Zest sets October 23 deadline to exit aeUSDC on Stacks Market V1

Zest Protocol is drawing a hard line under its legacy infrastructure. The Bitcoin-layer DeFi protocol has set October 23 as the final date for users to exit aeUSDC positions on Stacks Market V1, marking the end of a migration window that has been reshaping how liquidity works on the Stacks blockchain. The deadline is the capstone of a broader deprecation effort, with the minting of aeUSDC already disabled and support for the Classic Allbridge bridge ceasing alongside it. Why aeUSDC is getting left behind The one-transaction migration tool Zest built for the V1-to-V2 move is elegant in practice: most positions migrate automatically through the Zest app in a single action. aeUSDC is the exception. That exclusion is structural, not an oversight. aeUSDC is a legacy bridged USDC variant that dates to around 2023, and Stacks Market V2 operates on USDCx, a stablecoin tied to a partnership with Circle directly. The two assets are not interchangeable at the protocol level, so no automated path exists between them. For users still holding aeUSDC, the process involves three steps done manually: withdraw from V1, convert to USDCx by either swapping on Bitflow or bridging through Allbridge Clas...