Opinion of: Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs.
Decentralized finance, or DEFI, is built on composability, but composibility breaks. As new chains proliferate, liquidity fragments and incentives are weakening.
What was once a single shared environment separated into dozens of partitioned markets. Defi is not dead, but without the infrastructure that connects these environments, he can lose what made him powerful.
Fractured liquidity becomes the central risk of scalability of DEFI. Although the expansion to several channels was a natural response to the scalability limits of Ethereum, he created a new class of problems.
The infrastructure, and not ideology, will determine whether the future Multichain strengthens or weakens the category.
Fragmented liquidity is the default mode
The DEFI protocols are based on deep and composable liquidity: a shared pool of assets that can be borrowed, exchanged and superimposed on strategies.
In a multi -hole world, however, this hypothesis no longer holds. Liquidity is now distributed over dozens of L1, Rollups and Appchains. Aave is deployed on 17 channels; Pendle on 11.
These deployments are powerful alone, but the liquidity they capture is specific to the chain and often inaccessible outside the environment where it is deposited.
This fragmentation creates fundamental ineffectiveness: finer markets, higher shift and lower incentives on users and protocol. Even the best designed economic models are starting to break down when the liquidity on which they depend are no longer dense. Protocols that have worked transparently on Ethereum Mainnet now find it difficult to provide the same results elsewhere – not because their models are defective, but because the context in which they operate has changed.
The transition to Multichain was necessary for scaling. But without a means of imitating composibility through the chains, it risks undermining the very foundations of the success of DEFI.
Multichain UX friction is not the root problem
A large part of the attention in Multichain DEFI has been concentrated on the UX friction: wallet switching, acquisition of gas tokens and jumping in bridge uis (user interfaces). These are symptoms at the surface of a deeper problem: the absence of a layer of unified execution.
Users who try to perform even basic crosschain actions often meet incoherent interfaces, fragmented prices and uncertain results. In recent months, some progress has been made with exchange and bridge solutions, but the fragmentation of liquidity and the ineffectiveness of routing persist.
Most of these systems are based on liquidity pools isolated by chain, with double incentives and limited routing paths. Even if the front feels unified, the back -end remains fragmented – the ineffective capital and difficult to compose.
If the liquidity cannot move easily through the chains or the composition of strategies requires bridges, packaging or interaction with several applications, then DEFI cannot evolve significantly. Solvents imitate synchrony, so users are not obliged.
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Blockchains are not designed to operate in synchronization. There is no native way to perform a single atomic action through the chains. We don’t need to wait for synchronous infrastructure. We can imitate him.
This is where the solvers come into play. Solvents are sophisticated actors who use their own capital and logic to join fragmented actions in the name of the user. A user simply expresses an intention – exchange, deposit, interact – and the solver runs through the chains to make it, abstraction of complexity below.
Infrastructure based on intentions resolves for interoperability, not consolidation
The intentions are more than a simple layer of abstraction: they move the way in which we conceive liquidity, composibility and execution.
ERC-7683 Standardized how these cross-intentions are expressed and made. It allows an invisible puncture: exchanges, deposits or interactions in one click that move through the chains without the user needing to manage the complexity – even between the ecosystems which were not designed to interoperate.
A user on Solana can escape in a safe on arbitrum. Liquidity can enter and get out of the BNB chain, historically partitioned from native Ethereum standards. The strategies become portable. Protocols become interoperable.
The result is not a perfect uniformity but something more resilient: systems that work together despite their differences.
Instead of forcing each chain to adopt the same standards, the intentions allow users to define the results while solvents run through ecosystems – preserving local forces while allowing global liquidity. They do not strive the complexity of the multicaine. They take place around him.
Multichain is no longer theoretical. It is the environment in which DEFI operates today. Unless we resolved composability to the infrastructure layer, DEFI cannot evolve with him.
Risk is not a dramatic collapse. It is a slow erosion: thinner liquidity, weaker incentives and less things that work between the chains.
The solver infrastructure offers an outcome – not by forcing uniformity but imitating the experience of synchrony through fragmented chains. This is how we preserve what made it powerful in the first place and how we unlock what comes next.
Opinion of: Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and must not be considered as legal or investment advice. The points of view, the thoughts and opinions expressed here are the only of the author and do not reflect or do not necessarily represent the opinions and opinions of Cointellegraph.
