Liquidity Fragmentation Is More Expensive Than It Looks

Go to any DEX on Arbitrum and search for USDC. You'll find at least two: USDC and USDC.e. Same dollar. Same peg. Different contracts. Now try to swap USDC.e for something. You might get a worse price than if you had native USDC, because the liquidity pool for USDC.e is thinner. Or the router sends you through an extra hop (USDC.e → USDC → your target token) and you eat the slippage twice. This is liquidity fragmentation. And it costs more than most people realize. The Problem: One Dollar, Five Tokens When multiple bridges connect the same token to a chain, each bridge creates its own wrapped version. On Arbitrum alone, you've had USDC.e (Arbitrum's canonical bridge), and native USDC (issued by Circle). On other chains, you might see bridged versions from Wormhole, Multichain (before it collapsed), Synapse, and others, each with a different contract address. They're all supposed to be worth $1. But DeFi doesn't care about your intentions. It cares about contract addresses. Each version