Swapping STG for ZRO: Two Deadlines, One Fixed Rate and a 32 Percent Discount

If you still hold Stargate tokens (STG), you now have an expiry date in the calendar: after December 15, 2026, STG can no longer be converted into ZRO. LayerZero announced this in its ecosystem update on September 15, 2026, and it is the first time an end date has been named for this swap at all. Until now it ran indefinitely.

For most holders, however, an earlier deadline bites first. On September 18, Binance announced that it will carry out the swap for its own customers — and will halt trading in STG on October 6, 2026 at 03:00 UTC for that purpose. Half an hour later, at 03:30 UTC, STG deposits and withdrawals will be suspended and, according to the announcement, no longer supported. If you still want to send your tokens to the exchange, the deposit has to be fully completed before then.

And then there is the figure that nobody has written about so far. The swap runs at a fixed ratio of 1 STG = 0.08634 ZRO. That ratio comes from the acquisition proposal of August 2025. Recalculate it with today's prices and you receive considerably less for your STG than the same tokens still cost on the open market. How much less is set out below, with the arithmetic.

Until when can you swap STG for ZRO? Two deadlines, not one

The two dates belong to different houses and apply to different people. It is worth keeping them apart, because whether you have to do anything at all hangs on the distinction.

October 6, 2026 applies to you if your STG sit at Binance. The exchange states verbatim in its announcement that it will handle all technical requirements for the users involved. So you do not have to click anything. But trading ends on that day, open orders are deleted, and the route for deposits and withdrawals closes half an hour later.

December 15, 2026 applies to you if your STG sit in your own wallet. LayerZero puts it this way: the swap will remain available until December 15, after which conversions will no longer be supported. Until then the project says it is working with exchanges, market makers, custodians and ecosystem partners to accompany the transition.

A token merge is simply the consolidation of two tokens into one: one is withdrawn, the other remains, and a rate fixed in advance governs how many new units you receive for your old ones. Here STG is withdrawn and ZRO remains.

The 1 STG = 0.08634 ZRO ratio is fixed, the value it delivers is not

The ratio has been settled for more than a year. The LayerZero Foundation's acquisition proposal of August 10, 2025 states verbatim that all STG in circulation — staked and vote-escrowed included — would be swapped at a ratio of 1 STG to 0.08634 ZRO, corresponding to a value of $1.94 per ZRO and $0.1675 per STG. The same proposal names, as comparison figures, backing of $0.14444 per circulating STG and a market price at the time of $0.1637.

This is exactly where the catch lies. The ratio is a fixed number, but it connects two prices that have both moved since. ZRO stood at $1.12 on September 19, 2026 at 18:34 UTC (CoinGecko), while the exchange OKX showed $1.127 at the same moment. Against the $1.94 used in the 2025 calculation, that is around 42 percent lower.

Worked example: what 1,000 STG yield on the swap and on a sale today

Run the arithmetic on a round number and the gap is immediately visible. All prices in this section were retrieved from CoinGecko on September 19, 2026 at around 18:34 UTC.

• Swap route: 1,000 STG give you 86.34 ZRO. At a ZRO price of $1.12 that comes to $96.70, or, converted at the euro rate of 0.979998 euros per ZRO, around 84.61 euros.
• Sale route: the same 1,000 STG cost $0.142838 each on the market, so $142.84 in total, or roughly 124.43 euros.
• Gap: on this day the swap yields around 32 percent less than a sale on the market. Calculated with the OKX price for ZRO it is 31.9 percent, with the CoinGecko price 32.3 percent.

The STG price is no outlier from a single thin exchange. Within a daily volume of around $22 million, Binance showed $0.1428, Coinbase $0.1431, Kraken $0.1428 and KuCoin $0.1429. The prices sit closely together.

What you make of that is your decision and hangs on things this text does not know: your entry price, your holding period, fees, and whether you want to hold ZRO at all. What matters is only that you do the arithmetic yourself before you click, rather than taking the fixed rate for a fair price. Both prices move daily, and the figures above are a snapshot of a single afternoon. If you do not yet have an exchange on which both tokens can even be viewed, our comparison of the best crypto exchanges lists the venues that are regularly accessible in the EU.

