There's a weird phenomenon where new cryptocurrencies are often betting the farm on sidechains while noone building anything real is interested in them (thread)
For practical purposes this is simply because sidechains have no benefit over bridges. The different side chains simply don't interoperate except in the same ways that any two chains can interoperate (sha256 preimage reveals and bridges)
In fact sidechains look a lot worse here: With a sidechain having no native token of its own it's difficult for it to incentivize growing and maintaining the chain
Bridges are straightforward enough to build in systems with sufficient smart coin support but have the problem that they need a trusted oracle on both sides to report the state of the other chain
In principle the need for a trusted oracle could be removed with some super fancy snark functionality which can prove 'there's a version of the other chain with X weight which has Y as the report back state' which can be validated on-chain but that tech is ahem, not practical yet
But you can implement bridges today in a way where everything is done right except for an oracle making the exact attestation which would otherwise be made by a snark, and that oracle can be lightweight and multiparty and such
So the amount of trust is meaningfully reduced but not eliminated. If anyone knows of a writeup explaining how to do this I'll link to it, otherwise doing a post on it will go on my todo list.
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