Stargate / LayerZero Review
Exact fee split, and a licence that expired unresolved
of 10
Stargate publishes a 6 basis point fee with its exact destination — 4 bps treasury, 1 bp veSTG holders, 1 bp liquidity providers — and LayerZero documents a configurable verifier stack with an unusually candid warning about single-provider chains.
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Fee
6 bps: 4 bps treasury, 1 bp veSTG, 1 bp LPs
Partner rebate
0.3 bps
Trust model
Configurable DVN stack with a verification threshold
Stargate licence
BUSL-1.1, change date 17 Mar 2026 passed, no change licence named
LayerZero licence
LZBL-1.2 — states it is not an open source licence
Scores
Each criterion carries equal weight. The overall score is the average of these 5 scores — (9.0 + 8.0 + 2.0 + 2.0 + 9.0) ÷ 5 = 6.0.
Pros
- Fee published to the basis point: 6 bps total, split 4 treasury, 1 veSTG, 1 LP
- Partner rebate stated at 0.3 bps
- LayerZero documents its DVN security stack and how verification thresholds work
- Explicitly warns that production deployments should require a DVN not operated by LayerZero Labs, and that some chains have only one DVN provider
- Extensive audits named including Certora, OtterSec, Zellic, Paladin and Blockian
Cons
- The LayerZero v2 licence states in its own text that it is not an open source license
- Stargate Core's BUSL change date of 17 March 2026 has passed and the parameters name no successor licence at all
- The official supported-networks page renders a counter reading zero chains
- The fee schedule was found on the legacy documentation site, not the current one
The security warning is the best thing here
LayerZero documents that each DVN independently verifies a message payload and that a nonce is marked verified once the designated threshold is met. It then warns that production deployments should explicitly configure at least one required DVN not operated by LayerZero Labs, and that some chains currently have only one DVN provider deployed.
Publishing the circumstances in which your own security model is weakest is rare, and we have scored it accordingly.
A licence left unresolved
Stargate Core's Business Source License names a change date of 17 March 2026 — four months before we checked — but its parameters block specifies no Change License and no Additional Use Grant. On the face of the file, what the licence became after that date is simply unstated. LayerZero v2 sits under its own LZBL-1.2, which opens by saying it is not an open source license.
Chains, unanswered
The official supported-networks page renders a dynamic counter reading zero chains, and the public API returned an error. There is no published answer to read.
How it compares
Synapse
MIT-licensed, and little else readable
Chainflip
Apache-licensed, with documentation gaps
Squid
Charges nothing, documents little
deBridge
Per-chain flat fees, published in full
Hop Protocol
Every fee component published as a range
Celer cBridge
GPL-3.0 with a published fee ceiling
Wormhole
A named quorum: 13 of 19 guardians
Across
Optimistic security explained in one sentence
Axelar
Apache-licensed with the deepest audit archive
Sources
Scored from published primary sources rather than hands-on use. Every figure above comes from one of the pages below, on the date shown. Manufacturers change prices and specifications without notice — if something here no longer matches the source, tell us and we will correct it.
- 1.Stargate — protocol fees (legacy documentation) — checked
- 2.LayerZero — modular security and DVN stack — checked
- 3.Stargate — LICENSE — checked
- 4.LayerZero v2 — LZBL-1.2 licence — checked
- 5.LayerZero — audit archive — checked
Frequently asked questions
What does Stargate charge?
6 basis points per non-STG transfer, split 4 bps to treasury, 1 bp to veSTG holders and 1 bp to liquidity providers, with a 0.3 bps partner rebate.
Is LayerZero open source?
No. The LayerZero v2 licence, LZBL-1.2, states in its own opening text that it is not an open source license.
Nothing here is financial advice. Editorial policy · How we score · How we're funded.