The transfer of value between blockchains is currently largely done through a miniature group of centralized intermediaries, despite cryptocurrencies’ longstanding claims of decentralization.

Michael Steuer, president and chief technology officer at Casper Network, described this vigorous as a structural result of the industry’s approach to interoperability and user experience.

With a background spanning mobile gaming, enterprise software and the early development of blockchain technology, Steuer approaches the industry problem of interoperability as a question about how real users interact with the technology.

“For some reason, in crypto, it’s completely acceptable to ask users to care about things they would never think about in the real world,” Cointelegraph said.

Moving value between chains requires investors to understand how bridges work or rely on centralized players to reintroduce the risks associated with cryptocurrencies that it is intended to eliminate, Steuer said. As a result, interoperability has been relegated to a miniature number of intermediaries.

The Ideological Failure of UX Crypto

For most users, interacting with cryptocurrencies still requires an understanding of infrastructure that would be unseen in almost any other consumer technology.

Transferring value often means selecting a network, confirming wallet compatibility, checking bridge support, and settling fees and delays along the way.

Steuer said these expectations normalized as the industry grew around early adopters who were willing to tolerate friction.

“We have to think not only about early adopters and what is acceptable to them, but what is acceptable to your mom, your dad and your neighbor,” Steuer said. “If this is going to be a mass-market technology, we can’t expect everyone to think like cryptocurrency natives think.”

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In established payment systems, users make a elementary choice, such as paying by cash or card, while routing and billing are handled in the background. The buyer does not decide how the transaction proceeds between banks or networks, and most errors can be reversed.

In cryptocurrencies, the stakes are higher. Major exchanges warn that assets sent over the wrong network – for example, sending tokens on Solana instead of Ethereum – could be permanently lost.

When resources need to move between blockchains, bridges often become the default path. These bridges have evolved into critical infrastructure for interoperability, placing a miniature number of intermediaries at the center of the flow of value on blockchains.

Bridges are also one of the most sensitive parts of the cryptocurrency stack because they hold enormous pools of locked assets. Hackers have repeatedly attacked cross-chain bridges, resulting in some of the largest losses in cryptocurrency history. Chain jumping has also become an increasingly popular method for threat actors to launder money.

Centralized gatekeepers control interoperability

Bridges function as a 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 store resources themselves, but authorize which cross-chain messages are recognized in target contracts and are eligible for execution.

“Today, interoperability is effectively centrally controlled by a handful of players such as Chainlink, LayerZero and Axelar,” Steuer said. “They build and deploy their own cross-chain interfaces, decide which protocols are enabled, and ultimately control who has access and who does not.”

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Steuer said the problem is not that such systems exist, but that they have become inevitable. When a miniature number of providers control how blockchains communicate, interoperability begins to resemble the same centralized bottlenecks that crypto was designed to avoid.

He argued that this concentration limits the number of participants by making cross-chain activity dependent on infrastructure operating outside the control of the core networks themselves.

At the same time, concentration is partly the result of technical reality. Blockchains operate under different security assumptions, consensus models, and runtime environments, making native interoperability complex to implement.

Messaging and verification layers have emerged to solve this coordination problem by providing a common mechanism for validating events across chains in the absence of common standards.

Cryptocurrency fragmentation and centralized interoperability fuel tribalism

The consequences of fragmented interoperability extend beyond infrastructure and into culture.

When users are forced to pay attention to what network they are on, what wallet they apply and what tools handle their assets, loyalty to specific networks becomes an identity.

“You see it in the XRP army, the Bitcoin maximalists and the Ethereum crowd,” Steuer said. “This kind of tribalism doesn’t happen because users want it to. It happens because systems force people to choose sides.”

Networks compete as closed ecosystems, not as interchangeable elements of a broader system.

Steuer said this tribalism is the result of users engaging with specific networks in order to participate at all. When resources, applications and communities are connected in specific chains, interoperability becomes a competitive weapon.

These dynamics make it complex to design infrastructure that works universally, he said. Protocols are incentivized to protect their own ecosystems, not to reduce friction between them, even if this would benefit users.

Until blockchains can interact without compromising users’ access 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, utility, and power are concentrated elsewhere, while reinforcing centralized infrastructure and tribal divisions.

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