Coinbase Affiliate Program
The recent cryptocurrency bear market is tough on all players in the asset class, including exchanges like Coinbase.
Recent downturns in their stock price make people wonder if Coinbase ever had the worth that many initial investors in their stock placed onto it.
However, the stock price and recent news obscure something important about Coinbase: they offer one of the better cryptocurrency-focused affiliate programs out there.
Let’s look at how Coinbase manages to offer this program and how an affiliate can make the most out of their link.
Brett Helling is a digital marketing expert with over 10 years of experience building, managing, and scaling websites.
Coinbase offers a robust affiliate program thanks to its size and reputation in the cryptocurrency marketplace. Here’s what the company’s affiliate program looks like from the affiliate side overall:
- Cost Per Action (CPA): Cost per transaction, based on the trading amount of the affiliated account
- Commission Rate: 50%
- Cookie Duration: 30 days
- Payment Payout Threshold: $10 minimum
Coinbase offers an affiliate program to cryptocurrency content creators, outlets, and other related media groups. Let’s look at what makes up this affiliate program and dive into how it works.
What Is the Coinbase Affiliate Program?
The Coinbase affiliate program is part of Coinbase’s overall strategy to introduce cryptocurrency concepts to the average person.
Due to its highly technical aspects, Coinbase partners with cryptocurrency experts and media groups through its affiliate program to help refer newcomers to crypto to its platform.
This routing helps Coinbase educate newer investors about the projects Coinbase lists while also allowing Coinbase to increase its user base.
How Does the Coinbase Affiliate Program Work?
When a Coinbase affiliate directs a new user to their platform, Coinbase takes a portion of the trading fees from that user’s trades and gives it back to the affiliate. Thus, the more new users an affiliate can attract, the more revenue an affiliate makes.
These trades have to occur within the first 30 days of the new account’s lifespan, though. Affiliates that want to continue generating money through this program have to continue to find new users, as Coinbase does not currently have a recurring revenue-sharing option for its affiliate program.
Is the Coinbase Affiliate Program Free?
Anyone can sign up for Coinbase’s affiliate program. Each application undergoes a manual review from Impact, a third-party brand manager that matches Coinbase with worthwhile affiliates.
These applications cost no money to the applicant and take an average of two days to complete.
Products to Promote
Part of any successful affiliate marketing strategy with Coinbase will involve displaying all of Coinbase’s perks to new users. Crypto podcasts and other crypto outlets can take advantage of the wealth of features offered by Coinbase when crafting their marketing copy. Some of the big features to point out for crypto newbies include the following:
Coinbase Cryptocurrency Exchange
The biggest feature of Coinbase is its cryptocurrency exchange. Here, Coinbase users can buy and sell different cryptocurrencies using their account funds.
As a centralized exchange, Coinbase has perks it offers over decentralized ones. Coinbase partners with several banks and payment processors to make it easier for users to enter and exit the crypto markets using fiat currency.
Users, including affiliates, also have the choice of accepting payouts from Coinbase in either cryptocurrency or local currency.
Currently, Coinbase lists over 200 different coins and tokens on its platform. Many of the tokens listed on the exchange are ERC-20 tokens. This differs from other exchanges that tend to prefer Binance Smart Chain tokens.
Coinbase Earn
In addition to its exchange functions, Coinbase also allows users to place funds from their accounts into the Earn feature on the platform.
Here, users can use their crypto assets to generate passive income for themselves, depending on the crypto they offer up to Coinbase:
- Lending: Users can lend their crypto out to others, generating income through interest on the loan
- Staking: Some coins, such as Ethereum and Cardano, use Proof of Stake as their transaction verification method and offer blockchain fees as a reward for participating
- Decentralized Finance (DeFi): This function lets users contribute one of a few stablecoins for use in liquidity pools on the blockchain, earning rewards through exchange fees in those pools
The yield on these options depends on the cryptocurrency offered up and the current market conditions. On their Earn feature page, Coinbase lists most of their assets as offering a 2% to 6% APY in places where the yield is fixed.
Coinbase Wallet
Despite its role as a centralized exchange, Coinbase expresses the importance of the decentralized elements of cryptocurrency. Thus, Coinbase released its Coinbase Wallet application roughly one year ago.
This wallet app works like other decentralized wallets like MetaMask. These wallets provide the private keys to the user of the wallet rather than Coinbase. The Wallet app works on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchains, meaning any ERC-20 token can go into this wallet and be used in decentralized finance operations.
The wallet also offers support to Ethereum and Polygon NFTs, once again due to its focus on the Ethereum blockchain.
Coinbase Card
Cryptocurrency is not a big payment medium at the moment, Few people invest in the asset, let alone use crypto as a means of paying for goods or services.
To bridge the gap while adoption grows, Coinbase offers a Visa debit card that allows Coinbase users to use their crypto, much like regular fiat currency.
This debit card is a separate account that holds fiat currency and cryptocurrency for the user, including stablecoins. When swiped, the card sells some of the cryptos or uses fiat currency for the purchase, depending on the settings the user enables.