Why the fixed 2025 swap rate sits so far from today's market price

The gap does not arise from an arithmetic error. It arises from the passage of time. The rate was fixed on a day in August 2025 when ZRO was worth almost $1.94. ZRO has given ground since, while STG holds up at a good $0.14. An offer that meant a premium on the STG market price in 2025 is therefore a discount on it today.

Why this gap has not closed by itself cannot be answered cleanly from the outside, and this text therefore makes no such claim. Only the observation itself can be verified: the fixed rate and the market price lie far apart today, and whoever swaps realises that distance. We described how strongly individual dates in the LayerZero ecosystem act on the ZRO price back in August, looking at the monthly unlocking of new tokens — read it in our analysis of the ZRO unlock and its monthly dilution.

If your STG sit at Binance: what the exchange handles automatically

For customers of the largest exchange the process is convenient, and still not without consequences. Binance announces that it will carry out the swap technically itself and refers to the project team's announcement for further detail. In practice that means your STG are converted into ZRO at the ratio of 1 to 0.08634 without you having to sign a transaction.

Three things are still worth keeping in view. First, trading ends on October 6 at 03:00 UTC, after which you can neither buy nor sell STG there. Second, open orders are deleted automatically at that moment, including limit orders you set months ago and forgot. Third, the deposit window closes at 03:30 UTC, and Binance explicitly advises allowing enough time for a deposit to be fully processed beforehand.

The Binance timetable in detail: margin, futures and spot fall away in stages

The exchange withdraws STG from circulation over a good two weeks and across several products. All times come from the Binance announcement of September 18, 2026 and are given in UTC.

• September 19, 06:00 UTC: Binance Margin suspends borrowing on the affected pairs in cross and isolated margin.
• September 24, 08:30 UTC: no new positions may be opened on the STG futures.
• September 24, 09:00 UTC: Binance Futures closes all open positions and settles them automatically. A forced settlement is a closure of a position triggered by the exchange, without you selling it yourself.
• September 24, 10:00 UTC: STG disappears from cross and isolated margin.
• October 5, 03:00 UTC: Spot Copy Trading removes the STG pairs from portfolios.
• October 6, 03:00 UTC: spot trading for STG/USDT ends, and trading bot services for this pair fall away.
• October 6, 03:30 UTC: STG deposits and withdrawals are suspended.

Nothing changes for ZRO: Binance writes that trading on the existing ZRO pairs is unaffected. Anyone who was in STG with leverage or through automated strategies therefore already has the tighter dates behind them, while the plain spot holder still has until October.

If your STG sit in your own wallet: the redemption site and its terms

Here things get less clear, and this is precisely where most guides on the internet fall down. According to the ZRO Foundation's terms of use, the official swap page is the address stargate.finance/bridge. The terms refer to it verbatim as the “STG Redemption Site” and name the ZRO Association together with the Stargate Foundation as operators. Redemption here means cashing in: you hand over STG and receive ZRO for it.

What is missing on the Stargate home page itself is striking. The navigation leads to Bridge, Earn, Stake, Pool and Overview. The addresses stargate.finance/redeem, /convert and /merge answer with a 404 error, and neither layerzero.network nor layerzero.foundation hosts a swap page of its own. The pointer to how the swap actually runs sits in a post on X that the LayerZero update links to.

This article therefore deliberately gives no click-by-click instructions. What is established: the terms name stargate.finance/bridge as the official address, and they have been unchanged since August 23, 2025. Everything beyond that you should look at on the site itself before you connect a wallet.

Why the swap is irreversible: STG are burned on redemption

This point is stated explicitly in the terms of use and belongs to the few things that leave no room for interpretation. All redemptions of STG into ZRO through the website are, accordingly, final, non-refundable and irreversible. All submitted STG are permanently and irrevocably destroyed on receipt, automatically and immediately, as part of the process via a smart contract.

This destruction is called a burn: the tokens are sent to an address from which nobody can retrieve them, and they thereby vanish from circulation. There is no way back afterwards, no cancellation and no support case that undoes the process. The terms also record that the foundation assumes no fiduciary duties and that actions you approve through your wallet are final.

Stargate switches off the bus on October 1: what that costs for bridge transfers

The same update contains a second dated change that concerns an entirely different readership: everyone who uses Stargate as a bridge between blockchains. Stargate has so far delivered transactions in two ways. Taxi delivers the value on the destination chain immediately. Bus bundles several transactions into one trip and pushes down gas costs that way.

