ArbitrumDAO has unveiled season one of its $40 million DeFi Renaissance Incentive Program (DRIP), allocating up to 24 million ARB tokens to accelerate decentralized finance growth on the Arbitrum network.
The first season of DRIP focuses on leveraged looping strategies for yield-bearing ETH and stablecoins, with incentives flowing to leading lending and borrowing protocols including Aave, Morpho, Fluid, Euler, Dolomite and Silo. Users will earn ARB rewards for borrowing against a curated set of ETH and stablecoin collateral types, ranging from weETH and wstETH to sUSDC and syrupUSDC.
Approved by ArbitrumDAO in June, DRIP spans four seasons with a total budget of 80 million ARB tokens. Each season targets a specific DeFi use case to drive liquidity, capital efficiency and protocol innovation across the ecosystem.
“This targeted rollout introduces an aligned framework: protocols that are contributing meaningful innovation to DeFi receive incentive support, while users benefit from new opportunities to optimize strategies on Arbitrum,” the team wrote in a press release shared with CoinDesk.
Morpho, Euler and Maple Finance have already expanded onto Arbitrum ahead of the launch, citing DRIP as a growth catalyst.
“DRIP will help Morpho both attract DeFi native liquidity, and provide deeper liquidity and better rates for DeFi Mullet integrations like the Earn feature on Gemini Onchain,” said Kirk Hutchison, Chain Expansion Lead at Morpho, in the press release. “The combination of incentives and wide distribution network makes Arbitrum the natural home for our next stage of growth.”
Arbitrum, which is the largest Ethereum layer-2 according to L2Beat and holds over 35% of the market share, plans to run each DRIP season for four to five months, with results reviewed by a DAO-approved committee. Strategies that succeed may see renewed support, while underperformers will be adapted or discontinued.
Read more: Arbitrum Ecosystem Unveils ‘Onchain Labs’ to Support Early-Stage Projects