How moving coins between blockchains works

Each blockchain is a separate record. Bitcoin keeps track of BTC. Solana keeps track of SOL and Solana tokens. Ethereum keeps its own list. None of them can read the others.

So when an app says it will "move" your BTC to Solana, your bitcoin stays on Bitcoin. Something else happens instead. Either someone holds your BTC and gives you a stand-in token on Solana, or you trade your BTC for a coin that already lives on Solana.

Once you see it this way, every bridge and cross-chain swap becomes easier to understand. The question is always the same: what happens to the original coin, and what exactly do you get on the other side?

A blockchain only trusts what its own network agrees on. Solana has no way to check Bitcoin blocks by itself. Bitcoin has even less: it has only very simple scripting and cannot run the kind of program a bridge needs.

That means some outside party has to watch one chain and act on the other. It might be a company, a group of signers, a network of validators or a professional trader. The details of who that party is and what stops it from cheating are called the trust model.

The simplest route is a cross-chain swap. You send BTC on Bitcoin and receive SOL or USDC on Solana. No stand-in token is created. You end up with a normal coin of the destination network.

Chainflip, THORChain and NEAR Intents work like this. You send your coins to a deposit address, the protocol trades them, and the other coin is paid out to your wallet. From Bitcoin this usually takes 10 to 40 minutes, mostly waiting for Bitcoin blocks.

The trade-off: your BTC exposure ends. You now hold SOL or dollars, not bitcoin.

If you want to keep bitcoin exposure on another chain, you need a wrapped token, an IOU backed by real BTC. Someone locks the real coins, and an equal number of tokens are created on the new chain. This is called lock and mint.

cbBTC is wrapped bitcoin held by Coinbase. WBTC is held by BitGo. tBTC spreads the job across a network of signers. All of them can be used on chains like Ethereum, Base or Solana.

The token is only as good as whoever holds the real coins. If that vault is hacked or the custodian fails, the wrapped token can lose its value.

Some tokens are issued by one company on many chains. USDC is the main example. Circle runs a system called CCTP: you burn (destroy) USDC on one chain, Circle confirms it, and new USDC is created for you on the other chain.

You get real USDC issued by Circle, not a copy. There is no big pool of locked coins to rob. You trust Circle, but you already do that by holding USDC.

Many popular bridges mix these ideas to save time. Liquidity bridges like Stargate keep pools of the same coin on several chains and pay you from the pool on the far side. Intent bridges like Across let a solver pay you right away from their own funds and get repaid later.

Aggregators such as LI.FI or Bungee compare these options and pick a route for you. Under the hood, the route still uses one of the three basic ways.

This matters for what you receive. A fast bridge may pay you a normal token, a bridge-specific wrapped token or native USDC, depending on the route. Look at the token name on the quote screen before you confirm.