STON

According to STON.fi's guide, staking locks STON in a smart contract for a period the user chooses. In return the staker receives ARKENSTON, which the project calls the entry pass to the STON.fi DAO and the measure of a user's voting power. STON.fi describes three tokens in total: STON as the main DEX token, GEMSTON as an engagement token that rewards active participation, and ARKENSTON as the governance token that carries voting rights. A third-party guide adds that ARKENSTON cannot be transferred and is burned to reclaim the staked STON once the lock period ends, while GEMSTON can be traded.

The STON.fi DEX launched in November 2022, according to a STON.fi Dev press release. CoinMarketCap's exchange profile also dates the founding to 2022 and says the aim was a user-friendly exchange for mass adoption through access to Telegram's audience. The protocol is developed by STON.fi Dev, which describes itself as an independent development company contributing to STON.fi's protocols and interfaces based on the direction set by the community. Slavik Baranov is named as its CEO. On 30 July 2025 STON.fi Dev announced a $9.5M Series A led by Ribbit Capital and CoinFund. The same release lists the company's backers as including CoinFund, Ribbit Capital, Delphi Ventures, Karatage, The Open Platform and TON Ventures. The money went to the development company; the release does not describe it as a sale of STON tokens.

The STON.fi DAO went live on 14 November 2025 as the protocol's on-chain governance system. Users stake STON to receive ARKENSTON, then propose, vote on and discuss changes, with the results recorded on-chain. According to STON.fi, once the DAO approves a proposal, the Ston Foundation, the project's operating entity, takes it through integration where it fits technically, legally and operationally. At the launch the project said STON.fi had processed more than 29.8M operations from 5.6M wallets. The DAO followed the July 2025 Series A announcement, which had listed a community governance layer among the planned uses of the funds.

Besides staking, STON.fi runs several ongoing programmes that distribute STON, according to its campaigns page. They include farming, the Stonbassadors ambassador programme with a monthly budget of up to 10,000 STON, and Stonboarding tasks that reward participants in STON. The project also says it occasionally airdrops tokens to early adopters and active users of the exchange.

Alongside the governance layer, the Series A release listed concentrated liquidity pools, native limit orders, core protocol optimisations and cross-chain swaps through Omniston as planned uses of the funds. STON.fi describes Omniston as its decentralised liquidity aggregation protocol. The project says it already powers swaps in TON wallets and is meant to enable cross-chain swaps without bridges or wrapped assets; as of July 2025 the cross-chain part was still a plan.