No.307
StakeStone STO
the omnichain yield ferryman
🎭 a quiet boatman who never lets your money sit idle on one shore
💬 “Hand me your ETH or your BTC. I'll give you back a STONE that keeps earning while you carry it, and I'll ferry it to whichever of the 20-plus chains you need it on. Nothing of yours has to sit still.”
- The idea: stake ETH or BTC, get a yield-bearing token (STONE for ETH, SBTC for BTC) that still moves and spends freely.
- The trick: those tokens are LayerZero omnichain tokens, so they travel across 20+ chains without a normal bridge.
- STO: the governance token. Lock it for veSTO and vote on how rewards are shared.
- Supply: fixed at 1 billion STO, no inflation stated. Trading opened on Binance on May 2, 2025.
📖 The Story
In DeFi there is an old, annoying choice. You can stake your coins to earn rewards, or you can keep them free to spend and move, but usually not both. Stake, and your money is locked away earning quietly. Keep it liquid, and it earns nothing. StakeStone, founded in Singapore in 2023, set out to erase that choice.
The answer it offers is a stone you can carry. You hand over ETH and receive STONE; you hand over BTC and receive SBTC. Behind the scenes the original coins are put to work staking and restaking, but the token in your hand keeps earning and stays fully usable. You can spend it, lend it, or send it onward, and the yield rides along with it.
The other half of the idea is travel. Crypto liquidity is scattered across dozens of separate chains, like coins stranded on different islands. StakeStone built STONE and SBTC as omnichain tokens, so the same stone is recognised natively across more than 20 chains. That is where the ferryman picture comes from: the protocol carries your earning capital wherever it is needed, instead of leaving it beached on one shore.
Money followed the idea. Binance Labs invested in March 2024. That November a $22 million round, led by Polychain Capital alongside Binance Labs, OKX Ventures and others, came in behind it. The STO token launched in early April 2025, Binance ran an airdrop of 15 million STO to eligible savers in late April, and on May 2, 2025 STO began trading.
📊 Stats
🧩 How it works
Picture a loop with a vault at its heart. You deposit ETH or BTC, and that deposit goes to work in the vault through proof-of-stake staking and EigenLayer restaking. In return you hold a STONE (or SBTC) receipt that earns yield. Because that receipt is a LayerZero omnichain token, it can roam to any connected chain and keep earning the whole way, and whenever you want, you redeem it back at the vault for your original asset plus the yield it gathered.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- Solves a real pain: your capital can earn staking rewards and stay spendable at the same time, instead of being locked away
- Omnichain by design. STONE and SBTC move across 20+ chains without the usual bridge step that has caused many hacks elsewhere
- Backed by serious names (Binance Labs, then a $22M round led by Polychain Capital in Nov 2024), and supply is capped at 1 billion with no inflation stated
- It stacks risk on risk. Your yield depends on staking, EigenLayer restaking and LayerZero messaging all behaving, so a fault in any layer can hurt you
- Young and small. The token only began trading in May 2025, and only about 22.5% of supply circulates while the rest unlocks over time, which can pressure the price
- Not beginner-light. Liquid restaking, OFTs and veSTO voting are a lot of moving parts (and the founder identity, cited as 'Charles K', rests on secondary sources only)
🧬 Evolution lineage
StakeStone is not a fork and not its own blockchain. It is an app-layer protocol that sits on top of others: it stakes through Ethereum and EigenLayer, and ferries tokens with LayerZero. In spirit STONE is a cross-chain cousin of Lido's stETH, in the same family as the EtherFi, Renzo and Puffer restaking tokens.
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is StakeStone?
- A protocol where you stake ETH or BTC and receive a yield-bearing token, STONE for ETH or SBTC for BTC. That token keeps earning staking rewards while staying free to move and spend across 20+ blockchains, so your money is not locked up while it works.
- What is the STO token for?
- STO is the governance token. You lock it to get veSTO and then vote on how rewards and emissions are shared out across the protocol. STONE and SBTC are the things that actually earn yield, STO is the steering wheel.
- How does STONE move across so many chains?
- STONE and SBTC are built as LayerZero Omnichain Fungible Tokens (OFTs). Instead of using a traditional bridge that locks coins on one side and mints copies on the other, the same token is recognised natively on every connected chain, so it travels without the usual bridge step.
- How many STO tokens are there?
- The supply is fixed at 1,000,000,000 STO, and no inflation mechanism is stated, so that ceiling does not move. About 225 million (~22.53%) were circulating when Binance listed it; the rest is released slowly under vesting contracts.
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only