Bridging doesn’t feel like bridging anymore? So I moved 0.15 BTC ($11.5k) earlier this week from mainnet to USDT on ETH because I needed liquidity for a perp position, and the experience kinda threw me off, in a good way, but also made me question what we even call “bridging” now. Before, it was always: deposit -> wait -> mint wrapped BTC on some EVM/L2 -> withdraw. All manually, but with some new bridges, it's automated, but not fully. This time it felt completely different. No minting step. No wrapped asset sitting somewhere. It was more like: \- set an intent (basically “I want to swap BTC for xyz asset on any chain”) \- solver picks it up both sides \- lock funds in HTLC \- either it executes fully or refunds. No one can tamper with the HTLC contract, not even the protocol. It took less than 30 sec total, which was way quicker than BTC confirmations anyway, but the key difference was that there was no in-between state. No pending Tx anxiety, no checking a dashboard every 2 mins.…