Stargate Finance attracts $1.9B in six days

Stargate Finance, a cross-chain protocol designed to assist users in transferring assets between different blockchains, has accrued over $1.9 billion in total value locked (TVL) in less than a week after launching.

Stargate markets itself as a liquidity transport protocol that allows users to transact native assets cross-chain, offering decentralized finance (DeFi) users the option of staking stablecoins in pools where they are paid out in the native Stargate token (STG).

The rapidly growing TVL is probably down to the “up to 26% APY” being offered farming stablecoin deposits.

By attracting nearly $2 billion in TVL at the time of writing, Stargate has cemented itself as one of the top 10 DeFi projects, according to comparative data from DeFi Pulse.

Stargate has a high-profile supporter in quantitative crypto trading firm Alameda Research CEO Sam Trabucco.

In a Twitter thread to his 150,000 followers, Trabucco announced that Alameda Research had purchased all available Stargate tokens (STG) that were auctioned off during Stargate’s launch on March 17.

There’s been some chatter about the recent @StargateFinance auction, and I wanted to clarify a few things about Alameda’s involvement.

— Sam Trabucco (@AlamedaTrabucco) March 22, 2022

According to LayerZero, the protocol that Stargate runs on, 10% of the total supply of STG or 100 million tokens, were auctioned off to generate liquidity across the seven blockchains that Stargate is launching on.

LayerZero protocol markets itself as an “Interoperability protocol that actually works”.

According to a blog post from LayerZero Labs Co-founder and CTO, Ryan Zarick, the Stargate protocol solves something known as the “Bridging Trilemma” by using unified liquidity pools between chains, instant guaranteed finality of transactions and the use of native assets for cross-chain swaps.

Stargate plans to make it possible for any user to transfer assets from one blockchain to another one in a single transaction, skipping over the need for using complicated and convoluted methods such as locking, minting and burning and redeeming assets.

Related: Vitalik Buterin gives thumbs down to cross-chain applications

The LayerZero team also announced that they had hired Maki, the co-founder of SushiSwap, to lead business development at Stargate.

Stargate is currently live on seven primary chains including Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, BSC, Fantom, Optimism and Arbitrum. The LayerZero team plans to add support for other chains like Solana, Terra and Cosmos.