The Arbitrum DAO proposed the DeFi Renaissance Incentive Program (DRIP) in April 2025 on its forum, approved in June 2025 with an allocation of 80 million ARB tokens worth over 40 million USD to promote DeFi activities. DRIP acts as a performance-based incentive initiative, protocol-agnostic, rewarding specific DeFi actions to attract natural liquidity to Arbitrum, aiming to reinforce its leading position in DeFi by prioritizing meaningful interactions over superficial metrics. In this program, Dolomite plays a crucial role as a next-generation money market and margin trading protocol, focusing on ETH loops. It allows users to deposit their preferred assets as collateral, borrow ETH against them, create loops to enhance exposure, and earn DRIP rewards directly on its platform.
Structured over four seasons, each season targeting a different DeFi sector, Season 1 emphasizes creating leverage loops in lending markets, running from September 3, 2025, to January 20, 2026, with a budget of up to 24 million ARB distributed over 20 weeks through 10 two-week phases. Rewards are allocated flexibly to participating lending markets based on user activity, particularly the volume of ETH (WETH) or USDC borrowed against eligible assets, with some markets also incentivizing the provision of ETH or USDC. The program begins with an exploration phase in the first two stages using only 15% of the budget, transitioning to a performance phase with larger distributions for the best-performing markets.
