Fragmented liquidity is DeFi’s central scalability risk.

Opinion by: Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs.

Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is built on composability, but composability is breaking. As new chains proliferate, liquidity fragments and incentives weaken.

What was once a single shared environment has splintered into dozens of siloed markets. DeFi isn’t dead, but without the infrastructure that connects these environments, it may lose what made it powerful.

Fractured liquidity is becoming DeFi’s central scalability risk. While expanding to multiple chains was a natural response to Ethereum’s scalability limits, it has created a new class of problems.

Infrastructure, not ideology, will determine whether the multichain future strengthens or weakens the category.

Fragmented liquidity is DeFi’s core failure mode

DeFi protocols rely on deep, composable liquidity: a shared pool of assets that can be borrowed, swapped and layered into strategies.

In a multichain world, however, that assumption no longer holds. Liquidity is now spread across dozens of L1s, rollups and appchains. Aave is deployed on 17 chains; Pendle on 11.

These deployments are powerful on their own, but the liquidity they capture is chain-specific and often inaccessible outside the environment where it’s deposited.

This fragmentation creates fundamental inefficiencies: thinner markets, higher slippage and weaker user and protocol incentives. Even the best-designed economic models begin to break down when the liquidity they depend on is no longer dense. Protocols that worked seamlessly on Ethereum mainnet now struggle to deliver the same outcomes elsewhere — not because their models are flawed, but because the context they operate in has changed.

The shift to multichain has been necessary for scaling. But without a way to emulate composability across chains, it risks undermining the very foundations of DeFi’s success.

Multichain UX friction isn’t the root problem

Much of the attention in multichain DeFi has been focused on UX friction: switching wallets, acquiring gas tokens and jumping through bridge UIs (user interfaces). These are surface-level symptoms of a deeper problem: the lack of a unified execution layer. 

Users who try to execute even basic crosschain actions often encounter inconsistent interfaces, fragmented pricing and uncertain outcomes. In recent months, some progress has been made with swap-and-bridge solutions, but liquidity fragmentation and routing inefficiencies persist. 

Most of these systems rely on isolated liquidity pools per chain, with duplicative incentives and limited routing paths. Even if the front-end feels unified, the back-end remains fragmented — capital inefficient and hard to compose.

If liquidity can’t move easily across chains or composing strategies requires bridging, wrapping, or interacting with multiple apps, then DeFi can’t scale meaningfully. Solvers emulate synchrony, so users don’t have to.

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Blockchains aren’t designed to operate in sync. There’s no native way to execute a single atomic action across chains. We don’t need to wait for synchronous infrastructure. We can emulate it.

That’s where solvers come in. Solvers are sophisticated actors who use their own capital and logic to join fragmented actions on the user’s behalf. A user simply expresses an intent — swap, deposit, interact — and the solver executes across chains to fulfill it, abstracting away the complexity underneath.

Intents-based infrastructure solves for interoperability, not consolidation

Intents are more than just an abstraction layer: they shift how we design for liquidity, composability and execution.

ERC-7683 standardizes how these crosschain intents are expressed and fulfilled. It enables invisible bridging: one-click swaps, deposits or interactions that move across chains without the user needing to manage the complexity — even between ecosystems that weren’t designed to interoperate.

A user on Solana can swap into a vault on Arbitrum. Liquidity can move into and out of BNB Chain, historically siloed from Ethereum-native standards. Strategies become portable. Protocols become interoperable.

The result isn’t perfect uniformity but something more resilient: systems that work together despite their differences.

Instead of forcing every chain to adopt the same standards, intents let users define outcomes while solvers execute across ecosystems — preserving local strengths while enabling global liquidity. They don’t erase multichain complexity. They route around it.

Multichain isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s the environment in which DeFi operates today. Unless we solve for composability at the infrastructure layer, DeFi may not scale with it.

The risk isn’t dramatic collapse. It’s slow erosion: thinner liquidity, weaker incentives and fewer things that work across chains.

Solver infrastructure offers a way out — not by forcing uniformity but by mimicking the experience of synchrony across fragmented chains. That’s how we preserve what made DeFi powerful in the first place and how we unlock what comes next.

Opinion by: Hart Lambur, co-founder of Risk Labs.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.