Stargate Finance | Is this the best way to get the LayerZero airdrop?
😎 Research Tool That I Use To Invest: https://defichronicles.gumroad.com/l/efnjx
If you want to watch the video instead of reading it, click the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxwlj-D3cj4&t=804s
Intro
With over $$370,000,000 in total value locked and an average trading volume of 5–15M daily, STG is a fully composable native asset bridge, and the first dApp built on LayerZero.
DeFi users can swap native assets cross-chain on Stargate within a single transaction. For example, users can swap USDC on Ethereum for USDT on BNB.
These cross-chain swaps are supported by the community-owned Stargate unified liquidity pools. Where several DeFi users provide liquidity to help these cross-chain swaps while receiving fees/income.
Some supported chains are;
- Avalanche
- Arbitrum
- Binance Smart Chain
- Ethereum
- Fantom
- Optimus
- Polygon
Just like the blockchain trilemma, there’s also the bridging trilemma, which they claim to resolve using:
Instant Guaranteed Finality: Users & Applications can trust that when they successfully commit a transaction on the source chain, it will arrive on the destination chain.
Native Assets: Users & Applications swap in native assets as opposed to wrapped assets that require additional swaps to acquire the desired asset and corresponding fees.
Unified Liquidity: Shared access of a single liquidity pool across multiple chains creates deeper liquidity for users & applications that trust in the bridge’s reliability.
Metrics
- Rank # ~ 224
- Market Cap ~ $88.643 M
- Fully Diluted Market Cap ~ $640.4 M
- Price ~ $0.63
- All-time high ~ $5.05
- Circulating Supply ~ 138.572 M
- Max Supply ~ 1.000 B
How big is Stargate Finance
STG had a top of 4B in TVL in April 2022, which is normal since the price per token was at $5, and the crypto market was still looking good.
For being a protocol that is on a brand new blockchain, LayerZero. Having over 370M in TVL is astonishing.
Here’s a quick percentage breakdown of the tokens on the protocol;
Let’s review some of the staking available on STG.
These are the top staking pools available. There are others like:
ETH — 3.45% 4.61% depending on the chain used
DAI — 4.29% — 4.72% depending on the chain used
BUSD — 4.46% — Available only for Binance Smart Chain
Growth of the protocol
Monthly transactions
Transactions for the month of January are over 244,000. While in December STG had over 319,000.
3 months ago it was at 67,000. That’s a 400% — 500% rise in transactions in 90 days, crazy!
Daily active user
It was increasing tremendously but got a big drop in the last few days. I tried to find out why but got no news on it. Either way, the average daily users was around 4,000 daily.
Daily trading volume on the platform
Had some crazy peaks of over 120M in one day last year. But the average then was around 40–20M per day.
Now, they still pulling a nice 5–15M per day. Just to put things into perspective, Ref Finance which is the main dex on Near protocol is making between 5–10M per day.
And Rune is at 50M per day.
Me thinking: What will happen when LayerZero gets out, and people start to build projects and use STG’s platform to swap…
Revenue
Since inception until today they’ve amassed 2.6M in revenue from fees.
Tokenomics
Let me first start by differentiating the main type of tokens on Stargate Finance
STG is the native token of Stargate.
aSTG is the auction token that the users receive if they purchased STG in Stargate’s Launch Auction.
veSTG is the voting escrow token that the users receive if their STG is locked or staked. veSTG represents the voting power.
aSTG and veSTG may have different forms but they function similarly, e.g. the Community Auction holders receive aaSTG and sveSTG instead.
TG Token Allocation
1 billion STG have been minted at genesis and will be the entire finite supply of STG. The initial three-year allocation is as follows:
17.50% — Stargate core contributors (1-year full lock-up, 2-year linear unlock thereafter).
17.50% — Investors (1-year full lock-up, 2-year linear unlock thereafter).
65.00% — Stargate community allocation, dedicated to fulfilling the protocol’s vision: make cross-chain liquidity transfer a seamless, single transaction process. Here’s the breakdown of the community allocation:
15.00% — Stargate protocol launch.
10.00% to STG launch auction purchasers.
5.00% to an STG-USDC pool on Curve.fi.
15.95% — Bonding Curve, post-launch.
2.11% — Initial emissions program.
Up to 1.55% will be added to DEXs on BNB, Avalanche, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism & Fantom
The remaining 30.39% is dedicated to future community initiatives & the long-term success of Stargate.
Price Action
With an all time high at $5.05 and all time low at $0.32.
Currently at $0.66 with some interesting levels at;
$1.62, $1.20, $0.88, $0.59, $0.50, $0.32.
Staking and voting power
Last, but not least. Staking STG to receive veSTG.
When you stake your STG on the platform you receive veSTG which can later be used to claim your STG plus interest.
The good thing is that you can send STG to all the supported chains. Fantom, Matic, Avax, it doesn’t matter. You can withdraw your STG from a centralized exchange, choose Matic or any other that is available and it will go exactly where on your Metamask. Pretty neat.
In my case, I went with MATIC, but there’s also the option for ETH, BNB, AVAX, Arbitrum, and others.
I am receiving 3.84% APY at the moment, but that will vary with time. The locking period can be as low as 1 month, or up to 36 months.
The average user is staking for 12 months.
Also, as far as I know, this is the best way to get involved with LayerZero. That’s why I decided to stake over 200 STG to gain some voting power and vote on each proposal whenever I have the chance. If there is an airdrop for LayerZero, this might be the way to get some.
Conclusion
There’s over 18% of STG (25,615,647) circulating supply locked, over $300M in total value locked, plenty of integrated chains to swap and transfer from chain to chain.
Usability is great, various pools offer great APY but not like the non-sustainable 1,000,000% we were seeing everywhere last year which is good.
I would say a project that is similar is RUNE which has a market cap of $400M.
Therefore, I would expect a similar market cap or even higher since this is a new project with innovative technology.
A 4x on STG is something that I think is very likely. Not in the short term. But, when LayerZero launches its native token, you can expect plenty of volume on STG.
Overall, I give the project a big thumbs up. It is new and there are a lot of things to make sure work, but for now, I like it.
Subscribe to my newsletter where I share each week my trades, market recap, and much more. It’s free!