The future of cross-chain interoperability
Sylve explores how interoperability has become critical for infrastructure and what that means for blockchain security.
Cross-chain interoperability has spent years optimizing for speed and cost. This trade-off is reaching its limit. As interoperability becomes critical infrastructure, weak guarantees become a systemic risk.
During DevConnect 2025, at the Oracle Summit event by DeFiConnect, Sylve was part of a panel on the future of cross-chain interoperability. You can read his highlights below.
And if you'd prefer, here's the whole panel with Sylve, Philipp Zentner from Li.Fi, Prabal Banerjee from Avail, and Alon Muroch from SSV Labs, moderated by Krzysztof Urbanski from L2Beat!
Understanding the systemic risk of cross-chain interactions
Systems usually do not improve because people suddenly become more prudent. They improve after a shock.
The Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund collapse is a useful analogy. It was not one actor failing. That would have been manageable. Instead, the collapse was an occurence of one actor failing in a way that forces everyone else to react.
The equivalent in interoperability is not an individual user losing a transfer due to a risky bridge: we seem to be waiting for a failure that makes the entire space look fragile overnight.
In October 2025, a minting incident made this systemic risk concrete: an extremely large amount was mistakenly minted and then reverted by Paypal.
The problem is not the incident itself. It is the structure that allowed things to happen the way they did. Someone has the authority to mint and burn. If that authority is compromised, the supply integrity is compromised.
That is a different category than liquidity-bridge failures. It isn’t one pool being drained, which is bad enough on its own. It’s really that the asset’s issuance guarantees are no longer credible, which can collapse an entire system.
Interoperability only wins when it feels invisible
« Trust me » systems are often faster and cheaper because they do not pay for verifiability. The bill is deferred, not avoided.
In the short term, centralized interoperability can look good enough. But in the long term, when a failure happens, the cost shows up all at once: reputationally, politically, and economically.
On the other hand, interoperability should not be a product category that users think about. The real win for interoperability is when users don’t need to think about which chain they’re currently on. With solid interoperability, the guarantees are strong enough that failures are exceptional, not expected, and transfers are fast enough that you don’t have time to doubt their validity.
However, if interoperability becomes more proof-heavy over time, the bottleneck shifts to verification and throughput.
That is the direction Hyli is built for: fast DA, fast consensus, and native verification for multiple proof systems. At Hyli, we believe it’s the only way to solve the systemic risk around cross-chain interoperability.