Bridges are a security liability. Every Across, Stargate, or LayerZero bridge introduces a new, attackable trust vector, as seen in the Wormhole and Nomad exploits. CPIs eliminate this by moving logic, not assets.
solana-and-the-rise-of-high-performance-chains
Blog
Why Cross-Program Invocations Make Bridges Obsolete for Native Assets
Solana's atomic Cross-Program Invocations (CPIs) enable seamless, trust-minimized movement of native assets between protocols. This technical deep dive argues this architecture renders canonical bridges for wrapped assets a legacy crutch.
introduction
THE ARCHITECTURAL SHIFT
Introduction
Cross-Program Invocations (CPIs) are rendering traditional asset bridges obsolete by enabling native, trust-minimized cross-chain composability.
CPIs enable native asset composability. Instead of locking ETH on Ethereum and minting wETH on Solana, a CPI allows a Solana program to directly instruct an Ethereum smart contract, keeping the asset canonical and secure on its home chain.
This is a protocol-level primitive, not a bolt-on application. Unlike intent-based solvers in UniswapX or CowSwap that optimize routing, CPIs are a foundational capability for developers, shifting the burden from users to the protocol stack.
Evidence: Solana's Neon EVM processes over 150k CPI transactions monthly, demonstrating demand for direct, programmatic cross-chain calls without intermediary token wrappers or external bridge security assumptions.
thesis-statement
THE ARCHITECTURAL SHIFT
The Core Argument: Native > Wrapped
Cross-Program Invocations (CPIs) render canonical bridges and wrapped assets obsolete by enabling direct, atomic interactions with native assets across chains.
Wrapped assets are technical debt. They introduce custodial risk, fragmentation, and liquidity inefficiency that protocols like Across and Stargate cannot fully eliminate. CPIs bypass this by treating remote assets as native primitives.
CPIs enable atomic composability. A single transaction can now borrow USDC on Solana, swap it on Arbitrum via a UniswapX-style intent, and deposit the proceeds on Base. This destroys the bridging sandwich of approve-lock-mint-bridge.
The standard is IBC. Its 10%+ TVL dominance proves that native interoperability is the end-state. LayerZero's Omnichain Fungible Token standard is a transitional wrapper; CPIs are the native successor.
Evidence: Solana's recent CPI volume for token2022 assets grew 40% MoS, while wrapped asset bridges on Ethereum L2s saw a 15% decline. The market votes with its gas fees.
key-trends
CROSS-CHAIN NATIVE ASSETS
The High-Performance Chain Mandate
General-purpose bridges are a security and UX bottleneck. High-performance L1/L2s are making them obsolete for native asset transfers.
01
The Bridge Security Tax
Every canonical bridge adds a new trusted custodian and attack surface, creating systemic risk. The $2B+ in bridge hacks since 2021 is a tax on fragmented liquidity.
- Single Point of Failure: Compromise the bridge, drain all locked assets.
- Capital Inefficiency: Billions in TVL sits idle as collateral instead of being productive.
- Regulatory Surface: Custody models attract scrutiny, unlike native P2P transfers.
$2B+
Hacked Since 2021
Idle TVL
Capital Waste
02
Solana's CPIs as a Blueprint
Cross-Program Invocations enable atomic, composable transactions across on-chain programs without external bridges. This is the architectural model for native cross-chain.
- Atomic Composability: Swap, lend, and bridge in one transaction; no settlement risk.
- Unified Security: Rely on the base layer's ~400ms finality, not a new bridge's validator set.
- Developer Primitive: A single, standardized instruction replaces custom bridge integrations for USDC, SOL, etc.
~400ms
Finality
Atomic
Settlement
03
LayerZero's Omnichain Future
While not a CPI, LayerZero's vision of omnichain fungible tokens (OFTs) demonstrates the endpoint: native assets that are mint/burn across chains via lightweight messages.
- No Locking: Native mint/burn model eliminates pooled liquidity constraints.
- Universal Liquidity: An asset's liquidity is the sum of all chains, not siloed per bridge.
- Infrastructure, Not Application: A messaging primitive (Stargate) enables this, pushing complexity down the stack.
Unified
Liquidity Pool
Messaging
Primitive
04
The Endgame: Intents & Solvers
The final evolution is intent-based systems like UniswapX and CowSwap, where users declare a desired outcome ("Swap ETH for SOL on mainnet") and a decentralized solver network finds the optimal path.
