TL;DR:
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SCRT token is moving to a new home on Arbitrum, a leading Ethereum layer-2 ecosystem.
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The snapshot/migration date is set for September 1, 2026.
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A new ERC-20 SCRT token will be created; all holders of native and staked SCRT can migrate via a snapshot-based redeemer. Staked SCRT carries over as-is, so stakers don’t need to unstake before the snapshot.
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Before September 1st, holders should convert any SCRT held in contracts – including AMM/liquidity pools, sSCRT, and bridged SCRT – back into native or staked SCRT. Balances not held as native or staked SCRT at snapshot time may be permanently lost.
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If you hold IBC assets on Secret (e.g. IBC ATOM, OSMO, USDC), transfer them back to their native chains via IBC before the migration date.
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SCRT Labs ends official support for Secret Network on September 1, 2026 – after that, continued operation depends on third-party validators and isn’t guaranteed.
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Secret’s source code will be released under a permissive open-source license
Introduction
Six years ago, Secret Network shipped something no other live blockchain had: privacy-preserving smart contracts, in production, on mainnet. Encrypted contract execution running for real users in 2020, before “confidential compute” was a pitch-deck category, before anyone was seriously talking about confidential AI. Secret was early. We didn’t just write a paper and wait; we launched it.
That work stands on its own, and the case behind it has only gotten stronger. More sensitive data moves into closed systems every year, and the question of who gets to compute on what, privately, has gone from niche to unavoidable. Secret was making that argument when it was unfashionable to.
We built on Cosmos because in 2020 it was the right home. Appchains had momentum. IBC looked credible. CosmWasm was competitive. Wallets, exchanges, custodians, and infrastructure teams were willing to back an ambitious, fragmented ecosystem. That bet made sense at the time, and it’s part of how Secret got built.
The environment has changed, though, and so has the opportunity in front of us.
Why SCRT needs a new home
There are still serious teams in Cosmos, and it deserves credit for giving Secret its start. But for SCRT as an asset, the picture is hard to argue with. Liquidity has thinned. Builders have drifted to other ecosystems. The tooling you’d want to count on is shakier than it used to be, and a number of projects that once anchored Cosmos have migrated, seriously considered it, or stopped treating Cosmos as the default.
For a token, that shows up in concrete ways. Holders need wallets that support the asset without friction. Getting in and out depends on real exchange liquidity. Institutions custody on rails they already trust or have easy access to. And the layer underneath all of it, the indexers, explorers, monitoring, audits, and bridges, is what keeps an asset safe to hold and integrate over the long run. That layer is thinning on Cosmos. The EVM ecosystem has far more of it.
The security risk is the part we take most seriously
The recent Axelar-Secret IBC bridge incident made this concrete. The exploit hit the bridge integration. It did not touch native SCRT, Secret’s core privacy protocol, or the confidential compute model itself. But it exposed exactly the kind of risk that builds up in a thinning ecosystem: old integration paths, trusted-bridge assumptions, and legacy code sitting in places where maintenance and tooling depth aren’t what they used to be.
That risk is getting worse, not better. Old code is becoming dramatically easier to analyze. Attacks that used to take deep manual effort are getting cheaper as models get better at reading contracts, tracing assumptions, and turning a forgotten edge case into a working exploit. With AI, the cost of attacking stale code is falling across the board. A large, active ecosystem will eventually absorb that because there are more auditors, more monitoring, more eyes on the same surfaces. A shrinking one doesn’t - and will likely fade out. The long tail of old code just gets harder to defend.
For $SCRT to endure, it needs a new stable home. The Ethereum ecosystem is that home, and on September 1st, the $SCRT token with its substantial holder base will migrate. Read below to see if you need to take action now to ensure you migrate safely.
A home on Arbitrum
The token’s new home is Arbitrum, one of the largest and most active ecosystems built on Ethereum. It’s a deep, established DeFi environment with billions in liquidity, a broad base of active traders, and a thousand-plus protocols already composing with one another. For SCRT, that means the things a token needs to be safe to hold and easy to use: real liquidity, mature tooling, broad wallet and exchange support, and an active community of builders, available from day one.
Arbitrum has welcomed Secret and is ready to support the migration and SCRT’s growth across its ecosystem, from liquidity to broader ecosystem activation. After years in a thinning ecosystem, that’s a meaningful change: SCRT moves from a shrinking environment into one with momentum, reach, and a genuine appetite for new assets. We’ll share more on what that support involves closer to the migration.
What the migration actually involves
The plan is a one-time snapshot of SCRT balances, used to issue a new ERC-20 SCRT contract on Arbitrum.
The current target snapshot date is September 1, 2026, and the exact block height will be announced closer to the snapshot date.
The snapshot will include:
- Native SCRT held in wallets
- Staked SCRT, including any in-progress unbonding (no need to unstake)
The snapshot will not include:
- sSCRT or other private Secret tokens
- SCRT bridged to other chains
- SCRT and sSCRT held in contracts, such as liquidity pools and similar
- IBC tokens bridged to Secret Network (such as NobleUSDC, WBTC, Atom, stAtom, INJ, sINJ and others)
- Other SNIP-20 tokens
Those exclusions are deliberate. Pulling private balances, contract-held tokens, and bridged representations into the snapshot would add complexity and risk to a process that has to stay simple, verifiable, and safe. If you want your SCRT counted, make sure it’s held as native or staked SCRT before the snapshot.
