Thoughts on the Across token buyout proposal and what's next

Today, Across posted a proposal to convert from a token structure to a private company through an ACX token-to-equity exchange and buyout.

This proposal is a temperature check. Nothing happens without a discussion and formal vote.

Across is a great product. We pioneered crosschain intents and invented the 2-second bridging experience. Across has moved billions and billions of assets between chains, and we have helped unify Ethereum and all its chains. I’m proud of what we’ve built, and I believe this proposal lets us double down on our future while benefiting all existing tokenholders.

Below are my personal thoughts on why I think this proposal makes sense and why I’m maximally bullish on the future of Across.

Why transition to a private company?

I have always been a token maximalist, and I’ve always been against the “high FDV, low float” token launch strategy. I like fighting against the traditional VC path where companies privately build value in structures that regular people cannot access. We launched the Across token very early, at a very low valuation, and with a very broad airdrop. We picked this strategy so that we could build value in public *with *our community. We have done this for over 4 years.

Today, the macro environment has changed. Tokens are undervalued and underappreciated. I have many theories on why this is (that I’ll save for another post), but the reality for Across is that having a token generally hurts more than it helps.

Across has a consumer facing product, but Across is primarily payments infrastructure. Over the years, we have entered into contracts with many tier 1 crypto projects. But Across cannot directly enter these agreements as it has no legal entity: we need to route these agreements through our foundation. As we approach more traditional financial institutions, this wonky structure hinders us—it’s harder to sell our infra into tradfi or crypto-adjacent companies. The world I believe we are heading towards has more and more 3rd parties paying user transaction fees, and it’s becoming increasingly necessary to enter out-of-protocol agreements. We want to position Across to be maximally effective in this world. More on this below.

Where is Across going?

In a word, stablecoins.

At Devcon SEA in late 2024, I gave a presentation arguing that crosschain intents were needed to unify the many L2s, sidechains, and alt-L1 of crypto. The argument was simple: the rapid increase in the number of chains had fragmented the user experience, and users needed a 2-second bridging experience to unify this mess. The crosschain intents architecture that Across pioneered was, and still is, the only viable way to do this.

Today, we are fragmenting the user experience again, but in a different dimension. We now have many, many stablecoins. Users are moving dollars between USDC and USDT, but also between USDH, USDe, USDS, PYUSD, MUSD, CASH, and many more. We again are stepping into an incredibly messy and fragmented user experience.

What is especially crazy is that the user is required to pay to move between dollars?! You send $100 USDC and get $99 of stablecoinXYZ. What normie user is going to adopt this? It’s worse than credit cards or fintech payment apps.

I firmly believe that many stablecoins will win, but it will require $1 = $1.

Of course, there is some cost to move money. Someone has to pay some fee. But it shouldn’t be the user. It should be the asset issuer that is earning the yield on their stablecoin. The user should move money for free.

This is exactly the agreement that we pioneered with Native Markets for USDH, the Hyperliquid native stablecoin. You send $1 of USDC and get $1 of USDH. Or send $1m USDC and get $1m USDH. And of course you can do this in seconds from many different chains. This is what money movement should be like.

Across has two more yet-to-be-announced deals that make moving money free for users. My personal belief is that this “free bridging” will be table stakes for all stablecoins by the end of 2026. Securing these deals requires contracts and out-of-protocol payments, which are functions that are not well suited for DAOs.

Where is Across going (part 2)?

In two (buzzy) words: agentic payments.

Across is an intents-based protocol. That means a user states an intent “I want to move $10 USDC from Arbitrum to Base” and a network of solvers competes to fill that intent.

Back in 2024, there was much discussion about generalizing intents. Crypto twitter wanted to write intents like “I have $20, get me a pizza delivered in the next hour” and have it work. It was a cool idea, but it was too early.

It’s not exactly too early anymore. Agentic payments are a direct analogy to intents. You literally could declare your pizza intent and have a swarm of agents (aka solvers) hire RentAHuman.ai and compete to fill your pizza order. Or you could write “here’s $1000, buy me Taylor Swift tickets as soon as they come online”. Etc, etc.

It turns out that everything really is an intent, and Across is well positioned to be core infrastructure in this future world.

Final thoughts

The proposal to convert Across to a private company is, as far as I know, a first in the crypto space. We have done many iterations and reviews of this proposal. Our guiding principle was to make this fair: all employees, all investors (big and small), and all other token holders can exchange their tokens for equity at the same 1:1 ratio. Everyone will have the same class of shares, on the same terms.

This is new, and we expect questions. Please do share your thoughts on the Across forum. This proposal is a temperature check, and nothing will be decided without dialogue and a formal DAO vote.

For my part, I am bullish on Across and I am excited to double down on our future.

Full proposal in the Across forum is here.