After the past 24 hours of reading questions, concerns, criticisms; We’re writing this to address some of the largest questions and clear up the many misconceptions in both this offer and the state of Stargate.
I want to start by stating that I am a very strong believer in open markets and while most view DAO governance skeptically I strongly believe in an open and fair process and think every voter should make the decision that aligns best with their own economic interests. I will also state formally and for the record that despite significant ownership of STG, all LayerZero Labs and Foundation members have been expressly forbidden from voting on this proposal. We have also not rallied to individual or large holders to take a specific position. As any of the large stakeholders in the DAO who have reached out to me since this went up know, I have told each of them to vote in their own interests, have explained why I think this is clearly the best long term outcome for Stargate and LayerZero and not explicitly encouraged or pressured them to vote in any specific way. All of the information should be as open as possible, and everyone who has a strong opinion should stake their veSTG and vote.
I think it’s important to state. We are not here to take. We are here to give.
This acquisition expands Stargate’s fee capture across all LayerZero messaging volume ($22B in Q2 alone) – Every major stablecoin issuer, every tokenized asset, every cross-chain application will need what we’re building together. The question isn’t whether this future exists—it’s whether we’ll build it together or watch others attempt it separately.
We have an incredibly aggressive development roadmap with all of the resources to execute on it. Proven by all of the whitepapers and technical innovation we’ve historically delivered on both for LayerZero and Stargate and this year alone, where we have dominated we have not rested on our laurels and expanded with new research that opens up new markets that others haven’t been looking at.
Updated Terms to Better Reward veSTG Stakers
As for the deal structure: in all of the comments so far, I do think the most valid criticism is that veSTG and STG being treated equally is inherently unfair to veSTG stakers – the people who took a large leap of faith with the protocol, locking up for many years.
We will amend our proposal to distribute the next 6 months of Stargate revenue to pass through to veSTG stakers at the same ratio it is currently passing through at. This applies to all veSTG stakers who were staked at the time the proposal was posted.
Conclusion
We love the Stargate protocol, naturally, and it’s very dear to our hearts but it has struggled to get the market dominance it should have even with all of the time/resources/innovation that LayerZero Labs has provided it for free. We think Stargate should be far and away one of the most used protocols within crypto.
This offer comes after we received news of Stargate restructuring and reducing team’s operational capacity and bandwidth
We have all of the resources and expertise and more than ever we want to see products powered by LayerZero in the limelight and winning.
We care about winning and we want to see Stargate win. Our goal is that we are no longer building things that are potentially competitive, no longer having to decide between doing something that’s good for LayerZero or good for Stargate, and we want people to have a single place to look for everything within this ecosystem – ZRO.
We’re on the launchpad fuelling the rocket, we want Stargate onboard with us.
This is an invitation to join the most consequential infrastructure project in crypto history.
together we can achieve what neither could alone