Something that’s not talked about enough in the cross-chain space is the vendor-lock imposed by certain cross-chain interop providers Whether that’s an exclusivity agreement for all current and future tokens issued on a particular platform that makes switching impossible Or the integration involving vendor-specific code to be injected into the token’s smart contract making it difficult to switch to alternative providers in the future (full token migration or inefficient wrapping/fragmentation) Tokens that integrate Chainlink CCIP and adopt the Cross-Chain Token (CCT) standard to make their token natively cross-chain transferable avoid these issues as there is zero vendor lock-in CCTs are token-logic agnostic, meaning any existing ERC20 token can be turned into a CCT by its issuer using pre-audited token pool contracts (e.g., burn-and-mint), or can create/deploy a custom token pool for non-ERC20/custom tokens Importantly, CCTs do not require token developers to inherit any CCIP-specific code within their token’s smart contract, they can grant burn/mint privileges using existing standard functions to CCIP and revoke this access at any time (and be left with zero residual CCIP code in their token) Token issuers also own all deployments of their token contracts and associated token pools across all chains, providing unlimited control and flexibility Cross-chain security isn’t just scoped to the quality and robustness of the cross-chain network itself, albeit important, but having the freedom to seamlessly switch at any time should trouble arise with the current interop provider