Refer & Earn

Bring a trader to HardBasis and you earn a share of the taker fees they pay, in sats. They get a discount on those same fees. Both sides are paid out of fee revenue the venue actually collected — the program can never owe what it did not take in.

Referral codes are earned, not issued. You unlock yours by trading.

Unlocking your code

Every gate below must be met, and your account must be in good standing. The app shows live progress against each one.

Gate	Threshold
Account age	7 days
Taker fees paid, lifetime	3,000 sats
Fills	10
Distinct trading days	3 (UTC days)

In traded notional, that fee gate is 0.1 BTC (10,000,000 sats) of cumulative volume at the standard taker fee, and every fill counts toward it. See the FAQ for that arithmetic written out.

Your code is four to sixteen characters, lowercase letters, digits and hyphens, chosen by you from a suggested default. It is immutable once created — a code is an attribution record, and renaming one turns every historical binding into a dispute.

What you earn

You earn 15% of the net taker fee on every fill your referees make — net meaning after their own discount has been applied. Sats accrue from the first satoshi; there is no minimum fill and no rounding you up to a threshold.

What the reward is calculated from

Counted	Not counted
Taker fees your referees actually paid	Spread and skew impact — those are pricing, not fee revenue
	Funding payments — those move between traders, not to the venue
	Liquidation penalties
	Any fill that was fee-free or fee-waived

Rewards are a share of fees paid, never a share of volume. That is a deliberate design choice: a share of volume would pay out on trades that cost the venue money, and it would make round-tripping your own referral profitable. A share of collected fees cannot.

The bounds

Rewards from a given referee are bounded three ways. Each is a real limit, and none of them is a "lifetime" promise:

• A time bound. You earn on a referee's fills for 365 days from the day they bind to your code — a bit under twelve months. After that they keep trading and the stream ends.
• A total bound. At most 2,000,000 sats from any one referee, across the whole window.
• A rate bound. At most 500,000 sats from any one referee in any 30-day period.

The number of referees you can have is not bounded.

What your referees get

Discount	10% off the taker fee
For	30 days from binding, or 1 BTC (100,000,000 sats) of traded notional — whichever comes first
Applies to	the taker fee only — never the spread, skew impact, funding, or a liquidation

The discount is applied at the source: the fill charges the reduced fee outright. There is no rebate to wait for and nothing to claim. When the window or the volume allowance is used up, the app says so.

Attribution

One referrer, forever. A binding is permanent. There is no re-attribution, no switching codes later, and no way to reassign a referee — which also means nobody can poach yours.

When a code can be attached. At signup, or afterwards while both of these still hold: your account is less than 14 days old, and you have not yet made a fill. Your first fill closes the window permanently. A code cannot be attached to an account with observed trading.

Self-referral does not work. A code will not bind to an account belonging to the person who owns it. The engine refuses the binding outright.

Accrue, vest, claim

The vocabulary here matches the app exactly, and each word means something different:

State	What it means
Pending holdback	Accrued from a referee's fills, still inside the holdback period. Not yours yet.
Claimable	Past holdback with no open review. Available to claim.
Claimed	Moved into your free balance. Ordinary sats from that moment.

Holdback	7 days
Minimum claim	1,000 sats
Claim moves sats to	your free balance, in one action

Claiming is not withdrawing. A claim moves sats from the reward pool into your free balance inside HardBasis. Withdrawing is a separate step, and once sats are in your free balance they are ordinary balance: the withdrawal covenant applies to them, and nothing referral-related can touch them again.

Claims run while the venue is in normal operating mode. Rewards that have not been claimed are not balance you are owed — they are an accrual that has to vest first. Your already-claimed balance is unaffected by any of that and withdraws in every mode.

Active referees

Some parts of the program count active referees rather than all of them: a referee is active if they traded on at least 5 distinct UTC days in the trailing 30 days. Counting activity in trading days rather than volume means one large account cannot stand in for a real audience.

Abuse

Program policy — summary; formal terms to follow

Referral rewards are for bringing real traders. HardBasis may withhold, reverse, or forfeit unclaimed accruals, close a code, or remove an account from the program where it judges that attribution has been manufactured — including self-referral through additional accounts, coordinated or circular trading whose purpose is to generate rewards, and misrepresentation in how a code was promoted. Decisions of this kind are made at the venue's discretion and are reviewed by a person, not automatically.

Sats you have already claimed are your balance and are not clawed back.

If the program is paused

HardBasis can pause either referral program. If that happens:

• new fills stop accruing rewards, and the app says the program is paused;
• accruals already made keep vesting, and claims keep working;
• referee discounts already promised keep running for their term;
• bindings keep working — attribution is never lost.

Where it lives in the app

Refer & Earn is on the HardBasis app under your account. Signed out, the app shows what the program is; the exact rates for your account come from the engine once you sign in.