first thing I check is how big the trust assumptions are, and then I decide whether to throw my assets into the meat grinder just for a few points… (I know I’m a bit of a buzzkill, but I really can’t afford the tuition.)