Why Cross-Chain Aggregation Is an Economic Mirage

A Global Order Book is impossible because blockchains are not databases. Each chain is a final settlement layer with its own state, security, and latency. Aggregators like 1inch or Jupiter stitch together quotes, but they cannot create a shared, atomic execution venue like a traditional exchange.

Cross-chain MEV fragments liquidity. Protocols like UniswapX and Across use intents to route orders, but this creates competing solvers and filler networks that bid for partial flow. This auction model, while efficient, prevents the formation of a single, deep liquidity pool accessible to all.

Settlement finality is the bottleneck. A trade on a global CLOB requires atomic cross-chain execution, which today relies on optimistic or probabilistic bridges like LayerZero and Wormhole. These introduce latency and trust assumptions that break the synchronous trading model of a true order book.

Evidence: The TVL in cross-chain bridges exceeds $20B, yet no aggregated venue captures more than a fraction of the liquidity available on individual chains like Ethereum or Solana. The dominant DEX on each chain still processes the majority of its native asset's volume.

Latency arbitrage is impossible. The atomic finality of a transaction on a source chain creates a race condition. Aggregators like 1inch or Li.Fi cannot guarantee a price across chains without exposing themselves to front-running or requiring centralized sequencers, which reintroduces trust.

Fragmented liquidity creates phantom depth. An aggregator quoting a price across Uniswap on Arbitrum and Curve on Polygon presents a composite quote. This liquidity is not atomic; the first successful trade on one chain invalidates the quote on the other, causing widespread transaction failure or massive slippage for the user.

The trust model regresses. To solve latency and liquidity issues, aggregators must custody funds or use verifier networks like LayerZero or Axelar. This shifts trust from the underlying blockchain's consensus to a new, often less battle-tested, intermediary set of oracles and relayers, negating the value proposition of a trust-minimized swap.

Evidence: The dominant cross-chain volume flows through bridges with native liquidity like Stargate or intent-based systems like Across, which use a fill-or-kill model and professional solvers. Pure aggregation across DEX liquidity is a marginal use case because its economic model is broken.

Intent-based architectures like UniswapX separate declaration from execution, improving UX but outsourcing the core problem. Solvers compete to fill user intents, but they still face the same fragmented liquidity and routing costs across chains like Arbitrum and Base.

Atomic composability is a technical patch that bundles actions across chains into a single transaction. Protocols like Across and LayerZero enable this, but atomicity does not create new liquidity—it merely coordinates existing, siloed pools.

The economic mirage persists because aggregation requires capital to be pooled. An atomic swap from Avalanche to Polygon still needs deep liquidity on both sides; intent solvers just bid on who bears the bridging cost and slippage.

Evidence: Solver profitability collapses in thin markets. Data from CowSwap and Across shows solver margins evaporate on long-tail asset routes, proving the underlying liquidity problem is unsolved.