Why 2026 might finally be the year retail can touch cross chain arb without getting farmed? We’ve all seen those videos.. “Make $10K a day with this simple arbitrage bot” with a MetaMask screenshot that’s clearly inspect elemented. For years, cross chain arbitrage has been this weird holy grail. Close enough to tempt you, but basically gated behind infra, private RPCs, and people who live inside mempools. And honestly, it shouldn’t be this hard. Here’s why it’s been a nightmare for normal traders. Bridges. The bridge problem isn’t new. Ronin got hit for ~625M. Wormhole ~325M. Nomad ~190M. Different names, same movie. Bridges turn into centralized failure points inside a supposedly decentralized world. Pros exploit it. Retail eats the risk. Then came the worst layer of it all. The tutorial industrial complex. During 2021 to 2022, arb bot tutorials were everywhere, but a lot of them were just drainers wearing a friendly hoodie. You’d deploy a contract, send a bit of ETH for “gas,” and boom, you funded someone else’s wallet. It got so bad that even when real opportunities existed, accessing them safely was basically impossible for 99% of people. What’s changing now is the execution model. We’re moving toward intent based systems. You say what outcome you want, not the step by step route you’ll take to get there, and solvers compete to execute it for you. This matters for arbitrage because the old flow was cursed. Bridge, swap, bridge back, pray. Pray you don’t get sandwiched. Pray the bridge doesn’t break mid flow. Pray the contract you touched isn’t hiding a trapdoor. With intents, the game shifts. You submit the goal. Solvers race to give the best execution. And the system can make execution verifiable instead of trust based. It also feels like chains are getting abstracted away. When liquidity can route across multiple networks cleanly, arb becomes less about bridge timing and more about pure price discovery and who can execute best. To be clear, this doesn’t make it risk free. Smart contract risk is still real. Protocol risk is still real. But it’s moving from “This is fundamentally dangerous” to “These are defined risks you can actually reason about and manage.” The mental model changes from “Trust this multisig bridge” to “Verify execution matched the intent.” And that’s a massive upgrade for retail. I’m cautiously bullish on this direction. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s finally pointing at a world where retail can participate without needing to be a dev with a server rack. DYOR always, and please don’t trust any YouTube tutorial that asks you to deploy a contract and send it ETH.