Opinion by: Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs.
Decentralized finance or DEFI is based on synthetic nature, but synthetic nature is destroying. As new chains reproduce, liquidity fragments and incentives are weakened.
What used to be a shared environment has split into dozens of isolated markets. defi Not dead yet, but without the infrastructure that connects these environments, it may lose the functionality that makes it powerful.
Liquidity rupture has become a central scalability risk for Defi. While scaling to multiple chains is a natural response to Ethereum’s scalability limitations, it creates new problems.
Infrastructure rather than ideology will determine whether multi-chain will strengthen or weaken the category in the future.
Scattered liquidity is the core failure mode of Defi
The DEFI protocol relies on deep, composable liquidity: a pool of shared assets that can be borrowed, exchanged and layered into policies.
However, in multiple worlds, this assumption no longer exists. Now liquidity is distributed in dozens of L1s, summaries and applications. AAVE is deployed on 17 chains; Pendle is on 11.
These deployments are powerful in themselves, but the liquidity they capture is chain-specific and is often inaccessible outside the environment in which they are stored.
this dispersion Create basic inefficiencies: thinner markets, higher slips and weaker user and protocol incentives. Even the best economic model for design begins to collapse when the liquidity they rely on is no longer dense. Now, protocols that work seamlessly on the Ethereum mainnet are now hard to deliver the same results elsewhere – not because their models are flawed, but because the context they are in has changed.
To zoom requires turning to multi-key. However, without a cross-chain merging approach, it could undermine the basis for Defi’s success.
Multi-key UX friction is not a root problem
Much of the attention in multi-key Fefi focuses on UX friction: Switch wallets, get gas tokens and jump through the bridge UI (user interface). These are surface-level symptoms of a deeper problem: the lack of a unified executive layer.
Try to execute a basic user Cross Chain Actions often encounter inconsistent interfaces, pricing fragments and uncertain results. There has been some progress in exchange and bridge solutions in recent months, but the liquidity split and inefficient routes remain.
Most of these systems rely on isolated liquidity pools for each chain, with repeated incentives and limited routing paths. Even if the front end feels unified, the back end is still dispersed – capital is inefficient and difficult to form.
If liquidity cannot easily cross-chain or constituent policies require bridging, packaging, or interaction with multiple applications, then DEFI will not be able to scale meaningfully. The solver follows the synchronization, so the user does not have to do so.
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Blockchain is not designed for synchronous operations. There is no native method to perform a single atomic action across chains. We don’t need to wait for the sync infrastructure. We can imitate it.
This is the solution coming in. Solvers are mature participants who use their capital and logic to join fragmentary actions on behalf of users. The user simply expresses the intent – exchange, deposit, interaction – the solver executes across chains to implement it, abstracting the complexity below it.
Intent-based infrastructure addresses interoperability rather than mergers
Intent is more than just an abstraction layer: they change the way we design liquidity, synthesize, and execute.
ERC-7683 Standardize how these cross-chain intentions are expressed and implemented. It enables invisible bridging: one-click interchange, sediment or interactions that move across a chain without the need for users to manage complexity – even between ecosystems not designed for interoperability.
Users on Solana can swap the arbitration library into a library. Liquidity can be in and out BNB ChainHistorically, it originated from the local ether standard. The strategy becomes portable. The protocol becomes interoperable.
The result is not perfect unity, but something more resilient: they work together despite their differences.
Intent allows users to define the results, while the solver executes across ecosystems, rather than forcing each chain to adopt the same standards, it maintains local advantages while achieving global liquidity. They do not remove polyhedral complexity. They route around it.
Many chapters are no longer theoretical. This is the environment in which Defi works today. Unless we solve the merger at the infrastructure layer, DEFI may not scale with it.
Risk is not a dramatic collapse. It’s slow erosion: thinner liquidity, weaker incentives and less stuff that works across chains.
Solver infrastructure provides a way out – not by forcing unity, but by imitating synchronous experiences in fragmented chains. This is how we keep what makes Defi powerful in the first place and how we unlock what will happen next.
Opinion by: Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be considered legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent Cointelegraph’s views and opinions.
