Yesterday a Stride contributor proposed a merger with the Cosmos Hub. Under this proposal, STRD tokens would be bought out by the hub with ATOM and Stride would cease to have their own token. The forum post in full detail is here: https://forum.cosmos.network/t/convert-entire-strd-supply-to-atom/11650
My take: First off, I’m not surprised to see “M&A” type activity in a bear market pick up, and Stride is already a consumer chain secured by ATOM so it makes sense.
However… what is tough about this is because of how transparent it is. There have been no terms announced/buyout price and so now the communities need to decide on all of this while both tokens are liquid and trading. I am not saying the transparency is all bad, it is much better than backroom deals, but the lack of terms makes this a tricky one to me. The challenge here is going to get both communities to agree on some fair price. The Hub will need to spend ~$80M ATOM to acquire and that’s using the current price which is atypical in acquisitions (the acquirer pays a premium). There are also tokens vesting to both team members and investors, what will happen there?
Regardless of what you think, the proposal has received anything from a lacklustre response, as there are already 60 replies on the forum thread in ~24 hours. This proposal is going to be discussed, analyzed, torn to shreds, re-done, etc over the coming weeks/months so there’s not really anything conclusive to say about it at this time other than
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It’s kind of interesting as the Hub now owns its LST (plus becomes an LST provider for other chains)
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When have you ever seen a radically transparent merger discussion like this before?