Where Rebate Money Comes From: How Exchange Affiliate Programs Work

The first sensible question about any fee rebate is who is paying for it. If the answer is unclear, the honest default assumption is that you are — through a worse rate, worse execution, or something further down the page.

For rebates funded by exchange affiliate programs, the answer is public and checkable, so here it is in full.

The flow

Four steps, no hidden ones:

1. You trade. The exchange charges its standard fee — on Bybit's published schedule, 0.055% taker and 0.020% maker on perpetuals for a non-VIP account.
2. Your account is linked to a partner by UID. The exchange knows which partner introduced it.
3. The exchange pays that partner a commission calculated from the fees your account generated. This is the exchange's affiliate program, a standing, publicly advertised arrangement.
4. The partner returns part of that commission to you.

Your fee rate is unchanged at step 1 and unchanged at step 4. The money moves out of the exchange's acquisition budget, not out of your position.

Why an exchange pays for this

Because acquiring an active trader through advertising costs more than sharing fees with whoever brought them in.

Crypto exchange advertising is constrained in a way most industries are not. Google requires certification and local licensing for exchange ads and prohibits several adjacent categories outright. Meta requires written permission. X restricts by jurisdiction. What remains is expensive and converts poorly, because a display impression reaches mostly people who will never place a trade.

An affiliate arrangement inverts the risk. The exchange pays nothing up front and pays only in proportion to fees actually generated by an account that is actually trading. There is no wasted spend, because there is no spend until there is revenue. For the exchange this is the cheapest acquisition channel available, which is why every large venue runs one.

What the partner keeps

The partner receives a commission from the exchange and returns a portion of it to the trader. The difference is the partner's revenue, and it is the whole business model — there is nothing else to sell, because the trader is not charged anything.

This is the part worth being specific about, because it is where rebate offers become hard to compare. Two services can both advertise "50%" and mean different things:

• 50% of the commission the exchange pays the service
• 50% of the fees the trader paid the exchange

These are not the same number. If the exchange pays the partner half of your fees, then "50% of the partner's commission" is roughly a quarter of what you paid, while "50% of your fees" would leave the partner with nothing. When comparing services, the base matters as much as the percentage, and any service that does not state its base is asking you not to check.

How to verify any of this yourself

None of it requires trusting a rebate service's description.

Read the exchange's affiliate page. Every major venue publishes its partner terms. If a service claims a rate that exceeds what the exchange pays partners at all, the claim is arithmetically impossible.

Check your fee rate before and after linking. It should be identical. If a service's connection changes what the exchange charges you, the money is coming from somewhere other than the affiliate program.

Check what the link actually grants. A UID-level affiliate connection reports volume. It is not an API key with trading permission. If a service asks for keys that can place orders or move funds, the affiliate mechanism is not what is being described to you.

Ask where the money comes from and see whether you get a straight answer. In a category with this much fraud, a service that explains its funding plainly is making a deliberate choice, and one that talks around it is also making a deliberate choice.

We go through the security side in is a rebate service safe, and the terms for Bybit accounts are on our Bybit page.

The part that is not free

Two real constraints, since the section above would be incomplete without them.

The commission depends on the exchange's affiliate terms, and those terms are the exchange's to change. A rebate is a share of something the exchange controls.

And a rebate is proportional to trading. It returns part of a cost you already chose to incur. It does not make a losing strategy profitable — it makes the cost of running any strategy lower, which is a different and smaller claim.