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FAQ
How much do I have to trade to unlock a code?
The fee gate is 3,000 sats of taker fees paid, and the taker fee is 3 bps of notional. Divide one by the other and you get the volume:
| Taker fees required | 3,000 sats |
| Taker fee rate | 3 bps |
| Cumulative traded notional | 0.1 BTC (10,000,000 sats) |
That is cumulative across every fill, and both sides count — opening a position and closing it are two taker fills, so a round trip contributes twice its size.
If you prefer the figure in dollars: at a bitcoin price of 100,000 dollars, that is about 10,000 dollars of traded volume. That conversion is an illustration at an assumed price — this site is static, so it is not, and cannot be, a live quote.
Volume is only one of four gates. You also need the account age, the fill count, and the distinct-trading-days count, and all of them have to be met at once.
Do I earn forever?
No, and HardBasis will not describe it that way. Rewards from a given referee are bounded three separate ways:
- Time. You earn on their fills for 365 days from the day they bind to your code — a bit under twelve months. After that they can keep trading; your stream from them has ended.
- Total. At most 2,000,000 sats from that one referee, across the whole window.
- Rate. At most 500,000 sats from that one referee in any 30-day period.
Whichever binds first, binds. The number of referees you can refer is not capped — the bounds are per referee, not per referrer.
When can I claim, and how much do I need?
An accrual becomes claimable after a holdback of 7 days (14 days on the partner program), provided there is no open review on the account. The minimum claim is 1,000 sats; a claim takes everything that has vested, in one action.
Before that, rewards sit in pending holdback. They are an accrual, not a balance you are owed.
Is claiming the same as withdrawing?
No. Claiming moves sats from the reward pool into your free balance inside HardBasis. Withdrawing moves sats out of HardBasis. They are two separate actions and they behave differently:
- claims run while the venue is in normal operating mode;
- withdrawals of free balance work in every mode, including a halt, and that is a covenant the engine's tests enforce.
Once a reward is claimed it stops being a reward. It is ordinary balance, and nothing in the referral system can reach it again.
Can I change who referred me?
No. One referrer, forever. A binding is permanent — it cannot be reassigned, switched, or bought out. That cuts both ways: nobody can take your referees from you either.
I signed up without a code. Can I still add one?
Only while both of these are still true: your account is under 14 days old, and you have not made a fill yet. Your first fill closes the window for good.
The reasoning is straightforward — once trading has been observed, attaching a code is not attribution, it is retrofitting.
What happens if a program is paused?
HardBasis can pause Refer & Earn and Partners independently. While a program is paused:
- new fills accrue nothing, and the dashboard says the program is paused rather than quietly showing zero;
- rewards already accrued keep vesting on schedule, and claims keep working;
- referee discounts already promised keep running for their full term;
- bindings keep being created and attribution is never lost.
Pausing bounds what the program pays out going forward. It never reaches backwards into what has already been earned.
Do I earn on my referee's funding payments or liquidations?
No. The reward base is the taker fee your referee actually paid, and nothing else. Funding is a payment between traders rather than revenue to the venue; liquidation penalties and the spread are not fee revenue either; and a fill that paid no fee accrues nothing. The full list is on the Refer & Earn page.
Can I refer myself with a second account?
No. A code will not bind to an account belonging to the person who owns it — the engine refuses it outright. Attribution manufactured through additional identities is dealt with under the program's abuse policy: unclaimed accruals can be withheld or forfeited and the account can be removed from the program.
What counts as an "active" referee?
A referee who traded on at least 5 distinct UTC days in the trailing 30 days. Activity is measured in trading days rather than volume, so a single large account cannot stand in for a real audience.
Where do the numbers on this site come from?
From the engine's own constants. The figures on these pages are not typed into the text — they are rendered from the same values the engine charges and pays on, through a module that imports them, and a check in the build refuses a page that hardcodes a policy number as text.
One honest limit: this is a static site, rebuilt and redeployed. An operator can change a live program parameter without touching this site's code, so the foot of every page stamps which policy version and which build date you are reading. If a number here matters to a decision you are making, the app — which reads the live policy — is the authority.
Is this available where I live?
Not everywhere. See Eligibility & legal.