What is a cross-chain bridge?

Blockchains cannot read each other's state, so moving value takes a bridge. The classic design locks a token on the source chain and mints a wrapped copy on the destination. Circle's CCTP burns native USDC instead and mints it fresh on the other side. No wrapper at all. Liquidity networks skip minting and let a market maker front you the funds on the destination chain, then collect on the source once your deposit lands.

Layer 2s have their own canonical bridges back to Ethereum. Withdrawing from an optimistic rollup such as Arbitrum through that bridge takes about a week, the window anyone has to dispute an invalid state. That wait is why fast third-party bridges have a business at all. Base cut its own wait to as little as a day in May 2026 by adding ZK and TEE proofs.

Some of crypto's worst hacks hit bridges. In March 2022 attackers got hold of five of the nine validator keys on the Ronin bridge behind Axie Infinity and walked off with more than $600 million. Weeks earlier, a signature-check bug in Wormhole let an attacker mint 120,000 wrapped ETH with no ETH behind it. A wrapped token is only as good as the bridge behind it.

Bridge flows double as a market signal. If $500 million of stablecoins crossed into one chain in a week (an invented figure), someone would have a plan for it. Sometimes DEX volume on that chain follows within days, and sometimes the money just sits in a yield program.

Also called: bridge, blockchain bridge.

Cashboard does not bridge assets, and it has no bridge volume view: DefiLlama serves that feed only on its paid API, so Market flows dropped the empty tab instead of filling in numbers. Its L2 capital tab shows the value secured on layer 2s from L2BEAT, split by how it arrived (the chain's own bridge, a third-party bridge, or issued on the layer 2). Stablecoin risk shows which chains hold most of each stablecoin's supply.

• Market flows
• Stablecoin risk

• Layer 2
• Stablecoin supply
• Finality
• Total value locked