Starknet expands BTCFi push as Vesu pays STRK rewards to Bitcoin borrowers

Borrowing money usually costs money. On Starknet, borrowers are now being paid to do it, at least partially.

Vesu, a lending protocol on Starknet, lets users borrow against BTC and earn STRK rewards on those loans. The rewards for borrowers were announced on October 8, 2026. They are meant to lower the net cost of borrowing for users who come in through the Sats Terminal frontend.

How the Vesu rewards work

Vesu operates as a modular, permissionless lending market. Its pools can be set up for different assets and risk profiles instead of everything sharing one giant bucket.

The tokens eligible for both collateral and rewards are WBTC, LBTC, SolvBTC, tBTC, and strkBTC. Each one is a tokenized version of Bitcoin, which is how BTC shows up on networks it was never built to run on.

Borrowers who take out stablecoins against that BTC collateral can claim STRK rewards every week.

Sats Terminal is the user-facing layer. It gives borrowers a simpler interface for setting up BTC-backed loans. During reward periods, loans taken through Sats Terminal can carry effective net APRs that sit near zero or even dip into negative territory.

If the STRK a borrower collects is worth more than the interest they owe, the loan effectively pays them. The rewards arrive in STRK, so their actual value depends on what the token is worth when a borrower claims it.

The 100 million STRK backdrop

The Starknet Foundation has set aside 100 million STRK for its BTCFi Season program, which is built to encourage onchain Bitcoin activity, borrowing included.

Vesu V2 launched around October 2025, adding curated pools for BTC collateral and expanding the lending capacity available to Starknet’s BTCFi users.

What this means for borrowers and Starknet

For borrowers, the cost math is the obvious draw. A loan with a near-zero or negative net rate is unusual in almost any market.

It is also subsidized, and subsidies are temporary by design. The cheap borrowing window lasts only as long as the reward periods run and the STRK keeps flowing.

Reward value is the other moving piece. A negative net APR calculated today is only as good as STRK’s value on claim day, which makes the headline rate a snapshot rather than a guarantee.

The near-term signals to watch are straightforward. Watch whether Vesu’s volumes and total value locked climb during the reward periods, how quickly the 100 million STRK allocation is put to work, and whether borrowing activity holds up when the incentives eventually wind down.