Arbitrum's USDG carrot is $1.4m. The float it joins earns about $120m a year

Paxos began native issuance of USDG on Arbitrum One on 6 October, with Fluid, Morpho, GMX and Maple integrating it, Kraken handling deposits and withdrawals and Stargate moving it across chains. USDG stands at $3.08bn, seventh among stablecoins and 0.98% of a $314bn market. Arbitrum is its seventh chain, after Ethereum, Solana, X Layer, Robinhood Chain, Ink and Hyperliquid.

“Arbitrum will share in rewards generated by USDG activity on the network, with the proceeds directed toward adoption and ecosystem development”

— CoinDesk, 5 октября 2026

The incentive number being quoted is the wrong one

Coverage leads with 100 million ARB from the ArbitrumDAO proposal, which is $20.1m at $0.2005 and 1.47% of ARB's entire $1.36bn market capitalisation. That figure covers the wider incentive programme.

About 7 million ARB is set aside for USDG specifically. At today's price that is $1.40m, or 7% of the headline, and it works out at 0.046% of USDG's supply and 0.035% of the roughly $4bn of stablecoins Arbitrum already holds.

The money that matters sits in the reserves

The Paxos USDG stablecoin is backed one for one by dollar reserves. With the Fed's target range at 3.75% to 4%, $3.08bn of reserves earns between $116m and $123m a year on our arithmetic. That is the pool the Global Dollar Network splits with the partners who drive adoption, and Circle and Tether keep the equivalent for themselves.

Nobody has published what share partners receive. Until someone does, Arbitrum's gain from joining is a number only Paxos knows, and $1.40m is the only part with a published figure.

Three ways to cut the same float in one week

On 30 September Open USD went live with Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa on equal founding stakes. On 5 October we wrote about Stripe pushing stablecoin cards into 100 countries while owning the rails, the wallets, the chain and a stake in the coin. Now Paxos signs a chain into a network that already lists more than 150 partners, including Robinhood, Kraken, Mastercard and OKX.

The product is identical in all three cases. The redesign is about who collects the interest on other people's dollars.

USDG would need to multiply sixty times to match USDT. Paxos is betting the partner list closes that gap faster than a brand would.

Informational material, not investment advice. The reserve income figure is our own arithmetic on the float at current rates, and the share partners receive has not been published.