Stargate’s STG Token Surges Ahead Of FTX Listing

Stargate Finance had an eventful start.

The cross-chain protocol held an auction for its STG token on Mar. 17, only to have trading firm Alameda Research, buy all 100M of them in the very first block, as confirmed by then-CEO, Sam Trabucco.

This prompted the project to initiate another sale of 20M STG on Mar. 30 in order to distribute the token to the broader community.

A day after the second auction, the token pumped to an all-time high of $4.14 on Apr. 1, but a month later, it was trading at $0.95. STG proceeded to slowly dwindle to an all-time low of $0.33 on Aug. 18.

STG price action since inception

Then, following news that Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, would list STG on Aug. 18, the token soared to $0.95, nearly tripling within 24 hours. Momentum has since continued and STG is trading at around $1.06 at the time of writing.

STG seven-day chart

TVL Up 60%

And it’s not just price action — total value locked (TVL) has jumped over 60% in the last week, according to data from DeFi Llama.

As a bridge protocol, which transfers assets across blockchains, Stargate allows users to deposit their assets in liquidity pools and earn fees as other users and apps trigger transactions which move assets between blockchains.

Liquidity providers (LPs) are rewarded with STG tokens if they add LP tokens to one of what Stargate calls “farms.” Given that the spike in TVL coincided with the rally in STG, it’s likely that the protocol is attracting more LPs as the yield rises with the price of STG.

At $679M, Stargate is still about 84% off its all-time high of $4.17B in TVL, which was hit on Apr. 5, four days after STG hit its all-time high.

Stargate TVL since inception

Other well-known cross-chain protocols like Hop Protocol and Synapse have also seen their TVL drop precipitously as the bear market took hold this year.

Volume on Stargate has slowed over the year, but daily transactions have seen an uptick in the last month, according to stgscan.io.

FTX Listing

Now, crypto exchange FTX has announced that it will launch perpetual futures, or “perps,” for STG on Aug. 26 at 2pm UTC.

Perpetual futures are a derivative akin to futures, where a trader can take an indefinite long or short position on a token. When a centralized exchange like FTX lists perpetuals for a token, it becomes much easier for traders to short it.

This trend hasn’t been forgotten on Twitter, as observers joked that the listing will send the token to zero.

Not everyone thinks the announcement is bearish, however. Crypto influencer Chubbicorn219 underscored how LDO, the governance token of liquid staking protocol Lido Finance, has actually jumped 33% since FTX listed LDO perpetuals on July 19.

As a cross-chain liquidity protocol, Stargate makes it possible to move assets across blockchains in a single transaction. The protocol’s CEO, Primo, envisions Stargate not as a user-facing product, but more as a piece of core infrastructure for protocols.

“Stargate’s true form is NOT to be a user bridge but to [be] the liquidity transfer layer between applications and leverage its composability to make this process 10x+ for all applications looking to go cross/omni-chain,” Primo wrote in Stargate’s forum.

Decentralized exchange (DEX) Sushiswap has already launched SushiXSwap, which facilitates cross-chain trades and is built on top of Stargate. PancakeSwap, the leading DEX on Binance Smart Chain, also launched a cross-chain bridge this week using Stargate.

RayJ, an STG holder who frequents the Stargate Discord, told The Defiant that Stargate will integrate Aptos, a Layer 1 blockchain which announced a $150M Series A last month.

Aptos has yet to launch its mainnet, which is anticipated to come with token incentives. “There’s going to be a lot of new DeFi that people will be farming to hell,” he said. Stargate will aim to collect fees from users bridging to Aptos from other chains.

With an imminent listing and integrations by noteworthy DeFi players happening at a decent clip, Stargate appears to be a bright spot in the bear market.

CORRECTED on 8/26 at 1230 ET to show that Stargate plans to integrate Aptos.