Coinbase Learn
Finally, Coinbase seeks to help the general population learn more about cryptocurrency.
While there are several great sources out there about how cryptocurrencies operate, Coinbase offers short courses through their Coinbase Learn feature to teach users about some of the projects listed on the platform.
These courses take a few minutes to complete and give the user a brief overview of how the project in question works. Users answer a few questions to prove they understood the lessons throughout the course.
When finished, Coinbase rewards these users with a small amount of the cryptocurrency they learned about.
Other Things You Can Promote With This Program
In addition to the features listed above, Coinbase has several other features you might decide to promote as part of your affiliate copy:
- Coinbase Borrow: Coinbase users can borrow cash using their Bitcoin as collateral for these loans. The loans have an 8.7% APR, which is not as bad as the average credit card, but still quite high
- Coinbase NFTs: The NFT shop on Coinbase contains collections of both Ethereum and Polygon NFTs. Users can buy these NFTs to hold on to their Coinbase account or transfer them to an Ethereum or Polygon-supported wallet.
- Coinbase Derivatives: In addition to Bitcoin and Ethereum, users can buy and sell speculations on assets like crude oil and tech stocks through their Coinbase account
What Products Are Excluded From the Coinbase Affiliate Program?
While Coinbase offers loads of features to its users, the affiliate program only cares about one of them: the cryptocurrency exchange.
Only trades made by the new user during the initial 30-day window provide revenue to an affiliate marketer of Coinbase.
This fact means that any income the new user makes through the Earn or Learn features won’t make money for the affiliate marketer.
Affiliate marketers will still find value in promoting these other features, as it shows new users how comprehensive and user-friendly Coinbase can be, helping to attract these interested folks to the exchange.
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High-paying affiliate programs should be worth it for the marketer. Low-paying programs that don’t offer enough rewards to the marketer wouldn’t be worth it.
The problem with Coinbase’s affiliate program is that, unlike other programs attached to set-price products, Coinbase’s payouts depend on how often the new user trades and how much money they trade on the platform:
- $10 or less: $0.99
- Between $10 and $25: $.149
- Between $25 and $50: $1.99
- Between $50 and $200: $2.99
- Over $200: 1.49% of the total trade
The good news is you can somewhat predict the low end of your fees with this program.
Coinbase rarely accepts affiliates with fewer than 45,000 unique views per month, meaning an affiliate can use their average conversion rate and the low end of the fee structure to determine their payout floor.
Assume your affiliates only put in $10 one time with the new account. With a 2% conversion rate, that turns out to be 300 referrals. Each trade generated $0.495 for you (half of the $0.99 trading fee), which works out to roughly $445 per month.
Granted, this just represents the bare minimum an affiliate could make. Having a higher average trade volume per affiliate, or having a few large investors from your referral link, can quickly cause this floor to scale up.
Coinbase Affiliate Program Commission Rates
Coinbase offers a 50% cut of all trading fees from users that sign up with your affiliate link within the first 30 days. This split doesn’t change regardless of the number of accounts you help Coinbase signup for or the average viewership of your affiliate website.
Cookies from Coinbase referrals and affiliate links last for 30 days. During that time, if a new user signs up for Coinbase and uses the cryptocurrency exchange feature, the affiliate marketer will receive a cut of the trading fees for their effort.
How Payments Work
Coinbase uses an opt-in payment system for its affiliate marketers.
Once you reach the minimum payout threshold of $10, an affiliate marketer can withdraw the funds to a connected account, including a checking account or a payment processor like PayPal.
Receiving a payout from Coinbase requires going into your affiliate dashboard through the Coinbase platform. In addition to all of the handy charts displaying your referral metrics, affiliates will find their payout option here.
Coinbase generally takes three to five business days to pay out its affiliates. This can be faster or slower depending on the bank or payment processor in question, as well as the time of day the affiliate requests their payout.
Is the Program Worth It?
Overall, the Coinbase affiliate program seems worth it for any website or content creator with a crypto-focused audience.
The payout floor for the program is greatly based on the average monthly viewership Coinbase wants from its affiliates and has great potential upside as the number of referrals and the trading volume goes up.
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How to Join
Joining the Coinbase affiliate program is a straightforward process. Before you can join, though, you’ll want to ensure you match up with these requirements:
- Have a cryptocurrency-focused audience to give your potential affiliate link to
- Receive at least 45,000 unique monthly views for your content
- Have the ability to connect a valid banking account or payment processor to your Coinbase affiliate account
Once you have those requirements in order, follow along with these steps to get into the affiliate program:
- Go to Coinbase’s affiliate program page
- Select the Become an Affiliate option
- Answer the questions on the Impact survey regarding your website’s metrics and traffic generation methods
- Review your information and submit the application
How Long Does It Take To Get Approved for the Coinbase Affiliate Program?
On average, it takes between two and six days for Impact to manually review an application and get back to a potential affiliate.
This process can take longer, especially in crypto bull runs when content creators and news sites experience higher cryptocurrency interest than normal.
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