Author: Hart Lambur, Co-founder of Risk Labs
DeFi is built on composability, but this characteristic is disintegrating. With the surge of new public chains, liquidity is becoming increasingly fragmented, and the incentive effects are continuously weakening. The once unified shared environment has split into dozens of data islands. While DeFi has not perished, its core advantages may be lost without the infrastructure to connect these environments.
Liquidity fragmentation is becoming a key scalability risk for DeFi. Although multi-chain expansion is a natural solution to Ethereum's scalability bottleneck, it has given rise to a new category of problems. The future of multi-chain, whether it strengthens or weakens DeFi, will ultimately depend on infrastructure rather than ideology.
Liquidity fragmentation is the core failure mode of DeFi protocols.
DeFi protocols rely on deeply composable liquidity: a shared asset pool available for lending, exchanging, and integrating into strategies. However, this premise has collapsed in a multi-chain world. Liquidity is now dispersed across dozens of layer one networks, Rollups, and application chains—Aave is deployed on 17 chains, and Pendle covers 11 chains. These deployments have value in themselves, but the liquidity they capture is limited to single-chain environments, making cross-chain calls difficult.
This fragmentation leads to fundamental inefficiencies: insufficient market depth, increased slippage, and diminished user and protocol incentives. When the density of relied-upon liquidity decreases, even the most sophisticated economic models can fail. Protocols that run smoothly on the Ethereum mainnet struggle to replicate the same effects on other chains—not due to model flaws, but because the operating environment has changed.
While the multi-chain transition is an inevitable path for scalability, failing to achieve cross-chain composability simulations may undermine the foundations of DeFi's success.
User experience barriers in multi-chain are not the crux of the issue.
Current discussions focus heavily on user experience barriers: switching wallets, acquiring Gas tokens, and navigating cross-chain bridge interfaces. Beneath these surface issues lies the absence of a unified execution layer.
When users perform basic cross-chain operations, they often face problems such as interface confusion, price fragmentation, and uncertain outcomes. Although recent "exchange + cross-chain" integration solutions have emerged, liquidity fragmentation and routing inefficiencies still persist. Most systems rely on independent liquidity pools for each chain, leading to duplicated incentives and routing limitations. Even if the front-end experience is unified, the back-end remains fragmented—resulting in low capital efficiency and difficulty in composability.
If liquidity cannot freely cross chains, or if strategy combinations require frequent bridging, encapsulation, and multi-application interactions, DeFi will struggle to achieve substantial scalability. Solvers simulate synchrony, freeing users from these troubles.
Blockchains were not designed for synchronous operation. We do not need to wait for native cross-chain atomic operation infrastructure; we can achieve this through technical simulation—this is precisely the value of solvers. These specialized nodes use their own capital and logic to represent users in executing fragmented operations. Users only need to declare their intent (exchange, deposit, interact), and the solver automatically completes the cross-chain execution, hiding the underlying complexity.
Intent-based infrastructure achieves interoperability rather than forced uniformity.
Intent is not just an abstract layer; it changes the design paradigm of liquidity, composability, and execution. The ERC-7683 standard specifies the expression and execution of cross-chain intent, enabling "invisible bridging": users can complete cross-chain exchanges, deposits, or interactions with a single click, even connecting previously incompatible ecosystems.
Solana users can directly exchange to the Arbitrum vault, and liquidity from the BNB Chain can now interoperate with Ethereum's native standards for the first time. Strategies become portable, and protocols achieve interoperability. The result is not absolute uniformity but rather a more resilient differentiated collaboration.
The intent mechanism does not force each chain to adopt the same standards; instead, it allows users to define outcomes, executed by solvers across ecosystems—activating global liquidity while retaining local advantages. It does not eliminate multi-chain complexity but establishes alternative pathways.
Multi-chain is no longer a theoretical concept but the living environment of DeFi. Unless the composability issue is resolved at the infrastructure level, DeFi may struggle to scale synchronously. The risk lies not in a sudden collapse but in a slow erosion: liquidity continues to dilute, incentives gradually fail, and cross-chain functionality diminishes. Solver infrastructure provides a breakthrough—not through forced uniformity, but by simulating synchronous experiences across fragmented chains. Only in this way can we safeguard the foundation of DeFi and embark on the next stage of evolution.
Author: Hart Lambur, Co-founder of Risk Labs.
Related: Bitcoin (BTC) miners sued in U.S. court over cryptographic patents.
This article is for general reference only and should not be considered legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Original article: “The multi-chain future may first destroy DeFi, and then save it”
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