ETH and BTC made big profits on intraday trades; those who entered ZEC aggressively at a few points also made big profits.

Just woke up and checked gas—ETH mainnet is congested again, but today I want to gripe about something else. I was chatting with some group members about cross-chain transfers yesterday and realized that many people have no idea what they’re actually trusting. IBC is indeed elegant, with light-client verification and no need to park a multisig there, but at the end of the day, you still have to trust that the Cosmos SDK has no bugs, that relayers won’t act maliciously, and that the target chain’s validator set hasn’t gone bad. Message passing sounds cool, but if that channel in the middle breaks or gets delayed, your assets end up stuck in midair, which isn’t much different from traditional bridges. Every bridge is now touting itself as “trustless,” but when you look closer, it’s either an economic-security assumption or optimistic verification—in any case, there’s always an element of gambling. I do gas arbitrage the same way: every time I move funds across chains, I think about whether I could withstand it if this bridge blew up today. Rate-cut expectations are wavering again, with the dollar and risk assets jumping around together, while on-chain funds flee in all directions, putting even more strain on bridges. I’ve even been too lazy to do airdrop interactions lately. That’s all for now—I’ll watch to see whether there’s an opportunity in relayer fees.