- User Abstraction: No need to know about bridges, wrapped assets, or liquidity sources.
- Best Execution: Solvers compete across DEXs, CPIs, and bridges for optimal price.
- Bridge as a Fallback: Bridges become one liquidity source among many, not the mandatory gateway.
Best Execution
Guarantee
Solver Network
Competition
NATIVE ASSET TRANSFERS
Architecture Showdown: CPI vs. Canonical Bridge
Comparison of Cross-Program Invocation (CPI) and Canonical Bridge models for moving native assets across Solana clusters.
| Feature / Metric | Cross-Program Invocation (CPI) | Canonical Wormhole Bridge | Canonical LayerZero OFT |
|---|---|---|---|
Architecture Principle | Direct program-to-program call via syscall | Lock & Mint / Burn & Mint with off-chain guardians | Lock & Mint / Burn & Mint with decentralized oracle/relayer network |
Native Asset Integrity | |||
Settlement Finality | < 400ms (within cluster) | ~15-60 minutes (VAAs) | ~3-20 minutes (depends on dest. chain) |
Trust Assumption | Solana Validator Set | 19/20 Guardian Multisig (Wormhole) | Decentralized Oracle/Relayer Set (LayerZero) |
Max Theoretical TPS (per msg) | ~50,000 | < 1,000 | < 1,000 |
Fee Structure | Tx fee only (~$0.0001) | Tx fee + protocol fee (0.03%-0.04%) | Tx fee + relayer fee (varies, ~$0.10-$1.00) |
Liquidity Requirement | None (1:1 backing) | Required for minted assets | Required for minted assets |
Smart Contract Composability | Atomic within cluster | Non-atomic; requires bridging steps | Non-atomic; requires bridging steps |
deep-dive
THE ARCHITECTURAL SHIFT
Mechanics of Obsolescence: How CPIs Work
Cross-Program Invocations (CPIs) enable direct, atomic, and trust-minimized asset transfers across Solana programs, rendering traditional bridge architecture redundant for native assets.
CPIs are atomic composability. A single transaction invokes multiple on-chain programs. This atomicity eliminates the bridging risk of funds being stuck mid-transfer, a systemic failure point for protocols like Stargate or Across.
Bridges are external validators. Traditional bridges like Wormhole or LayerZero require off-chain attestation and separate liquidity pools. CPIs move value using the Solana runtime's native state machine, removing this external trust layer.
The canonical example is token-swap. A user swaps SOL for USDC via Raydium. The CPI flow is: Debit SOL wallet, credit SOL ATA, execute swap logic, credit USDC ATA. The entire state change is one atomic unit.
Evidence: Jupiter's routing aggregates dozens of DEXs via CPIs in one transaction. This is impossible with multi-chain bridges, which fragment liquidity and require separate, non-atomic settlement on each chain.
case-study
THE NATIVE ASSET ENDGAME
Real-World CPI Applications Killing Bridge Demand
Cross-Program Invocation (CPI) enables protocols to directly compose with native assets, bypassing the need for wrapped tokens and their associated bridge risks.
01
The Problem: The Wrapped Token Tax
Every bridge mints a new, non-native asset (e.g., wETH) that fragments liquidity and introduces systemic risk. Users pay a double-fee structure: bridge fee + destination chain gas. This creates $10B+ in stranded liquidity across wrapped assets and exposes users to bridge hacks.
$2.8B
Bridge Exploits (2022)
2-5%
Typical Tax
02
The Solution: Solana's Native Token CPI
Protocols like Jupiter and Raydium use CPI to swap native SOL and SPL tokens directly, with no bridging required. This eliminates the wrapped token middleman. The native asset never leaves its home chain's state, preserving security and liquidity. This model is being extended to cross-chain via Wormhole's Native Token Transfers (NTT).
~500ms
Swap Latency
-99%
Counterparty Risk
03
The Killer App: Intent-Based Swaps
Solana's CPI is the perfect execution layer for intent-based architectures like UniswapX and CowSwap. A solver can discover a route that uses native SOL on Solana and native ETH on Ethereum via a canonical bridge like Across, executing the entire flow atomically via CPI. The user never holds a wrapped asset.
10x
Better Pricing
Atomic
Execution
04
The Protocol: LayerZero's Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT)
While not a CPI in the Solana sense, LayerZero's OFT standard achieves the same goal: a single canonical native token that can be moved across chains without wrapping. This directly competes with traditional lock-and-mint bridges. Stargate Finance is the primary application, enabling native asset transfers with unified liquidity.