Any SCRT that is not held as native or staked SCRT in a wallet you control at the moment of the snapshot – including sSCRT, SCRT in contracts or liquidity pools, and SCRT bridged to other chains – will not be included and cannot be claimed later. If you want a balance counted, convert it back into native or staked SCRT before the snapshot date.
We also urge users to unwrap and move their IBC tokens to other chains before the migration date, to avoid any risk of losing funds.
Beyond holding/staking SCRT (publicly) in your wallet, and moving your bridged IBC tokens elsewhere, there is nothing you need to do. This is not a burn, not a deposit window, and not something you have to act on before the snapshot to be included. It’s snapshot-based. You don’t send anything anywhere first.
We will also reach out to leading exchanges to ensure an orderly transition, but we cannot commit to one on their behalf. It may therefore be safest to withdraw SCRT into your self-custodied wallets before the snapshot date.
Claiming your SCRT
After the snapshot is finalized, we’ll deploy the SCRT contract suite on Arbitrum: including the ERC-20 SCRT token, the Staked SCRT token and the Redeemer contract tied to the snapshot. Governance will be handled on-chain as well.
The Redeemer governs the claiming process. It stores the snapshot’s Merkle root, and eligible holders claim their SCRT by submitting a proof that verifies against that root. No tokens need to be sent to the contract beforehand, and every claim can be independently verified. We’ll open-source a front-end that easily allows claiming your tokens.. The Redeemer remains open indefinitely.
The full SCRT balance captured by the snapshot, both native and staked, is minted at deployment and held by the Redeemer, from which eligible holders can claim their allocation.
Tokenomics
SCRT stays the governance token, and existing tokenomics carry over with two changes:
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Official support for the Cosmos L1 is dropped
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Validators on the old Cosmos L1 stop receiving official validator rewards
To be clear, this proposal does not shut down the L1. As long as two thirds of the staking power continues operating, the network can keep producing blocks after the snapshot, and the old-chain SCRT keeps its existing tokenomics at the protocol level. Separately, regardless of how the vote goes, SCRT Labs will conclude its development and related support of the Cosmos-based Secret L1 on September 1, 2026. All related source code will be released under a permissive open-source license, so that the community can run and build on it.
While we expect the major liquidity sources, exchanges and market makers, to move to the new ERC-20 SCRT, that is ultimately the decision of the many third parties in the Secret ecosystem. It is a market and community decision, not something SCRT Labs controls or directs.
Staking continues, but its job changes. Instead of securing the old L1 through validator rewards, staking is how holders participate in governance and earn inflation. We propose reducing inflation to 5%, down from the current 9%. Anything beyond that is for the community to propose and decide after the migration.
For now, this proposal keeps tokenomics deliberately simple: migrate first, with only the inflation change above. Beyond this, the tokenomics may evolve over time - through community governance - to better support the protocol’s long-term vision.
Where this is going
Moving the token is about stability, but it isn’t only defensive. It clears the way to put energy where the case is strongest: confidential AI, and verifiable, confidential off-chain compute.
The original bet – that people need to compute on sensitive data without exposing it – has only gotten more pressing as AI pushes more computation into closed systems run by a handful of companies. The frontier now is doing that work off-chain, at the performance real applications need, while still being able to prove what ran and keep the inputs private.
A stable home on Arbitrum shifts focus from a legacy and illiquid ecosystem and gives Secret a healthier base: deeper liquidity, broader tooling, and a larger community of builders to integrate with.
Arbitrum is more than a venue for the token. Secret’s confidential and verifiable compute stack lines up naturally with the kind of applications being built there: AI agents, financial services, on-chain automation, and other workflows where data protection and verifiable execution matter. Moving closer to that activity is a chance to put the technology to work where there’s real demand for it.
This is a proposal, not a decision
Everything above is what we believe is the right move. It is not settled. A change this size belongs to the people who hold the token, so it goes to a community governance vote. If it passes, we execute on the timeline laid out here. If it doesn’t, the migration won’t proceed, though SCRT Labs will still conclude its support of the Cosmos L1 on September 1 as described above.
It is worth being precise about what a yes vote approves. This vote is about one thing: giving SCRT a durable home. We’re keeping it narrow on purpose, to make it easier for the community to align and move forward.
Conclusion
Secret built something real. It put privacy-preserving smart contracts on mainnet before the industry had a name for the category, and the case for private computation has only grown since. As AI pushes more and more computation into closed systems run by a handful of companies, the question Secret has asked from the start, who gets to compute privately and on whose terms, matters more now than it ever has.
None of this would exist without the people who believed in it, the builders, validators, and holders who backed privacy as a principle when it wasn’t the easy thing to back. The hope is that the story continues on Arbitrum, where $SCRT will stand on stable ground.