Is it just me, or is cross-chain API integration getting WORSE in 2026?

I’ve spent the last few weekends trying to build a simple portfolio tracker that allows direct swaps in the UI. It's nothing fancy; I just wanted to learn Rust and experiment with some DeFi protocols.

But, honestly? The fragmentation right now is insane.

With all the talk of Web3 maturing last year, I thought we’d have standardised endpoints by now. Instead, I’m juggling 15 different SDKs just to bridge a stablecoin from Ethereum to Solana without losing 5% to slippage. Even asking AI to generate boilerplate code is hit and miss because half the documentation changed last month and the models are suggesting deprecated methods.

I’ve reached the stage where I’m just looking for middleware to handle the dirty work. I've been digging through the documentation for 1inch and ParaSwap, and I've recently stumbled upon the API documentation for a crypto exchange aggregator at LetsExchange. Honestly, their widgets seem cleaner than the custom solution I'm trying to build.

This makes me wonder: for those of you building dApps or bots right now, Are you still running your own nodes and interacting with contracts directly, or have you fully capitulated to using aggregators and third-party APIs?

Thoughts?