Emerging L1 chain projects, although primarily focused on native compliance and privacy features, cannot avoid a harsh reality when expanding their ecosystems—that is, reliance on external services. Infrastructure such as bridges and oracles may seem insignificant but are actually fraught with major pitfalls.

Let's start with bridges. These have a history of frequent issues in blockchain. In 2022, the Ronin bridge was hacked for $600 million, Wormhole lost $320 million, and by 2025, several multi-chain bridge incidents occurred, with total losses exceeding $2 billion. Why do problems keep happening? Because the essence of bridging is trusting third-party verification or multi-signature schemes. If there are vulnerabilities in the verification logic or private keys are leaked, user funds are directly at risk. For ecosystems that are still relatively small and rely mainly on community staking for liquidity, attracting more users and real assets (RWA) inevitably means expanding onto Ethereum or other mainstream chains to gain depth. But this step also means accepting cross-chain risks.

The issues with oracles are similar. Projects need oracles to feed prices. If an oracle malfunctions or is manipulated by hackers, DeFi contracts on-chain could face incorrect liquidations. This is even more critical in RWA scenarios—since real assets are anchored with the cooperation of custodians, any problem in one link can propagate throughout the entire system.

The risks associated with these external dependencies are very real. Especially in the early stages of a project, when the team’s execution capacity is limited, problems are more likely to be amplified. It’s understandable that users feel uneasy when crossing chains.

However, this is also an inevitable phase for most L1 projects. Many projects start by focusing on developing their core products—refining privacy modules, optimizing modular architecture—these are the long-term sources of competitiveness. As long as they solidify native functions like local issuance and real-time settlement, and gradually address external dependency risks later, this path remains viable.