Toll Bridge

A toll bridge, in its literal sense, is a bridge whose owner charges a fee to everyone who crosses it, a long-standing way of funding infrastructure. In business and investing, the phrase is used figuratively for a company that controls a passage others cannot easily avoid, such as a payment network, a stock exchange or a dominant software platform, and so can collect a small fee on a large volume of activity. Investors often cite such positions as examples of a durable competitive advantage, and critics as a sign of weak competition. In crypto, the image is applied to blockchain bridges and other intermediaries that charge a fee to move assets between networks, and to services that sit at a bottleneck users must pass through. The term has no single technical definition in crypto, so its exact meaning depends on context. Also see crypto bridge.