Crypto: Latest Bridges Are Crypto’s Next Ftx Waiting To Happen 2026
Cross-chain bridges concentrate risk and centralize trust, creating vulnerabilities that could trigger a systemic crypto crisis under stressed market conditions.
Opinion by: Kadan Stadelmann, chief technology officer of Komodo Platform
Crypto didn’t get wrecked by regulators or some shadowy conspiracy. The industry did this to itself. It handed control of cross-chain liquidity to a handful of intermediaries, who it called “bridges,” wrapped assets in slick tickers, and pretended that was decentralization.
Every time one of these house-of-cards systems collapses, billions vanish, and the rest of the industry shrugs, as if these were isolated accidents instead of warning sirens blaring across the ecosystem.
Multichain’s collapse was a mess. The Ronin hack was one of the biggest crypto heists in history. More than $2.8 billion has been drained through bridge exploits to date, accounting for roughly 40% of all funds stolen in Web3.
These aren’t freak accidents; they’re the predictable result of trusting centralized choke points and calling them “innovation.”
Wrapped assets were sold as a way to connect fragmented ecosystems. In practice, they concentrated risk into a few validators, custodians or multisig groups. Bridges rely on intermediary chains, external consensus layers or a small number of operators to maintain coherence.
That’s not decentralized, and it’s even something Vitalik Buterin has discussed at length. It’s a centralized infrastructure wearing a mask. One breach, one compromised key, one exploit in a validator set, and the entire system can implode. The trust assumptions are huge, but most people barely understand them.
The consequences ripple out far beyond the bridge itself. When one of these systems fails, it doesn’t just affect a single token. Lending markets seize up, liquidity dries out, and entire decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystems lose their backbone overnight.
Consider how much DeFi relies on wrapped Bitcoin (BTC), wrapped Ether (ETH) or wrapped stablecoins on non-native chains. These wrapped assets are treated like the real thing. Protocols are built upon them. Behind the scenes, they’re IOUs backed by a fragile set of actors who have repeatedly shown they can fail.
Source: CoinTelegraph
