Wormhole Foundation STIP Grant

The Wormhole Foundation received a 1.8M ARB grant from the Arbitrum DAO with the goal to onboard 100,000,000 native issued USDC to Arbitrum. This program aims to distribute ARB rewards to users who utilize Circle’s CCTP via Wormhole Connect. The bridged USDC can be deposited into Aave, Compound, and Beefy, or held in the bridged address, to be eligible to accrue rewards.

Wormhole is a cross-chain messaging protocol and supports Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) for minting and burning native USDC for cross-chain transfers. Since its deployment, Wormhole has transmitted over a billion cross-chain messages.

The Arbitrum Short-Term Incentive Program was created by the Arbitrum DAO with the goals to accelerate ecosystem growth, experiment with grant distribution models, and uncover new strategies to drive activity on the network. With this grant, Wormhole aims to target USDC users to migrate their assets to Arbitrum. It also provides an incentive for users holding wrapped USDC.e to bridge back to Ethereum and re-enter Arbitrum with native USDC, which will speed up the migration to Circle’s canonical bridge and shorten the period of liquidity fragmentation between the two versions of USDC.

How to Participate

Step 1) Bridge USDC to Arbitrum from any chain using Portal Bridge

Make sure to bridge to native USDC using the CCTP router

https://portalbridge.com/usdc-bridge

Step 2) **Supply USDC on Compound, Aave, or Beefy and continue earning ARB rewards (Optional)

Step 3) Claim ARB rewards

Incentives will accrue every seven days for a maximum of three months. They can be claimed for up to a year, after which unclaimed rewards will revert to the Arbitrum DAO. Please note that users need to hold USDC in the minting address for at least seven days to be eligible for this program.

https://portalbridge.com/rewards-dashboard/

About Wormhole Foundation

The Wormhole Foundation is the steward of Wormhole, the leading interoperability platform powering multichain applications and bridges. Our mission is to empower passionate people in the research and development of blockchain interoperability technologies. Through grants, research, and ecosystem programs, we support teams in building secure, open-source, and decentralized products within the Wormhole ecosystem.

Stay updated with our mission by following us on Twitter or contact us at [email protected].