The 14 Types of Trading Deals

Venue offers get described with whatever word the marketing team liked that week. Underneath, they resolve to a small number of distinct mechanisms, and Voltrade's deal catalogue classifies every one it tracks into fourteen types.

This is the reference: what each type means, who it favours, and the one thing most worth checking before you act on it.

Fee-side deals

FEE_REBATE — discounted trading fees. Part of what you pay to trade is returned, typically as a percentage of fees paid. Scales linearly with your volume and lasts as long as the program does. Check: which side it applies to (maker, taker, or both) and which markets are eligible. A perp-only rebate is worth nothing to a spot trader. See maker vs taker rebates.

FEE_DISCOUNT — a fixed fee reduction. Not a share returned but a new rate: "0.01% maker" rather than "50% off". Cleaner to price, because it changes the fee schedule directly rather than producing a claim. Check: whether it is permanent or a promotional rate with an end date, and what the rate reverts to.

CASHBACK — a percentage back on trades. Usually a credit on fees paid over a period, paid after the fact. Check: the payout asset and the timing. Cashback in an illiquid native token is a position, not a refund.

Activity-threshold deals

VOLUME_BONUS — a bonus for hitting a volume target. Trade a stated notional, receive a stated reward. Check: the arithmetic. Required volume × your fee rate is the cost of qualifying. If that exceeds the bonus, the offer is negative for you even though it is advertised as free money.

THRESHOLD_REWARDS — cumulative volume thresholds, often with first-come caps. A ladder rather than a single bar: hit $10,000 for one reward, $50,000 for a larger one, and so on. Individual thresholds can carry a cap on how many traders can claim them. Check: whether the caps on the thresholds you are targeting are still open. A ladder whose top rungs are exhausted is a shorter ladder than the page implies.

HYBRID_VOLUME_COMPETITION — a multi-market threshold race. The first N traders to clear a volume threshold in every named market group win. Part threshold, part race. Check: all the groups, not just the easy one. You have to clear each of them, and the qualifier count is capped — so a group you cannot reach makes the whole deal unclaimable no matter how much you trade elsewhere.

Competition deals

TRADING_COMPETITION — a recurring venue competition or leaderboard event. A fixed prize pool split by a published rule among a field of participants. Check: the field size against the pool. Unlike a rebate, a competition's value to you depends entirely on who else entered — the same $10,000 pool is worth far more against forty entrants than against four hundred. How DEX trading competitions work covers the machinery; live ones are on competitions.

Acquisition deals

SIGNUP_BONUS — a bonus for new users of a venue. Pure acquisition spend. Check: whether you qualify at all. "New" is defined by the venue and often means no prior account of any kind, and the bonus frequently requires signing up through a specific link — which can never be applied retroactively.

DEPOSIT_BONUS — a bonus for depositing funds. Often tiered by deposit size, and often carrying a volume requirement before release. Check: whether what you receive is withdrawable cash, a fee credit, or bonus margin you can trade but never withdraw. Those are three very different products under one headline. Deposit and signup bonus mechanics goes clause by clause.

REFERRAL_BONUS — a bonus for referring others. You earn from the activity of people you bring in. Check: whether it pays on their fees or their volume, whether it decays, and how long attribution lasts. Referral economics are the most durable reward on this list for anyone with distribution, and irrelevant for anyone without.

Ongoing and speculative deals

LOYALTY_REWARD — ongoing loyalty or tier rewards. Status-based benefits that accrue from continued activity rather than a single qualifying event. Check: how the tier is measured and over what window. A rolling 30-day tier decays the moment your volume does.

POINTS — earn exchange points. A claim on an unknown future distribution, denominated in a unit the venue defines. Check: what activity earns, whether the rate is fixed or divided among a growing pool of participants, and whether the program has a published end. Price it as a range and default to zero in any venue comparison — the argument is in exchange points programs, compared structurally.

AIRDROP — a token airdrop opportunity. The distribution event itself, or eligibility for one. Check: the eligibility snapshot, whether there is vesting, and whether the criteria are published or retroactive. Retroactive criteria are unknowable by construction, which means any expected value you compute is a guess with a large error bar. How to value an airdrop points program is the framework.

GENERAL_REWARD — a generic earn, staking, learning or referral-style reward. The catch-all: anything that pays for an action but does not fit the categories above. Check: the actual mechanism, because the label tells you nothing. Read what the reward is for and what it pays in.

The fields that decide everything

Independent of type, the same handful of attributes determine whether a deal is real for you. Every listing carries them:

Who actually pays you

One more attribute matters more than most people expect: the payout rail. It decides when the money arrives and who you chase if it does not.

• Platform-distributed. Voltrade pays out against settled reward records, manually, so a human reviews the split before money moves.
• On-chain distribution. Rewards are published to an on-chain distribution and claimed by the recipient. You need to claim; nobody claims for you.
• Partner-direct. The venue or partner distributes rewards themselves, and Voltrade only displays the terms and proof of distribution. If it does not arrive, the venue is the counterparty — not the listing.

Read that field before you plan around a payout date. "The reward exists" and "someone has committed to sending it to you on a schedule" are different statements, and the rail is what distinguishes them.

Using this list

The taxonomy is useful mainly for one thing: making offers comparable. Once you know that a deal is a fee rebate rather than a competition, you know it scales with your volume rather than depending on the field. Once you know it is points rather than cashback, you know its value is a range and not a number.

The practical routine does not change by type. Work out your monthly fee spend in dollars, price each offer in the same units against your own volume, apply the eligibility filters honestly — a rebate that excludes your markets is zero, not "some" — and check depth and funding before any of it, because on real size those lines dwarf every reward program on this page.

Start from the exchanges comparison for the durable numbers, browse per-venue detail on venues, and use how to compare crypto exchange rewards for the framework that puts all fourteen of these in the same units.