Glossary
Bridge
Infrastructure that moves assets or messages between two blockchains by locking on one chain and minting a representation on the other.
A bridge connects two otherwise independent blockchains. The most common pattern is lock-and-mint: tokens are escrowed in a contract on chain A, and a wrapped representation is minted on chain B; burning the wrapped token releases the original.
Bridges are also among the most heavily exploited primitives in crypto — the validator set or signing committee that authorizes mints on the destination chain has historically been the single largest target for thefts (the Ronin, Wormhole, and Nomad incidents were each hundreds of millions of dollars).