Modern blockchain ecosystems comprise many heterogeneous networks, creating a growing need for interoperability. Cross-chain bridges provide the core infrastructure for this interoperability by enabling verifiable state transitions that move assets and liquidity across chains. While prior work has focused mainly on bridge design and security, the system-level and economic consequences of cross-chain liquidity interoperability remain less understood. We present a large-scale empirical measurement study of cross-chain interoperability using a dataset spanning 20 blockchains and 16 major bridge protocols from 2022 to 2025. We model the multi-chain ecosystem as a time-varying weighted hypergraph and introduce two complementary metrics. Structural interoperability captures connectivity created by deployed bridge infrastructure, reflecting bridge coverage and redundancy independent of user behavior. Active interoperability captures realized cross-chain usage, measured by normalized transfer activity. This decomposition separates infrastructure capacity from actual utilization and yields several findings. The cross-chain network evolves from a sparse hub-and-spoke structure into a denser multi-hub core led by EVM-compatible chains. Bridge expansion and chain growth are uneven: some chains achieve broad structural access but limited realized usage, whereas others concentrate activity through a small set of routes. Overall, interoperability provision and interoperability use diverge substantially, showing that connectivity alone does not imply economically meaningful integration. These results provide a measurement framework for understanding how cross-chain infrastructure reshapes blockchain market structure and liquidity organization.

翻译：现代区块链生态系统由众多异构网络组成，对互操作性的需求日益增长。跨链桥通过实现可验证的状态转换来跨链转移资产和流动性，从而为这种互操作性提供了核心基础设施。尽管先前研究主要关注桥的设计与安全性，但跨链流动性互操作性在系统层面和经济层面的后果仍待深入理解。我们基于涵盖2022年至2025年期间20条区块链和16个主要桥协议的数据集，对跨链互操作性进行了大规模实证测量研究。将多链生态系统建模为时变加权超图，并引入两个互补指标：结构互操作性反映已部署桥基础设施所创造的连接性，体现独立于用户行为的桥覆盖与冗余；活跃互操作性则通过归一化转移活动反映实际跨链使用情况。这种分解将基础设施容量与实际利用率分离，并得出若干发现：跨链网络从稀疏的星型结构演化为以EVM兼容链为主导的更密集的多核结构；桥的扩展与链的发展不均衡——部分链实现了广泛的结构接入但实际使用有限，而另一些则将活动集中于少数路径。总体而言，互操作性的供给与使用存在显著差异，表明连接性本身并不等同于具有经济意义的整合。这些结果提供了一个测量框架，用于理解跨链基础设施如何重塑区块链市场结构与流动性组织。