Moving value across blockchains is now largely mediated by a small group of centralized intermediaries despite crypto’s long-standing claims of decentralization.
Michael Steuer, president and chief technology officer of Casper Network, framed this dynamic as a structural outcome of the industry’s approach to interoperability and user experience.
With a background spanning mobile gaming, enterprise software and early blockchain development, Steuer approaches the industry’s interoperability problem as a question of how real users interact with technology.
“For some reason, in crypto, it’s perfectly acceptable to ask users to care about things they would never think about in the real world,” he told Cointelegraph.
Moving value across chains requires investors to understand how bridges work or rely on centralized players that reintroduce risks crypto set out to eliminate, Steuer said. As a result, interoperability has been pushed into the hands of a small number of intermediaries.
Crypto’s ideological UX failure
For most users, interacting with crypto still requires an understanding of infrastructure that would be invisible in almost any other consumer technology.
Moving value often means choosing a network, confirming wallet compatibility, checking bridge support and accounting for fees and delays along the way.
Steuer said this expectation became normalized as the industry grew around early adopters who were willing to tolerate friction.
“We have to think beyond the early adopter and what’s acceptable to them to what’s acceptable to your mom, your dad and your neighbor,” Steuer said. “If this is supposed to be mass-market technology, we can’t expect everyone to think the way crypto natives do.”
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In traditional payment systems, users make a simple choice, such as paying with cash or a card, while routing and settlement are handled in the background. A shopper does not decide how a transaction moves between banks or networks, and most errors can be reversed.
The stakes are higher in crypto. Major exchanges warn that assets sent over the wrong network — for example, sending tokens on Solana instead of Ethereum — may become permanently lost.
When assets need to move between blockchains, bridges often become the default path. Those bridges have evolved into critical infrastructure for interoperability, placing a small number of intermediaries at the center of how value moves across blockchains.
Bridges are also among the most fragile parts of the crypto stack, as they hold large pools of locked assets. Cross-chain bridges have been repeatedly targeted by hackers, accounting for some of the largest losses in crypto history. Chain hopping via bridges has also become a rising money laundering method by threat actors.
Centralized gatekeepers control interoperability
Bridges function as the user-facing interoperability layer, while at the infrastructure level, messaging and verification systems mediate cross-chain communication. Some mechanism must still determine whether a cross-chain transfer or message is valid and sufficiently finalized before it can be acted upon on the destination network.
These systems typically do not custody assets themselves, but they authorize which cross-chain messages are recognized by destination contracts and eligible for execution.
“Interoperability today is effectively centrally controlled by a handful of players like Chainlink, LayerZero and Axelar,” Steuer said. “They build and deploy their own cross-chain interfaces, decide which protocols are enabled and, ultimately, gatekeep who has access and who doesn’t.”
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Steuer said the issue is not that these systems exist, but that they have become unavoidable. When a small number of providers control how blockchains communicate, interoperability begins to resemble the same centralized chokepoints crypto was designed to avoid.
He argued that this concentration limits who can participate, making cross-chain activity dependent on infrastructure that operates outside the control of the underlying networks themselves.
At the same time, the concentration is partly a product of technical reality. Blockchains operate under different security assumptions, consensus models and execution environments, making native interoperability difficult to implement.
Messaging and verification layers emerged to solve that coordination problem, providing a shared mechanism for validating cross-chain events in the absence of common standards.
Crypto fragmentation and centralized interoperability fuel tribalism
The consequences of fragmented interoperability extend beyond infrastructure and into culture.
When users are forced to care about which network they are on, which wallet they use and which tools support their assets, loyalty to specific chains hardens into identity.
“You see this with the XRP army, the Bitcoin maximalists, the Ethereum crowd,” Steuer said. “That kind of tribalism doesn’t happen because users want it. It happens because the systems force people to choose sides.”
Networks compete as closed ecosystems rather than as interchangeable components of a broader system.
Steuer said that this tribalism is the result of users committing to specific networks in order to participate at all. Once assets, applications and communities are locked into particular chains, interoperability becomes a competitive weapon.
That dynamic makes it harder to design infrastructure that works universally, he said. Protocols are incentivized to protect their own ecosystems rather than reduce friction across them, even when doing so would benefit users.
Until blockchains can interact without exposing users to networks, wallets and bridges, Steuer said the industry will continue to reproduce the same fragmentation it set out to eliminate. Today, decentralization exists at the protocol level, but coordination, usability and power concentrate elsewhere, simultaneously reinforcing centralized infrastructure and tribal divisions.
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