The foundation has different plans for the bridge and has made a buyout offer to the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that governs it.

The suggestion ignited the prices of the native tokens of the protocol and the bridge.

The Offer

In a Sunday forum announcement, the foundation behind the Layer Zero Protocol and the Stargate Bridge has made an offer to the Stargate DAO in the form of a token buyback from their native STG bridge token. If approved, this will effectively dissolve the autonomous organization.

The bridge, launched over three years ago, has reportedly generated over $70 billion in trading volume and hosts the majority of OFTs (Omnichain Fungible Tokens), a universal token standard used to send, receive, and compose assets across all blockchains.

The current offer is $0.1675 per token, compared to $0.1637, which was applicable at the time of the foundations post, as the data at press time differs. The conversion was intended to swap all circulating STG (including staked/voting tokens) for ZRO (Layer Zeros native token) at a ratio of 1 STG: 0.08634 ZRO, reflecting a value of $0.1675 per STG and $1.94 per ZRO.

Following this, the bridge will be integrated into the Layer Zero ecosystem, and any future revenue generated by it will be utilized in a buyback program aimed at reducing the circulating supply of ZRO.

The discussion period will be open for 7 days, after which the proposal will be moved to Snapshot (voting platform) for a three-day period. Quorum is set at 1.2M veSTG (staked STG), and the approval threshold is 70% for the vote to pass.

There is already commentary from governance holders on the forum announcement and from the community on the post on X, with a mix of positive and negative sentiment, as well as discussion on how this would affect STG holders.

Price Reaction

As noted above, after the proposal went live both tokens have posted some signifcant gains from yesterday, with STG up 20% to $0.1965 and ZRO at $2.42, up 26%, respectively, at the time of writing.

If we are to take the original bid of 1 STG to 0.08634 ZRO with current prices, that would correlate to $0.1961 per STG and $2.42 per ZRO. Naturally, the deal itself is now more expensive, taking into account the overall increase in both token prices; it is now approximately $137 million, which is a respectable jump of $27 million in just under 24 hours.

Given the positive price action from the buyout proposal, along with varied feedback on its potential impact on the community, it will be interesting to see how the deal unfolds.