Cross-chain transfers, why do they always lose money?

Every time you perform a cross-chain operation, the assets received are always less than expected. The reason for the shrinkage is actually quite straightforward—

Your tokens go through three layers of harvesting:
- Exchange slippage on the source chain
- Bridge protocol fees
- Additional exchange losses on the target chain

Looking at it from another perspective, it's like goods passing through three toll booths; each one charges a fee, and your wallet naturally gets emptier. This model has become the industry standard, and users can only accept it.

But there's another approach—rather than transferring the assets themselves, why not just transmit transaction instructions? This way, you can bypass the multiple layers of exchange logic between chains, significantly reducing the user's actual costs.

Optimizing at the architecture level, rather than patching within the existing framework—that's the idea behind the new generation of cross-chain interactions. Industry-savvy projects are already putting this into practice.