Cross-chain bridges have been the single most exploited category of infrastructure in digital assets, and the reason is structural: most rely on a committee attesting that something happened elsewhere.
That design is being replaced. Newer bridges verify the source chain's consensus directly using light-client proofs, reducing trust to the security of the chains themselves.
The obstacle has been cost. Verifying one chain's consensus inside another's virtual machine was prohibitively expensive until succinct proofs made the verification step cheap.
Teams migrating existing bridges face a harder problem than teams starting fresh, because liquidity and integrations are tied to contracts that cannot simply be swapped.
Security researchers welcomed the direction while noting that light clients move risk rather than remove it: a bug in proof verification is as fatal as a compromised committee.
