Crypto exchange · TradingNobody gets paid until the account trades.
Kraken's partners earn a share of the fees their referrals generate. That one line moves the whole problem off sign-ups and onto whether a person ever really starts trading.
- Sector
- Crypto exchange
- Model
- Share of trading fees
- Paid when
- The account trades, not when it registers
- The rule
- The promotion itself is regulated
- Judged on
- Funded accounts that come back
The economics
A share of the fees means a share of the habit.
Kraken pays partners out of trading fees — spot, futures, margin. Nothing is due on a sign-up. Nothing is due on an account that verifies and then sits there. The partner earns when the customer trades, and keeps earning while they keep trading.
That inverts the usual worry. On a fixed payment per acquisition, the brand's risk is buying people who leave. Here the risk is quieter: the cost of onboarding somebody — identity checks, support, compliance review — is spent whether or not they ever place a trade.
So a campaign that looks cheap per registration can be the expensive one. The thing worth steering by is the funded account that makes its first trade and comes back for another.
The rules
Here, the advert is the regulated thing.
Crypto marketing isn't judged the way a consumer app is. In the UK a referral link or a promo code counts as a financial promotion in its own right: it has to carry the risk wording, it has to be approved by somebody authorised to approve it, and the firm that paid for it answers when it isn't. People have been prosecuted over promotions of this kind, and other markets have been moving the same way.
The large ad platforms add their own gate on top — certification, and permission market by market, before a crypto advert is allowed to run at all.
That changes who is even eligible to be a partner. A publisher who can send volume but can't publish compliant wording isn't an opportunity. They're a problem with a date on it.
The problem
Volume that pays for itself.
The channel has its own fraud, and on a revenue share it's cleverer than faking sign-ups. If the payout follows trading fees, the way to fake it is to trade: an affiliate refers accounts they control and runs trades back and forth between them, paying fees with one hand to collect a share of them with the other.
Running alongside it is the blunter version — rings of invented identities pushed through verification to collect whatever a funded account is worth.
Both are visible to anyone who looks at how accounts behave rather than how many arrived: the same device, the same funding route, trades that go nowhere, activity that stops the moment a payment clears.
How the work started
We agreed what a customer is before buying any.
The first job is a definition everyone signs: which event pays, how long an account has to stay active before it counts, and what voids it.
Partner checks come before partner budget — who they are, where they publish, whether their pages can carry the wording the market requires, and what they have been paid for before.
In a licensed category that sequence isn't caution for its own sake. Buying first and reading afterwards is how a brand inherits somebody else's advertising.
What we did
Judged partners on behaviour, not arrivals.
Accounts are followed past the first trade, and partners are ranked on what their referrals keep doing — so sources sending verified but dormant traffic quietly lose their budget instead of topping a chart.
Anything with the shape of trading done for the sake of the fee is pulled and reviewed rather than paid and explained later.
The partners left standing are the ones whose audience was going to trade anyway. They are worth paying properly.
How we did it
One ledger, checked both ways.
The campaign's view of performance is reconciled against fees the exchange actually collected, and against the compliance record for the copy that earned them.
Neither number is allowed to travel on its own. Performance without the paperwork is a liability with good news attached.
Anyone can buy registrations. The only thing worth buying is the second trade.
