STPT to AWE Swap: What Happens to Your Tokens on September 21, 2026

On September 21, 2026, the swap window from STPT to AWE closes for good. Anyone still holding the old STPT tokens in self-custody after that date can no longer exchange them for AWE. The AWE set aside for those tokens but never collected will then be decided by a vote of token holders. You are affected only if your STPT sit in a wallet you control, or on an exchange that did not carry out the swap in spring 2025.

This guide answers four questions: whether you need to act at all, how the swap works through the official portal, why your personal deadline can fall a week earlier depending on the network, and how the process is treated for tax purposes. In that order.

What happens to your STPT tokens on September 21, 2026

Since its rebranding, the project behind the token has been called AWE Network; before that it ran as STP Network. On August 20, 2026, it set the closing date in a blog post of its own: after September 21, 2026, STPT is no longer eligible to be swapped for AWE. The swap window has been open since May 2025, it is now being closed, and after that there is no official route left from the old token to the new one.

A quick definition: a token migration is the exchange of an old project token for a new one, usually because the project is switching blockchain or changing its name. The old token loses its role and the new one takes it over. Here the ratio is 1 STPT on Ethereum to 1 AWE on Base. The project charges no fee of its own for the swap; you pay the network fees on both chains yourself, and on Ethereum those are noticeably higher than on Base.

One detail is missing from the primary source, and no text should invent it: the blog post gives no time of day and no time zone for September 21. The safe reading follows from that. Treat September 20, 2026 as your last working day and do not plan the swap for the final hour. Anyone who starts on the deadline itself is relying on it still being midnight somewhere in the world.

Are you affected? The five-minute check for wallet and exchange account

The large majority of holders have nothing to do, and that is why the topic has gone unnoticed in the German-speaking market so far. The project names the venues that handled the swap automatically in 2025 in its official migration guide: Binance, Upbit, HTX, MEXC, Gate, Bitget and Bithumb. If your balance sat with one of them during that period, you have held AWE for a long time and can stop reading here.

You need to act in three situations. First, if STPT sit in a wallet of your own, whether software or hardware. Second, if your exchange did not support the swap and still displays an STPT balance for you. Third, if you withdrew STPT from an exchange in 2025 and have not looked at them since. That third group is the one that regularly slips through in deadline cases: the money is not gone, it has merely dropped out of sight.

The check takes a few minutes. Open your wallet and look for STPT in the token list. If your wallet only displays known tokens, check the balance through a block explorer for the address you traded under in 2025. The relevant contract on Ethereum carries the address 0xde7d85157d9714eadf595045cc12ca4a5f3e2adb; on Base there is a second, older version of STPT at 0x4489d0a0345eCB216A3994De780d453c7fA6312C. Both addresses appear in exactly that form in the project's technical documentation. If you are sorting through your holdings anyway, the hardware wallet comparison lists the devices that allow such a check without the detour through an exchange.

Why the Ethereum contract still reports 1.94 billion STPT

Here lies the misunderstanding that leaves most holders feeling safe. The project states that around 99 percent of the tokens have already migrated. That figure comes from the project itself and has not been independently verified by us. It also describes AWE claimed on Base rather than STPT destroyed on Ethereum. The old contract is in fact not reduced by the swap at all.

You can check that arithmetic yourself. On September 8, 2026 at 06:38 UTC we queried the totalSupply() function of the STPT contract through a public Ethereum node, at block 25,930,906: the result reads 1,942,419,283.03 STPT at 18 decimal places. For comparison we queried the same function on the AWE contract on Base, at block 51,030,084: a round 2,000,000,000 AWE there. The supply of the old token therefore stands unchanged in the books of the chain.

totalSupply denotes the total quantity of a token that a contract reports. If that value stays constant through a migration, the swap is a portal exchange and not a burn, meaning there is no destruction at contract level. In practice that means your STPT will not disappear from your wallet on September 21. The tokens stay visible, keep their number and lose only their claim to the new token. A glance into your wallet after the deadline will therefore reassure you about something that no longer holds true.

How the swap works through the official swap portal

For self-custody holders the route runs through the project's official portal, reachable at the address upgrade.stp.network. A swap portal is a web application operated by the project, to which you send the old token and through which you then collect the new one. The process has three stations: you deposit your STPT on Ethereum through the portal, wait for the automatic confirmation, which the project puts at around three minutes, and then claim your AWE on Base through the same interface.

The migration guide stresses two points explicitly, and both are security points. There is no separate contract address to which you are supposed to send tokens manually. And you should not use third-party bridges. Anyone who transfers STPT on their own initiative to some address that another person has given them has no claim to AWE and, as a rule, no one left to talk to either.

If you would rather take the detour through an exchange: a few venues folded the swap into their own processes at the time. Whether that is still offered today, shortly before the deadline, is for each exchange to decide and can change at short notice. Check it in your provider's support section instead of assuming it. And if you are thinking about switching venues anyway, the overview of crypto exchanges in comparison helps with the question of which venue handles such changeovers cleanly in the first place.