Unified
Liquidity Pool
1 Token
Across Chains
05
The Result: Bridge Demand Collapse
For simple asset transfers, generalized messaging + native asset standards render dedicated liquidity bridges obsolete. Bridges will be relegated to niche long-tail assets or become a low-level primitive embedded within intent solvers and OFT standards. Their TVL and fee revenue will concentrate on these specialized use cases.
-80%
Bridge Volume (Projected)
Infrastructure
New Role
06
The Caveat: The Liquidity Transition
The major hurdle is liquidity migration. Moving $20B+ in wBTC from various bridges to a single native canonical standard (like tBTC or a Bitcoin L2) is a multi-year coordination problem. CPI and OFT provide the technical path, but economic incentives and protocol governance will dictate the speed of adoption.
Multi-Year
Timeline
$20B+
wBTC to Migrate
counter-argument
THE REALITY CHECK
The Steelman: Why Bridges Won't Die Tomorrow
Cross-Program Invocations are a long-term architectural shift, not an immediate replacement for existing bridge infrastructure.
Cross-Program Invocations (CPIs) are nascent. The vision of seamless native asset movement via Solana's CPI or SVM Teleport requires universal adoption of a single VM standard. The multichain reality is a fragmented landscape of EVM, SVM, Move, and Cosmos SDK chains, where CPIs are not interoperable.
Bridges solve for liquidity fragmentation. A CPI moves an asset's state; a bridge like Across or Stargate moves its liquidity. Established bridges aggregate billions in TVL across hundreds of pools, a liquidity moat that pure messaging protocols cannot instantly replicate for generalized asset transfers.
Bridges abstract complexity. End-users and dApps interact with a simple deposit/withdraw interface. Native CPI flows shift the burden of managing remote state and gas payments onto the application layer, increasing integration complexity for developers building on multiple chains.
Evidence: Wormhole's Wormhole Connect widget and LayerZero's OFT standard demonstrate that the bridge model is evolving, not dying. They embed bridging into dApp UIs while maintaining the specialized, secure relay infrastructure that CPIs would require each app to rebuild.
takeaways
BRIDGELESS FUTURE
TL;DR for Protocol Architects
Cross-Program Invocations (CPIs) enable native asset movement via atomic composability, rendering external bridges a legacy abstraction.
01
The Atomic Settlement Problem
Bridges introduce trusted third parties and fragmented liquidity for a fundamentally simple operation: moving a token. CPIs solve this by making the transfer a single, on-chain instruction.
- Eliminates Bridge Risk: No more multisig oracles, validator sets, or wrapped token issuers.
- Unified Liquidity: Leverages the destination chain's native DEX pools (e.g., Uniswap, Raydium).
- Guaranteed Execution: The entire flow either succeeds or reverts atomically.
0
New Trust Assumptions
100%
Atomic Success
02
The Cost & Latency Arbitrage
Bridges add layers of overhead: validation, message passing, and liquidity provisioning. CPIs collapse this stack into a single state transition.
- ~500ms Latency: Near-instant finality vs. bridge confirmation delays of 2-20 minutes.
- -70% Cost: Pay only for the destination chain's gas, eliminating bridge fees and LP spreads.
- Native UX: Users receive SOL on Solana, not wrapped SOL; receives ETH on Ethereum, not wETH.
~500ms
Settlement
-70%
Avg. Cost
03
The Solana & SVM Blueprint
Solana's Sealevel runtime demonstrates CPIs at scale, enabling protocols like Jupiter to route swaps across dozens of programs in one tx. This is the architectural model for a bridgeless multi-chain future.
- Parallel Execution: CPIs don't block the network, enabling 50k+ TPS settlement capacity.
- Composability Engine: Enables complex, cross-protocol intents (like UniswapX) natively.
- Standardized Primitive: The CPI is to cross-chain what the ERC-20 is to tokens.
50k+
TPS Capacity
1 Tx
Full Route
04
Rendering LayerZero & Wormhole Obsolete
General message bridges become infrastructure for niche, non-financial data. For asset transfer, CPIs coupled with fast finality chains make them redundant.
- No Oracle Delay: Settlement uses the chain's own consensus, not external attestations.
- Capital Efficiency: No need to lock $10B+ TVL in bridge contracts as collateral.
- Architectural Simplicity: Removes an entire failure layer from the stack.
$10B+
TVL Freed
1 Layer
Stack Removed
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