Opinion: Hart Lambur, Co-founder of Risk Labs.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is built on composability, but this composability is breaking down. With the surge of new chains, liquidity is becoming fragmented, and incentives are weakening.
What was once a shared environment for the market has now split into dozens of isolated markets. DeFi is not dead, but without the infrastructure to connect these environments, it may lose its strong foundation.
Fragmented liquidity is becoming a core scalability risk for DeFi. While the expansion to multi-chain is a natural response to Ethereum's scalability limitations, it also brings a new class of problems.
Infrastructure, rather than ideology, will determine whether the future of multi-chain strengthens or weakens this category.
DeFi protocols rely on deep, composable liquidity: a shared pool of assets that can be borrowed, swapped, and embedded in strategies.
However, in a multi-chain world, this assumption no longer holds. Liquidity is now distributed across dozens of L1s, rollups, and application chains. Aave is deployed on 17 chains; Pendle on 11 chains.
These deployments are powerful in themselves, but the liquidity they capture is chain-specific and often inaccessible outside the environment in which it was deposited.
This fragmentation creates fundamental inefficiencies: markets thin out, slippage increases, and user and protocol incentives weaken. Even the best-designed economic models will begin to collapse when the liquidity they rely on is no longer dense. Protocols that run seamlessly on the Ethereum mainnet now struggle to achieve the same results elsewhere—not because their models are flawed, but because the environments in which they operate have changed.
The shift to multi-chain is necessary for scaling. But without a way to simulate composability across chains, it may undermine the foundation of DeFi's success.
Most of the focus on multi-chain DeFi is on user experience friction: switching wallets, acquiring gas tokens, and cross-bridge user interfaces. These are surface symptoms of deeper issues: a lack of a unified execution layer.
Users attempting to perform basic cross-chain operations often encounter inconsistent interfaces, fragmented pricing, and uncertain outcomes. In recent months, while some progress has been made on swapping and bridging solutions, liquidity fragmentation and routing inefficiencies persist.
Most of these systems rely on independent liquidity pools for each chain, with duplicated incentives and limited routing paths. Even if the front end feels unified, the back end remains fragmented—capital inefficient and difficult to compose.
If liquidity cannot move easily across chains, or if composable strategies require bridging, wrapping, or interacting with multiple applications, then DeFi cannot scale meaningfully. Solvers simulate synchrony so that users do not have to.
Blockchains are not designed for synchronous operations. There is no native way to execute a single atomic operation across chains. We do not need to wait for synchronous infrastructure. We can simulate it.
This is the role of solvers. Solvers are complex participants that connect fragmented operations for users using their own capital and logic. Users simply express an intent—swap, deposit, interact—and the solver executes it across chains, abstracting away the underlying complexity.
Intents are not just an abstract layer: they change the way we design liquidity, composability, and execution.
ERC-7683 standardizes the expression and implementation of these cross-chain intents. It enables invisible bridging: one-click swaps, deposits, or interactions that move across chains without users managing complexity—even between ecosystems not designed for interoperability.
Users on Solana can swap into a vault on Arbitrum. Liquidity can flow in and out of the BNB Chain, a chain historically isolated from Ethereum's native standards. Strategies become portable. Protocols become interoperable.
The result is not perfect unity, but greater resilience: systems can still work together despite differences.
Intents allow users to define outcomes, while solvers execute across ecosystems—achieving global liquidity while retaining local advantages. They do not erase the complexity of multi-chain; they bypass it.
Multi-chain is no longer theoretical. It is the environment in which DeFi operates today. Unless we solve the composability issue at the infrastructure layer, DeFi may struggle to scale accordingly.
The risk is not a dramatic collapse, but a slow erosion: liquidity thins, incentives weaken, and the number of cross-chain operations diminishes.
Solver infrastructure offers a way out—not through forced unification, but by simulating a synchronous experience across fragmented chains. This is how we preserve the original strengths of DeFi and unlock future developments.
Opinion: Hart Lambur, Co-founder of Risk Labs.
Related: Blockdaemon launches institutional-grade non-custodial staking and DeFi solutions
Original article: “The multi-chain future may kill decentralized finance (DeFi) before saving it”
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