The hidden deadline: seven days of bridge time for STPT on Base

This calculation has not appeared in German anywhere so far, and it is the most practically important part of this text. There is an older version of STPT on Base. Anyone holding it cannot swap directly, because a Base-to-Base swap does not exist. The guide prescribes the route: first you have to bridge your STPT from Base back to Ethereum, then you can submit them through the portal and claim your AWE on Base.

A bridge is an application that transfers tokens from one blockchain to another. For the return trip from Base to Ethereum the project explicitly names a waiting period of seven days and urges you to factor it into your planning. Those seven days are not an estimate by the project; they are the usual challenge period for return routes of this kind.

September 21 minus seven days of bridge time makes September 14, 2026 the realistic last starting date, and only if everything goes smoothly. Anyone who discovers STPT sitting on Base on September 18 will not make it, arithmetically speaking. Anyone whose holdings are on Ethereum has an easier time and is well served by September 20. So clarify first of all which chain your balance sits on, because your calendar depends on it.

What happens to unclaimed AWE after the deadline?

The project puts it this way: unclaimed AWE that was earmarked for the migration will become the subject of a community governance proposal once the window closes. A governance proposal is a motion that the holders of a token vote on; the outcome then binds the project. Which options will be put to the vote is open. Destruction, redistribution or a lock-up over a longer period are all conceivable. The project intends to publish further details after the deadline.

For you as a holder this amounts to a plain shift of responsibility. Until September 21 you decide whether to collect your share. After that a vote decides, one you cannot take part in with an unswapped token, because voting rights attach to AWE and not to STPT. That is no reproach to the project; it is the normal mechanics of windows like this one. It is, however, the reason why working through such a deadline pays off even when the balance is small.

What the swap means for taxes

Caution is warranted here, and this section does not replace tax advice. The starting point: on March 6, 2025 the German Federal Ministry of Finance published a circular on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets. It confirms the familiar line that swapping one crypto asset for another within the one-year holding period triggers a private disposal transaction, while gains remain tax-free after a year has elapsed.

Whether a pure one-to-one migration even counts as a swap in that sense is answered inconsistently in the specialist literature. Tax firms and crypto tax providers largely take the view that in a migration the acquisition date and acquisition costs carry over to the new token, and that no taxable event therefore occurs. That view is well founded, but it is an interpretation and not an explicit statement by the ministry on this precise case.

In practice what mainly follows from this is a duty to document things for yourself. Record when you originally bought STPT, what quantity you submitted and when, and when you claimed AWE, together with the transaction identifiers on both chains. A tax tool with portfolio tracking takes that matching off your hands and carries the old holding period correctly over to the new position. Anyone who reconstructs it only next spring will be searching two blockchains for transactions they no longer remember.

How to tell a genuine migration page from a fake

Deadlines that create pressure to act are the preferred setting for counterfeit portals, and that applies to every migration. Four checks cost you under two minutes in total and rule out the most common cases.

1. Take the address from the source, not from a search. Open the portal address via the project's blog post or documentation and, if in doubt, type it out. Paid search ads on typed brand names are a known attack route.
2. Never enter your recovery words. A swap portal never asks for your seed. It connects to your wallet and lets you confirm a transaction, nothing more.
3. No manual transfers to addresses someone names. The project's guide states explicitly that there is no separate deposit address.
4. Read the approval you are signing. Check in your wallet which contract you are approving for which amount, and cap the approval at the amount you actually intend to swap.

Anyone who observes these four points has cleared away the largest part of the risk that lies in your own hands during a migration at all.

What this deadline has in common with the year's other migration dates

The STPT case is no one-off; it is the latest in a series. In August we covered the VANRY migration to Base, where the swap window likewise dragged on for weeks and self-custody holders were the real target group. In early September we checked nine crypto deadlines this autumn in an overview; September 21 was not among them at the time and is now the next of those to fall due.

The pattern repeats with remarkable regularity. An exchange or a project announces a changeover, the large trading venues handle it automatically for their customers, coverage ends at that point, and what remains is precisely the group that did everything right: the self-custody holders. Anyone who takes their tokens into their own keeping also takes on the dates that an exchange would otherwise work through in the background. That is the price of independence, and it is low as long as you know about it.

From this follows a habit worth more than any single deadline: go through your self-custodied holdings once a quarter and check, for every project you have not watched for a while, whether there has been an announcement. For dormant positions, half an hour per quarter is a good trade.

Checking the STPT swap: what to take away

1. Check today whether you hold STPT at all, and on which chain. If the balance sits on Base, your starting date is September 14 because of the seven-day bridge time, and not September 21. If you find in the process that your custody arrangements have become hard to survey, the hardware wallet comparison lists the devices that handle such checks without an exchange account.
2. Swap through the official portal and plan for September 20 as your latest date. Check your exchange's support section beforehand to see whether it will handle the swap for you; the comparison of crypto exchanges shows which venues see changeovers through reliably.
3. Document the process immediately, and not at tax return time. Acquisition date, quantity, both transaction identifiers. A tax tool with portfolio tracking transfers the holding period to the new position instead of leaving you to guess in the spring.

Two sources for further reading, both from the project itself: the announcement on the close of the swap window dated August 20, 2026 and the official migration guide setting out the process for self-custody holders, exchange customers and liquidity providers.

(As of September 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)