Unifying Ethereum: The Path to Seamless Crosschain Interoperability

The crypto industry is currently experiencing growing pains. While the broader web3 ecosystem has rapidly expanded into a trillion-dollar economy, in recent years, this growth has introduced a critical challenge: interoperability. 

The truth about the DeFi experience today is that users often encounter unnecessary hurdles when moving assets across chains. This is because each blockchain operates with its architecture, security framework, and transaction models, all of which create a frustrating user experience.

Crosschain interoperability could be the key to solving this, but achieving true interoperability is complex. 

In this article, we’ll explore the current challenges, promising solutions, and future possibilities for crosschain interoperability.

Imagine a country where every city has a different currency, language, and governance system – without an intentional plan for interconnectivity across those cities.

The Ethereum ecosystem is somewhat like that, and the broader crypto industry is very much like that. The crypto industry is a multichain world where each blockchain functions in isolation, with its own rules, protocols, and infrastructure, making connectivity cumbersome and inefficient.

This fragmentation forces users to navigate an ecosystem of siloed networks with inefficiencies, redundancies, and roadblocks. To complete the simplest crosschain actions, users must juggle multiple wallet accounts, switch back and forth between chains, and pay gas fees numerous times.

There is a massive demand for crosschain interoperability. In the last month, the total bridging volume across all bridges was about $19.34B. In 2024, Across alone recorded $11.6B in bridged volumes—a nearly 4x growth from 2023.

Web3 users are active participants in what is supposed to be a permissionless ecosystem. Fragmentation creates friction that, in many cases, is indistinguishable from permissioned access. And that’s partly why almost $20B flowed across crypto bridges last month. 

More so, fragmentation frustrates users and stifles innovation. Developers are stuck building for isolated chains instead of the broader web3 ecosystem, making it harder to create dApps that tap into liquidity across networks. These inefficiencies slow adoption and keep many potential participants on the sidelines.

For web3 to realize its full potential, crosschain interoperability must address these inefficiencies, enabling users to move assets, data, and value with the same ease they experience when using traditional apps. Without this connective tissue, web3 risks becoming an ecosystem of isolated islands rather than a truly decentralized multiverse.

While the demand for crosschain interoperability is clear, traditional bridging solutions have struggled with the competing requirements of security, speed, and user experience. Each approach typically sacrifices one for the others, creating an inconsistent array of solutions that still leave the ecosystem fragmented.

Intents-based architecture has emerged as the most promising standard for unifying Ethereum. Intents, as specified in the ERC-7683 standard co-authored by Across and Uniswap Labs, allows web3 apps to express complex multi-step crosschain transactions as a single user request that is executed by a shared network of relayers.

Rather than forcing users to navigate the complexities of multiple chains, Intents flip the paradigm by allowing users to express what they want to accomplish, not how they want to accomplish it.

This shift is significant because it moves the complexity of crosschain interactions from the user to the protocol level. Instead of bridging being a separate, manual step that users must take, Intents make crosschain interactions feel like single-chain experiences.

Intents allow users to declare actions—such as token swaps, DeFi deposits, or governance votes—across different chains.

At its core, an Intent is a user's desired outcome, not the specific steps to reach that outcome. When a user expresses an intent—such as "I want to swap ETH on Arbitrum for USDC on Optimism"—they're specifying their end goal without worrying about the mechanics involved.

Unlike traditional crosschain transaction processes that require users to take multiple manual steps, sign several transactions, and pay gas fees each step of the way, Intents simplify the process by focusing on what users want to achieve rather than how they achieve it.

Here's how the Intents model works in practice:

The beauty of Intents lies in their ability to abstract away complexity. Users don't need to understand the underlying mechanics—they simply express what they want, and the system handles the rest. This architecture results in faster execution times.

