The problem: too many copies of the "same" token
If you have ever moved a token across chains, you have met its evil twins. You bridge USDC or some governance token from one network to another and end up holding a wrapped version — a separate contract, a separate balance, sometimes a slightly different name. The "canonical" token still sits on the origin chain; what you hold on the destination is an IOU minted by a bridge, backed by collateral locked somewhere else.
This fragments everything. Liquidity splits across a dozen wrapper contracts, so pools are thinner and slippage is worse. Your balance is scattered — 40 units here, 25 there, none of them directly fungible with each other. And every wrapper adds risk: the value of the wrapped token is only as sound as the bridge holding the collateral behind it. When a bridge is exploited, the wrappers it minted can collapse to zero while the "real" token is untouched. The core issue is that there was never one token — there were many incompatible copies pretending to be the same asset.
What an OFT actually is
An OFT — Omnichain Fungible Token — is a token standard from LayerZero designed to fix exactly this. Instead of a token existing on one home chain and being wrapped everywhere else, an OFT is deployed natively on every chain it supports, and those deployments share one canonical supply. The token is not "on" a chain the way a wrapped asset is; it is an omnichain asset that happens to be readable and spendable on each chain, with the total supply conserved across all of them.
Under the hood, the deployments talk to each other through LayerZero's cross-chain messaging layer. As of 2026, LayerZero is one of the more widely adopted omnichain interoperability protocols, and the OFT standard is its reference pattern for making a fungible token behave as a single asset rather than a family of look-alikes. If you want the messaging layer itself unpacked, see our explainer on what LayerZero is.
How an OFT transfer works
The mechanism is refreshingly simple: burn on the source chain, mint on the destination.
When you send an OFT from Chain A to Chain B, the contract on Chain A burns the amount you are moving — it destroys those tokens outright. It then sends a LayerZero message to the contract on Chain B, which mints the exact same amount into your address there. No collateral is locked in a vault. No wrapper token is created. The global supply is unchanged, because what was burned on one side is re-minted on the other. Value moves by destroying and recreating the token, not by parking the original somewhere and issuing a claim against it.
Because there is no locked pool of collateral, there is no honeypot for an attacker to drain in the way classic lock-and-mint bridges create. The security assumption shifts to the correctness of the messaging layer and the token's own contracts, rather than to a separate custodian of locked funds.
OFT vs. wrapped vs. bridged tokens
It helps to line these up side by side. A wrapped token (like a bridged "wETH" variant on a foreign chain) is a new contract backed by collateral locked on the origin chain — a derivative, not the asset itself. A bridged token, in the traditional lock-and-mint sense, is much the same: the original is immobilized, and a representation is minted elsewhere. In both cases you end up with two distinct assets that are only economically linked, and only as long as the bridge holds.
An OFT is different in kind, not degree. There is no derivative, no representation, no collateral to defend. There is one token, one supply, and one balance for you — it simply moves between chains by burning and minting itself. For a deeper comparison of these models, we go further in omnichain vs. wrapped and bridged tokens.
Why this matters: unified liquidity and one spendable balance
The practical payoffs follow directly from the design. Unified liquidity: because there is only one canonical token, liquidity does not shatter into a dozen wrapper pools — a single deep market can serve every chain instead of many shallow ones. One spendable balance: your holdings are not stranded per chain; the same token is yours to use wherever it is deployed. Less bridge risk: with no locked collateral sitting in a vault, the classic bridge-exploit failure mode — drain the collateral, and every wrapper it backed goes to zero — largely disappears.
This last point is what makes an OFT genuinely useful as a utility token rather than just a tradable one. A token you can actually rely on having in one balance across chains can serve as a single, portable unit of account — for fees, for settlement, for whatever the application needs — without the user first juggling wrappers.
A practical example: moving an OFT between chains
Say you hold 100 units of an OFT on an EVM chain and want to use it on another network. You initiate a transfer. The source contract burns your 100 units and emits a LayerZero message. Moments later, the destination contract mints 100 units to your address. Your total holding never changed — it was 100 before and 100 after — but the tokens now live on the destination chain, ready to spend. There was no wrapped-token screen, no "you will receive w-TOKEN" warning, no separate balance to reconcile later. From your point of view, the token followed you. That single-balance experience is also what lets a wallet treat one token as spendable across ecosystems; see using one wallet across Ethereum, Solana and TON for how that plays out in practice.
How WATS uses this
WATS puts the OFT model to work as its fee token: ATS is a LayerZero OFT, so a single ATS balance is spendable across EVM, Solana and TON — which is exactly what lets one fee token work everywhere. Every action in the Hot Wallet is charged in ATS instead of each chain's native gas (on EVM through an ERC-4337 paymaster, and via an equivalent fee-payer on Solana and TON), and collected ATS is burned from a 100M supply toward a 30M floor. WATS is non-custodial — you hold your keys and WATS never holds one. You can read the full mechanics on the ATS fee page.
Frequently asked questions
What is an OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token)?
An OFT is a LayerZero token standard where a token is deployed natively on multiple chains but shares one canonical supply across all of them. Instead of being wrapped or bridged into separate copies, the token behaves as a single asset with one balance that follows you between chains. Value moves by burning the token on the source chain and minting it on the destination, so the total supply is always conserved.
How is an OFT different from a wrapped or bridged token?
A wrapped or bridged token is a separate contract backed by collateral locked on the origin chain — a derivative that is only economically linked to the original. An OFT has no wrapper and no locked collateral: it is one token with one supply that transfers by burning on the source chain and minting on the destination. That means unified liquidity, a single spendable balance, and less exposure to the bridge-exploit failure mode where drained collateral makes wrappers worthless.
Can one OFT balance really be spent across different blockchains?
Yes. Because an OFT keeps one canonical supply, the same token is spendable on every chain it is deployed to rather than being stranded per chain. WATS uses this so that a single ATS balance works across EVM, Solana and TON as one fee token. On EVM those fees are charged via an ERC-4337 paymaster, and on Solana and TON via an equivalent fee-payer or relayer — ERC-4337 itself is EVM-only.