From October 1, 2026, according to LayerZero, all Stargate transactions will be delivered via Taxi. The cheaper pooled route falls away with it. Anyone regularly moving smaller amounts between chains should recheck the costs afterwards before letting their routine run on.

Dates in the LayerZero ecosystem creating concrete deadlines for action is nothing new. In August, balances on 15 shut-down chains expired — how that played out at the time and how short the window was is in our report on the shutdown of the 15 chains.

Is swapping STG for ZRO taxable in Germany?

This question cannot be answered conclusively here, and any site claiming otherwise is overstepping its competence. What can be said is the framework within which you ask it.

A swap of one token for another typically counts, for German tax purposes, as a process in which one asset is given up and another obtained. It is therefore more than a mere renaming. Whether that becomes a taxable private disposal transaction under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act depends, among other things, on the holding period and on whether a gain arises at all. Section 23 (3) sentence 5 of the Income Tax Act provides an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros per calendar year for the sum of all private disposal transactions.

It gets particularly tricky with the Binance variant, because you do not trigger the process yourself there. Whether an automatically executed swap is to be treated differently for tax purposes than a self-initiated one is not something an article can decide for your individual case. The swap site's terms of use make clear, for their part, that you alone are responsible for determining, calculating, reporting and paying all taxes due, and that the foundation provides no tax advice.

In practice that means two things. Secure your records while you can still get them: swap date, number of STG, ZRO received, prices at the time of the transaction. At Binance that means exporting the transaction history before October 6, because after the delisting it gets more laborious. And settle your individual case with a tax adviser familiar with crypto matters.

How to spot a fake swap site

Every migration with a deadline attracts imitations, and this case is particularly vulnerable because the route is unclear. When the official path is not on the home page, people search for it, and search ads pointing at fake addresses are cheap.

Three checks that cost little time. First: type the address yourself or follow it from a source you know, instead of from a search ad or a direct message. Second: a genuine swap site never asks for your seed phrase or your private key. Anyone who does is after your balance. Third: check in your wallet's approval dialogue which contract receives which permission, and distrust unlimited approvals for tokens you have no intention of swapping.

And the sentence that always applies: there is no urgency that justifies an unchecked click. Even the tighter of the two deadlines is still a good two weeks away.

What happens if you miss the December 15 deadline?

LayerZero writes only one sentence about it, and it is unambiguous: after this date, conversions would no longer be supported. What happens to unswapped STG after that is not in the announcement. Whether a route through exchanges, custodians or a later individual arrangement stays open is therefore open, and will not be painted in here.

Only the opposite can be planned for: assume that no regular swap is possible after December 15, 2026, and organise your actions accordingly. Anyone holding at Binance has the earlier marker on October 6 anyway and has to do nothing for it — except decide beforehand whether an automatic swap at a fixed rate is what they want.

Swapping STG for ZRO: your takeaways

1. Find out where your STG actually sit. At an exchange, that venue's own timetable applies, and at Binance that is October 6, 2026. In your own wallet, December 15, 2026 applies, and then you have to act yourself. Our comparison of the best crypto exchanges shows which venues are regularly accessible.
2. Weigh the fixed swap rate against the market price before you do anything. Multiply your quantity by 0.08634 and that figure by the current ZRO price. Compare the result with what your STG cost on the market. On September 19, 2026 the swap route came out around 32 percent below. If you trigger the process yourself from a wallet, look first at how you store your holdings securely — the options are in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Secure the records while you can get them. Export your transaction history before the delisting and record the date, the quantity and the prices. For sorting and evaluating it, the programmes in our comparison of crypto tax tools are suitable.

Sources and status of the figures

The deadlines and the wording on the swap come from the LayerZero ecosystem update of September 15, 2026. The terms on irreversibility, the official address of the swap site and the responsibility for taxes are in the terms of use of the STG redemption site. The staggered timetable and the swap ratio for exchange customers come from the Binance announcement “Binance Will Support the Stargate Finance (STG) Token Merge to LayerZero (ZRO)” of September 18, 2026. The ratio of 1 to 0.08634 and the valuation of $0.1675 per STG are in the LayerZero Foundation's acquisition proposal of August 10, 2025. All prices were retrieved from CoinGecko on September 19, 2026 at around 18:34 UTC and cross-checked against OKX and CoinGecko's exchange overview.

(As of September 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)