With Intents, Across delivers the fastest bridging times in the industry with 2-second bridging, while we often deliver 1-second L2-to-L2 fills. For additional context, about 85% of bridge transfers are L2-to-L2 transactions. With 2-second bridging and a median fee of $0.04, Across provides users with the ideal combination of speed and cost.

In addition to breaking down asset and data silos, crosschain interoperability can also be a catalyst for unlocking new economic opportunities in web3. Users face high fees, long wait times, and complex multi-step processes to move assets between networks. This inefficiency slows the flow of liquidity, hinders innovation, and discourages broader adoption.

Crosschain interoperability enables protocols to leverage liquidity, data, and functionality across networks, fostering new use cases. YieldNest’s integration with Across demonstrates this in action, offering users one-click crosschain staking—a previously cumbersome process now made simple. Such innovations wouldn’t be possible without Intents-based infrastructure.

Importantly, we’ve only just begun to see the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's possible in crosschain interoperability. Imagine DeFi protocols that can tap into liquidity from multiple networks to offer enhanced lending and trading opportunities or NFT marketplaces that can enable seamless purchases across chains without users even having to navigate the underlying complexity.

For users, faster settlement times empower more sophisticated trading strategies, while reduced fees and a simpler UX lower barriers to entry, increasing engagement on dApps throughout web3. For developers, Intents-based architectures remove the need to build chain-specific solutions, reducing time to market and encouraging innovation.

By bridging fragmented ecosystems and enabling composability, crosschain interoperability can and is driving economic efficiency and new possibilities for growth and innovation onchain.

The heart of the interoperability crisis within the Ethereum ecosystem is the longstanding struggle with fragmented approaches to crosschain transactions. With initiatives like ERC-7683 standardizing how Intents are expressed, we're beginning to see a path toward true unification—where Ethereum and its L2s function not as separate islands but as a cohesive, interconnected network.

ERC-7683 is already gaining momentum with broad-based adoption. Uniswap has integrated Across’s Intents-based infrastructure into its interface and wallet, enabling millions of users to perform seamless crosschain transactions without switching networks or wallets.

Additionally, ERC-7683 is now supported by more than 50 major projects, including Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Offchain Labs, Polygon, and ZKsync, among others, and Vitalik has endorsed the standard, This growing industry collaboration underscores a clear shift toward interoperability. It highlights the demand for more efficient, reliable crosschain solutions.

Of course, ERC-7683 is just one piece of the larger standardization movement in web3. Other notable advancements include:

These standards are paving the way for the next wave of blockchain innovation by giving users more control and flexibility in how they interact with the blockchain, especially in a crosschain context. They also make crosschain interactions as smooth and frictionless as possible, hiding the underlying complexities from the user.

They’re breaking down silos, improving user experiences, and making markets more efficient by enabling broader networks and easier liquidity sharing across chains.

The impact of these efforts is already visible. With millions of users now benefiting from ERC-7683-powered integrations and many projects adopting other emerging standards, standards are setting the foundation for the next wave of blockchain innovation.

The collective vision for interoperability isn’t some distant, speculative horizon. Interoperability is already taking shape today through emerging security models, evolving economic implications, and standardization, which foster a clear path toward compliance.

With Intents-based standards gaining widespread traction and unified filler networks becoming a reality, seamless 1-click crosschain actions are starting to rival the simplicity of single-chain interactions. The era of bridging as a clunky, disconnected user action is ending.

Across is the leading crosschain interoperability protocol built to unify Ethereum. Powered by Intents, Across enables the fastest and cheapest way to transfer value while delivering superior security tradeoffs compared to traditional bridge designs. Across delivers 2-second bridging directly to users and empowers developers to build native seamless crosschain experiences into their dApps.

Our current multichain paradigm marks a turning point. As more protocols adopt Intents-based standards, we're seeing the foundation of a truly interconnected blockchain ecosystem where web3's next phase will be defined by simplicity, speed, and scalability.

Interested in seeing Intents in action? Check out our case study in building crosschain NFT experiences.