cryptonews

  DeFi's explosive growth has fractured liquidity and user experience across dozens of blockchains. For all the promise of composability and permissionless finance, practical obstacles persist: siloed rollups, fragmented liquidity pools, and user friction moving assets between chains.   Anyswap   was built to solve these problems, pioneering mechanisms that enabled users and protocols to move value and messages between otherwise incompatible blockchains. Even as new interoperability solutions have appeared in 2026—Cosmos IBC, Polkadot XCM, LayerZero, and chain abstraction layers—bridges remain a core piece of the DeFi infrastructure. This guide explains how Anyswap worked, why bridges are still necessary, the trade-offs of different interoperability models, and what the next phase of cross-chain DeFi will look like. By the end, you'll understand why cross-chain bridges are still required, the lessons learned from Anyswap's rise and collapse, and how modern interoperabilit...