Stacks initiates 90-day incentive program distributing BTC rewards

Bitcoin sitting idle in a wallet earns nothing. Stacks has a pitch for changing that, and it comes with real BTC attached.

The Stacks network is launching a 90-day incentive program designed to pull users deeper into its Bitcoin-native DeFi ecosystem. The program distributes 1 BTC per month, totaling 3 BTC across the full run, paid directly to participants as rewards for borrowing the stablecoin USDCx or supplying liquidity to USDCx trading pairs.

The program kicks off around September 10, 2026, timed to Bitcoin block 966,350.

What participants actually do to earn rewards

Users who borrow USDCx against sBTC or STX collateral qualify for a share of the monthly BTC distribution. So do users who add liquidity to USDCx trading pairs on the network.

sBTC is a 1:1 Bitcoin-backed asset native to the Stacks ecosystem, meaning one sBTC is always redeemable for one Bitcoin. Using it as collateral to borrow a stablecoin is essentially the same move institutional desks have been running with wrapped Bitcoin on Ethereum for years, just executed within the Stacks environment and rewarded with more BTC on top.

STX, the native token of the Stacks blockchain, also qualifies as collateral. That makes the program accessible to users who are already active in the Stacks ecosystem without necessarily holding sBTC.

Two protocol partners are running the operational infrastructure. Zest Protocol handles the lending and borrowing side, processing USDCx loans against collateral. Bitflow, a decentralized exchange built on Stacks, manages the liquidity side, where users pair USDCx with other assets to deepen on-chain trading markets.

The USDCx layer underneath it all

USDCx is the stablecoin sitting at the center of this program, and it is relatively new. Stacks launched USDCx in December 2025, building it on top of Circle’s xReserve infrastructure. The backing is USDC, which itself maintains a 1:1 peg to the US dollar.

Rather than creating an entirely novel stablecoin from scratch, Stacks wrapped institutional-grade dollar infrastructure in a form that operates natively within the Bitcoin layer 2 environment. The result is a stablecoin that inherits USDC’s credibility while functioning inside a Bitcoin-secured network.

The strategic logic behind paying rewards in BTC

Choosing to pay rewards in BTC rather than STX tokens is a deliberate design choice. Token-denominated reward programs have a built-in problem: the more users farm them, the more sell pressure hits the reward token, which erodes the value of future rewards in a self-defeating loop. Stacks sidesteps that entirely by paying out in Bitcoin, an asset participants presumably already want more of regardless of what the protocol’s native token is doing.

The total reward pool is 3 BTC across 90 days, with 1 BTC distributed every 30 days rather than front-loaded.