As 2025 draws to a close, it's time to look back on a year filled with bold moves, innovative launches, and meaningful partnerships.
From a complete rebrand to innovative integrations and exciting new products, 2025 has been a pivotal year for Merkl, driving our growth and helping shape the DeFi incentives industry.
Let’s look back at the milestones that defined 2025 for Merkl.
A rebrand to match our ambitions
This year, Merkl embraced a full rebrand to better reflect the scope of our ambitions. Our new logo, colors, and typeface symbolize both our roots in Merkle tree technology and the unstoppable growth we drive for protocols and chains.
Alongside this rebrand, we launched a brand-new app and website designed to provide a smoother, more intuitive experience for our users.
Expanding product integrations
2025 was a year of consolidation for Merkl, working with the largest protocols in the DeFi ecosystem. Merkl Rewards APRs are now displayed directly in the Uniswap, Aave, Morpho, and Euler apps, allowing users to clearly see the rewards distributed on each pool, vault, or lending market in addition to the base APR.
We also integrated Merkl rewards with Coinbase through Morpho, opening the door for over 100 million users to participate in DeFi lending seamlessly. Users can lend USDC via Morpho vaults, earn native yield boosted by MORPHO token rewards, and claim them directly within the Coinbase app. Behind the scenes, Merkl handles the tracking and distribution of these rewards, ensuring a smooth, unified experience.
Running the largest DeFi incentive program of 2025
In 2025, Merkl powered some of the biggest incentive programs in DeFi. We ran Arbitrum’s DRIP, distributing 80 million ARB tokens across multiple protocols via a seamless, customized DRIP app.
Merkl also powered the launch of the Plasma chain, automatically distributing XPL rewards across 30+ opportunities from day one, with a dedicated Plasma App for smooth user experience.
We partnered with Ethena and the Aave Chan Initiative to launch the Ethena Liquid Leverage program. Using the Merkl Engine, we managed complex conditions, like cross-asset balances, health factors, and capped APRs, ensuring rewards for USDe holders were distributed automatically, accurately, and seamlessly.
Finally, Merkl powered World Chain’s incentive program, enabling the first human-only onchain rewards powered by World ID. These campaigns distributed rewards exclusively to verified humans, introduced fair deposit caps, and operated at scale across protocols like Morpho and Uniswap. In just a few months, more than 28 campaigns were launched, engaging over one million participants and driving rapid growth in World Chain’s DeFi ecosystem.
Strengthening the Merkl product experience
For campaign creators
2025 was the year Merkl Studio launched. With Merkl Studio, protocols and ecosystems gained a dedicated tool to design, run, and scale incentive programs using the same infrastructure that powers the largest initiatives in DeFi. Our focus was to offer an easy and fast solution to deploy and monitor, while reducing operational overhead.
For LPs and DeFi users
The Merkl app also continued to evolve. We rebuilt the Merkl app around how users actually think, not how data happens to be structured. In-app discovery improved with intent-driven search, allowing users to filter opportunities by token, APR, TVL, or strategy. we also release the app on Telegram, making incentives easier to access.
We introduced protocol-native APRs aggregated with Merkl incentives to show total yield in one place, and Linked Opportunities to surface indirect rewards earned through underlying pools, that no other platforms offer. Together, these updates made incentives easier to understand, compare, and optimize, all in one app.
The year in metrics
The numbers tell the story.
From $80 million in incentives distributed in January to $1 billion in November, and that’s just the headline.
- Over 20,000 campaigns created, growing 30% month-over-month
- Daily active users increased 4x from January to December, with consistent monthly growth
- Monthly active users rose 3.5x from Q1 to Q4
- Retention cohorts improved month-over-month, from 10% to 20%
Conclusion
2025 was a turning point for Merkl.
With over $1B in rewards distributed and partnerships with the leading protocols in DeFi, this year confirmed Merkl’s product-market fit and its role as core incentive infrastructure for the ecosystem.
With strong foundations now in place, we’re excited to keep building and to see what 2026 has in store.