1.4. Referral Program

The purpose of the referral program is to incentivize people to bring in more people. It compares to a Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) scheme with the difference of having only 1 level where referred individuals can opt-out by upgrading their account to a Life-Time Member (LTM). Every lifetime member can get a cut of the fees based on child accounts linked to ours via referral.


1.4.1. Participation

Every BitShares Holder can become a Lifetime Member and participate in the Referral Program. In this program:

Basic Accounts are free, but do not qualify for the referral program, nor any cash back on transaction fees.

Lifetime Members pay an upgrade fee and earn 80% cash back on every fee they pay. They also qualify for 80% cashback of the fees paid by Basic Accounts they refer to the network. These 80% can be split among the registrar, that actually registers the accounts, and an affiliate referrer, that brought in the new user.

The referral fees are controlled by the blockchain and are distributed like this:

  • 20% go to the network
  • 80% go to the referral program
    • of this 80%, x% go to the registrar
    • of this 80%, 100%-x% go to the affiliate referrer

1.4.2. How can I do?

If you want to participate in the referral program, you need to have a life-time member account, first! Then you can bring in new users by

  • (1)- running your own faucet and actually register new accounts (will give you 80% of all the fees of those minus a fraction that you decide to give to affiliates (the referrers)
  • (2)- referring people to a hosted wallet that offers you a cut of the fees as an affiliate.

The case below, most hosted wallets add your account as affiliate if you provide the following link structure to people

https://<url>/?r=<your-account>

with <your-account> being the name of your BitShares Lite-Time Member account.

Note

If you want link to pages with in the wallet(e.g., a particular decentralized market), you need to have the ?r= parameter before the #. Example : https://<url>/?r=<your-account>#/market/USD_BTC

  • (3)- or sending your referral link to people you want to refer to BitShares, your referral link would be:

    https://wallet.bitshares.org/?r=<your-account-name>
    
    (*You might want to use yow wallet address instead of "wallet.bitshares.org"*)
    

Example:

When an Basic Account pays $100 to become a Lifetime Member, $50 is paid to their Referrer, $30 is paid to the nearest Lifetime Member, and $20 is paid to the Network. After this point the Lifetime Member becomes its own referrer and nearest Lifetime Member and its prior Referrers no longer get any revenue from this user.

1.4.3. Fee Division

Every time an account you referred pays a transaction fee, that fee is divided among several different accounts. The network takes a cut, and the Lifetime Member who referred the account gets a cut.

The registrar is the account that paid the transaction fee to register the account with the network. The registrar gets to decide how to divide the remaining fee between themselves and their affiliate.

1.4.3.1. Fee status

Pending Fees:Fees paid are only divided among the network, referrers, and registrars once every maintenance interval.
Vesting Fees:Most fees are made available immediately, but fees over the vesting threshold (such as those paid to upgrade your membership or register a premium account name) must vest for some period as defined by the committee.

To see your vesting balances, open the side menu and select Vesting balance. Vesting balances are recalculated hourly, so you might not yet see them right away.


1.4.4. Claiming Referral Bonus and Cashback

If you have a lifetime memb1er account and

  • already paid some fees, or
  • have referred people that paid some fees,

you can claim them in the “Vesting balances” of your account.