Cross-chain expansion
Expansion takes a token that graduated on one chain and gives it a life on another - not a wrapped copy or a bridge IOU, but the same canonical supply moved natively across chains, with a real pool seeded on the far side. It is built on LayerZero’s OFT standard (it is not the Wormhole protocol, despite the nickname you may hear), and you choose it up front, at launch.
What expansion does
A normal token lives on one chain forever. An expanded token can be sent to and traded on a second chain, sharing one supply across both: tokens that move to the new chain are locked or burned on the home chain and appear on the target, so the total in circulation never changes. On the target chain, degen.zone seeds a fresh pool (single-sided, carrying our own fee hooks) so the token has a real market the moment it arrives.
How it works
- One canonical supply, bridged natively. The token is a LayerZero OFT (Omnichain Fungible Token). Moving it across chains isn’t a third-party bridge wrapping your token - the token is the bridge, so there is no separate wrapped asset to fragment liquidity.
- A seeded pool on the target. Expansion doesn’t just make the token transferable elsewhere; it opens a pool on the target chain, carrying the same hook trio degen.zone tokens graduate into, so trading and fees work there like they do at home.
- It runs after graduation. A token expands once it has graduated and has a real market to mirror - the token page runs an “Expand now” stepper for it, resuming from wherever you left off.
You elect it at launch
Even though expansion executes after graduation, you decide it at launch, on a card beside the venue. The reasoning is honesty: a creator choosing where their token will live should make that choice where every other launch decision is made, not discover it buried on a page months later.
Two numbers still being finalised
- The default tranche size - how much of supply the seeded target pool starts with (the form’s placeholder caps a creator’s holdings at
2%of supply). - The flat expansion fee - a one-off fee for the expansion, whose amount is a pending client decision (it ships at
0by default until set).
Which chains
| Chain | Can it be an expansion target? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Robinhood Chain | Yes (built) | LayerZero endpoint present. |
| BNB Smart Chain | Yes (built) | LayerZero endpoint present. |
| Base | Yes (built) | LayerZero endpoint present. |
| Ronin | No - permanently | LayerZero runs no endpoint on Ronin, so it has no address in the network. Nothing can send an OFT to a chain LayerZero doesn’t serve. |
| Solana | Planned (later in v1) | Gated on legal counsel for LayerZero’s Solana program. The election makes no Solana-specific promise, so nothing else waits on it. |
The exclusion of Ronin is a fact about LayerZero, not our roadmap: with no endpoint on Ronin there is no way to address it. The day LayerZero ships Ronin support, adding it is a one-line change - until then, treat Ronin as unreachable for expansion in either direction.
What cannot expand
A reward token can never expand. This is structural, not scheduling:
- A reward token’s 3% is enforced by its Solana Token-2022 mint. A bridged copy on another chain is a plain token that pays no transfer fee - so expanding would route volume to a venue where your holders earn nothing, quietly undermining the whole point of the token.
- Worse, neither bridge shape even survives the mint: a burn/mint OFT needs a mint authority that reward launches revoke, and a lock/unlock OFT would pay the 3% into escrow and silently under-back the supply.
So if you elect expansion, the reward model disappears from the form, and if you pick the reward model, the expansion election is refused - the two are mutually exclusive from both directions.
What you are trusting
Expansion relies on LayerZero’s message-passing (its DVN set) to move supply between chains, and on degen.zone’s factory and seeder contracts - deployed CREATE2-identically on every EVM chain, so the token has the same address everywhere - to deploy the peer and seed the target pool. The supply invariant (one total across all chains) is enforced by the OFT itself. As with everything else in these docs, this is a real trust surface, stated plainly rather than hidden.
Is it live?
Built · not live - the EVM leg is built end to end: the OFT and factory contracts, a proven round-trip exact to the wei, the hook-carrying seeder with a live seeded pool on BSC testnet, the API’s link machine, and the launch-time election plus the token page’s resumable “Expand now” stepper. Two things gate the flip:
- client sign-off on the tranche size and the flat expansion fee (above);
- one watched end-to-end run through the real UI - launch with the election, graduate, expand, trade on the target chain.
Until then the election renders visible and inert, with its reason attached, and flipping one flag is the only change. The Solana legs follow later within the same v1, gated on counsel.