StakeStone’s Vision for Entire-Chain Liquidity and Industry Pain Points
In the multi-chain competitive landscape of 2025, fragmented liquidity has emerged as a core bottleneck for blockchain ecosystem development. Assets on Ethereum, Bitcoin, and emerging chains (such as Berachain and Solana) struggle to interoperate, forcing users to choose between staking rewards and participation in DeFi. StakeStone, as a decentralized cross-chain liquidity protocol, introduces an “entire-chain liquidity layer” solution. Through its three core products—STONE (yield-bearing ETH), SBTC (entire-chain BTC), and LiquidityPad—it bridges Ethereum’s mature ecosystem with high-yield scenarios on emerging chains, enabling free movement of capital.
As of April 2025, StakeStone’s total value locked (TVL) has surpassed $600 million, covering over 120,000 independent addresses and providing cold-start funding support for emerging chains like Berachain and Plume. Its core philosophy is to become the “water utility” of liquidity in the blockchain world—helping new chains acquire initial liquidity while allowing Ethereum users to capture cross-chain yields.
STO Token: A Governance and Deflation-Driven Value Engine
As the ecosystem’s governance token, STO plays a central role in coordinating value flows across chains. Its token economic model features three key innovations:
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Dual-Token Mechanism (STO and veSTO): Users lock up STO to receive veSTO, which enhances their governance weight and profit-sharing ratio (e.g., from bribe market revenues), with a 30-day unlocking period to mitigate speculative sell pressure.
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Deflationary Mechanism: Fifty percent of the protocol’s revenue is used to buy back and burn STO. Additionally, partner projects must purchase and burn STO to gain access, creating a positive cycle of “ecosystem expansion → token scarcity.”
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Cross-Chain Governance Threshold: Developers must hold a minimum amount of STO (converted into an ecosystem “passport”) to access StakeStone’s liquidity.
On April 3, 2025, STO officially launched on exchanges such as Binance and MEXC. With a total supply of 1 billion tokens, 25.72% is allocated to the community and airdrops (17.87% community + 7.85% airdrop), while investors and the team together hold 36.5%. This allocation balances early supporter incentives with long-term decentralization objectives. In the future, STO is expected to list on other mainstream platforms such as JuCoin.
LiquidityPad: Bootstrapping Emerging Chains and Creating a Yield Flywheel
StakeStone’s LiquidityPad is a critical hub connecting Ethereum and emerging chains, having raised over $540 million for projects like Berachain and Plume. Its operational logic is divided into two stages:
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Bootstrapping Stage: Emerging chains issue a pre-deposit treasury on Ethereum via LiquidityPad to attract assets like ETH/BTC for building their mainnet DeFi protocols. For example, the Berachain Vault locked $314 million through this method, rewarding users with STO tokens and future airdrop expectations.
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Yield Encapsulation Stage: After depositing assets, users receive LP tokens (e.g., beraSTONE) which can be used across mature protocols such as Uniswap and Aave, enabling “one staking, multiple yields.” This design boosts capital efficiency by up to 20 times and creates a flywheel effect—“liquidity injection → ecosystem prosperity → yield recirculation.”
Currently, LiquidityPad supports over 20 assets including ETH, WBTC, and USDT, with plans to expand into the RWA (real-world assets, e.g., real estate and bonds) sector in Q2 2025, further bridging traditional finance and on-chain liquidity.
Challenges and Future Outlook: From Technical Breakthroughs to Regulatory Adaptation
Although StakeStone has taken an early lead in the entire-chain liquidity space, it still faces three challenges:
Network Stability Risks
Dependence on LayerZero for cross-chain communication may be limited by the performance of target chains; latency issues under large-scale capital flows need optimization.
Regulatory Uncertainty
U.S. SEC scrutiny over “securitized tokens” may affect the compliance process of STO, especially as the protocol expands into RWA.
Intensifying Ecosystem Competition
Competing protocols such as Unichain and Owlto Finance have launched their own liquidity solutions. StakeStone must continuously demonstrate the irreplaceability of its modular architecture.
Looking ahead, StakeStone plans to launch Stone.Pay, a payment gateway in Q3 2025, enabling direct cross-border settlement using STONE, and to explore integration with compliant stablecoins alongside partners like Visa and Circle. If its “entire-chain TCP/IP” vision is realized, StakeStone could fundamentally reshape the Web3 financial infrastructure.
Neason Oliver
