Cross-Chain Bridges reviewed

A cross-chain bridge moves tokens from one blockchain to another, but nothing actually travels. The bridge locks or burns your tokens on the source chain and releases or mints an equivalent on the destination, or a third party pays you from its own funds and is repaid later. Which of those happens decides who you are trusting with the money, and Chainlink's explainer describes the lock, burn and mint designs in more detail.

Many bridges also sit on a messaging layer. Stargate runs on LayerZero, where each app chooses its own set of verifiers (DVNs) and LayerZero recommends at least one that its own team does not run. A bridge is only as strong as the weakest party allowed to approve a transfer, so that verifier setup matters as much as the contract code.

Bridges are a favourite target because they hold large pools of locked tokens behind a few keys or a single verification path. In 2022, cross-chain bridges accounted for 64% of the $3.1 billion stolen from DeFi protocols, according to Chainalysis. By our calculation, that is about $2 billion. The FBI tied two of the largest thefts to North Korea's Lazarus Group.

The KelpDAO exploit shows where the risk has moved. KelpDAO's LayerZero-based bridge relied on a single verifier, LayerZero Labs' own, and attackers fed it false data by compromising the servers it read from. Chainalysis called it an attack on off-chain infrastructure, not a smart contract hack. LayerZero says its verifier no longer signs for apps that rely on one verifier alone, and Kelp's developer has since sued LayerZero over who approved the setup, a claim LayerZero calls meritless. Before using any bridge, ask how many independent parties have to agree before your funds move.

A bridge that winds down can still hold your money. Orbit Bridge's migrated assets sit on the Silicon network, which stops withdrawals at 12:00 Korean time on 31 December 2026 and says anything left after that cannot be recovered; our Orbit Bridge review has the details. Hop Protocol looks inactive: DefiLlama marks its website as dead and records almost no volume in the past 30 days, and its last governance vote was in March 2025.

Most bridges quote one figure, and it is built from several parts:

• Gas on the source chain to send the transaction, paid in that chain's native token.
• A bridge or liquidity fee. On Across the total fee is the difference between what you deposit and what you receive, covering a liquidity-provider fee, a relayer fee and any app fee.
• Gas on the destination chain, usually folded into the relayer's or the bridge's fee.
• Slippage on pool-based routes when the far side is short of liquidity. Stargate lets you set a minimum amount received and cancels a transfer that would come in below it.

Speed is part of the price. Circle's CCTP moves native USDC with no Circle fee in standard mode, which takes 15 to 19 minutes from Ethereum and its layer 2s. Fast mode, where the source chain offers it, takes about 8 to 20 seconds and costs 0.01% to 0.13%. Arbitrum's own bridge takes 15 to 30 minutes to deposit but about a week to withdraw to Ethereum.

Six of the nine bridges on this page carry a score. Hop Protocol, Binance Bridge and Orbit Bridge stay online for reference without one. Every score uses the same five parts, set out in full in our bridge scoring methodology:

• Security and audits (35%): audit firms and dates, the verification model, the incident record and how the team responded, and the value at stake against the signer threshold.
• Transaction speed (20%): how the bridge settles and how long a transfer takes to arrive.
• Fees (20%): documented liquidity, protocol and gas costs, plus slippage at retail sizes.
• Chain and token coverage (15%): supported routes, and native rather than wrapped assets.
• Reliability (10%): pauses, route outages and fallbacks when the main app is down.

A past exploit doesn't sink a score by itself. Whether users were repaid and what changed afterwards both count. We only rank bridges we have reviewed in full, so our best crypto bridges ranking draws on the nine reviews above.

We have published full reviews of nine bridges: Across Protocol, Stargate Finance, Synapse Protocol, Orbiter Finance, Portal Bridge, Hop Protocol, Binance Bridge, Orbit Bridge and Arbitrum Bridge.

• Best crypto bridges, ranked: our picks by use case.
• Compare cross-chain bridges: scores and coverage side by side.
• How to bridge crypto: a walkthrough for your first transfer.
• What is a rollup?: why layer 2 networks need bridges at all.