Based affiliate program review: 60% of a 0.025% builder fee, two payout rules and a 180-day claim deadline

Based, the Hyperliquid trading app of Based Technologies Limited of the British Virgin Islands, pays whoever refers a trader 60% of its own builder fee on every trade that trader makes, for life, in USDC. The base is Based’s fee, not Hyperliquid’s: 0.025% of notional on an ordinary perpetual, which makes the direct share 15 cents per $1,000 traded; 0.002% on the growth-mode markets where most of its stock and index perpetuals live, which makes it 1.2 cents; and nothing at all once the trader stakes 600,000 BASED. The “76%” on the landing page is the sum of three levels (60%, 12% and 4%) and only exists if the people you refer go on to refer other people. We read the affiliate documentation, the fee schedule, the FAQ, the referral portal’s own text and the platform terms on 16 October 2026. The rates are public, and the revenue behind them is visible on Hyperliquid: 15.43 million USDC in cumulative builder rewards credited to Based’s published builder address. What is not settled is how you get paid. The portal says commission “lands here daily” and can be claimed above $0.10; the FAQ says payouts run “twice a month” with a $10 minimum; and section 8.4 of the terms forfeits anything not claimed within 180 days. Our score is 6/10.

Who runs the program

The platform terms, a Google document linked from the Legal footer of based.one and headed “Last Updated: 16 November 2025”, say the interface is “operated by or on behalf of Based Technologies Limited, a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands”. That is the party an affiliate contracts with, because there is no separate affiliate agreement: the affiliate payouts clause is section 8.4 of the same document. Apple’s App Store listing names a different company, SHA2 Labs Pte Ltd, as the developer and provider, and the July 2025 announcement of the program describes the Visa card as “provided by BasedApp Singapore”. We did not obtain a company extract for either entity. The BVI Financial Services Commission’s public list of registered virtual asset service providers, read across all five pages on 16 October 2026, has no entry for Based Technologies Limited; whether a self-custody interface to a decentralised exchange needs one is a question the list does not answer.

What the product is matters for the commission, so here it is in Based’s own words. The about page states that “Based is a self-custody wallet”, “Based is not a broker”, “Based does not hold user funds”, that “Stock and crypto trades are perpetual futures, a type of derivative”, and that “Traders do not own the underlying stock or coin”. The same page claims “Lifetime trading volume exceeds $44 billion”, “more than 100,000 users” and “Annualised revenue is around $20 million”. Those are Based’s figures. The one number we could check independently is the fee revenue: Based publishes its Hyperliquid builder wallet in its API documentation, and Hyperliquid’s public information endpoint returned 15,429,059 USDC of cumulative builder rewards for that address on 16 October 2026. That is money the exchange has credited to Based for its fee; it says nothing about how much of it reached affiliates.

The program itself is a retail referral scheme that pays publisher-grade rates, and it says so. The documentation addresses “a trader, card user, content creator, or community builder” in one sentence and says “Anyone can sign up and register as an affiliate” at the portal. The 16 July 2025 announcement of “Affiliate Program V2” is the founding document: a first version had gone out “last week”, the revision added “rebates, multi-tier affiliate fees and partner program”, and the XP needed to get a code was lowered from 50,000 to 5,000. The documentation now mentions no XP requirement. Two other routes exist and are not this review’s subject: an ambassador programme “by application” with “an ongoing waitlist”, and a Builder-on-Builder offer for teams with a live app who want to “integrate Based into your platform to earn affiliate fees from users trading through Based”.

Commission structure

The affiliate documentation publishes a three-level ladder on “Based fees”, meaning the builder fee Based adds to Hyperliquid’s own charge, and the same page says “Earn up to 76% of trading fees across three tiers”. Read on 16 October 2026:

Level	Who	Documentation	Landing page and portal
T1	People you referred	60% of Based fees	60%
T2	People they referred	9% (boostable to 12%)	12%
T3	One level further down	3% (boostable to 4%)	4%
Total		up to 76%	76%

The two columns disagree on what the lower levels pay by default, and the disagreement has a history. The July 2025 announcement listed “T2: 9% of BasedApp fees -> Boostable to 12%” and “T3: 3% of BasedApp fees -> Boostable to 4%”, and attached the boost to “Based Partners”, a tier you entered by accumulating “at least $5M in referred volume” or being “invited by the team”. Partners also got a Gold card “worth $1500 USD”, discount codes and sponsored trading competitions. The documentation still carries the “boostable” wording. The landing page now says “earn 60% from direct referrals, 12% from their referrals, and 4% from the next” with no partner condition, and the referral portal’s published text goes further: “Rates are flat — there is no tier to climb and no evaluation period.” We could not see an account’s assigned rates without creating one, which we do not do. If you are forecasting on the lower levels, the only safe reading is 9% and 3% until your own dashboard shows otherwise.

The announcement’s illustration, which we opened, uses the boosted rates and shows what the levels are worth: $6,000,000 of direct-referral volume producing “$900”, $20,048,679 of second-level volume producing “$601”, $67,500,000 of third-level volume producing “$675”, and a “TOTAL COMMISION” of “$2,176” (the typo is theirs). The arithmetic checks at a 0.025% builder fee: 60% of it on $6 million is $900, 12% on $20.05 million is $601, 4% on $67.5 million is $675. Note the shape of the example. To earn $2,176, the network under one affiliate traded $93.5 million, and 59% of the money came from people the affiliate never spoke to. The diagram labels every referred trader “10% trading rebate”, which is the user-side perk: the announcement gives referred users “10% trading rebates on the fees”, paid “on the 3rd day of each month”, plus 2,000 XP.

What a thousand dollars of referred volume is worth depends on the market, because the builder fee does. The fee schedule gives four cases. Our arithmetic applies the direct 60% to each, before any staking discount:

$1,000 of referred volume	Hyperliquid fee (taker, base tier)	Based builder fee	Direct commission (60%)	Per $1 million
Perpetual, ordinary market	0.045%	0.025% = $0.25	$0.15	$150
Perpetual, growth-mode market	0.009%	0.002% = $0.02	1.2 cents	$12
Spot sell	0.070%	0.1% = $1.00	$0.60	$600
Spot buy	0.070%	none	$0	$0

The growth-mode row is the one to read twice. Based’s pricing page says “Most TradFi assets on trade.xyz run in growth mode, so nearly all stock, index and commodity perps get these rates”, with exceptions “such as Gold and DATs linked to crypto holdings like MSTR, STRC and PURRDAT”, which are charged crypto-perp rates. The documentation puts the growth-mode builder fee at “a flat builder fee of 0.002% (reduced from 0.025%)”. So an audience that comes to Based for Nvidia, Tesla or SK Hynix perpetuals, which is what the about page advertises, is worth 12.5 times less per dollar of volume than an audience that trades bitcoin perpetuals. The spot row cuts the other way: a referral who sells spot tokens through Based generates four times the commission of one who trades perpetuals, and the buy side of the same trade generates nothing, because Hyperliquid’s builder-code rules “do not apply to the buying side of spot trades”. The landing page, for what it is worth, says “Our revenue share comes from perp trading”; the documentation and the portal say “Based fees” and “every Based fee your network pays”. We would not count on spot until a payout shows it.

Then there is staking, which sits between the trader and your commission. The staking page gives the ladder, and it applies “to Based builder fees only”, which is exactly the part you are paid from:

BASED staked by the trader	Tier	Builder-fee discount	Builder fee on an ordinary perpetual	Your direct commission per $1,000
under 60,000	none	0%	0.025%	15 cents
60,000 or more	Silver	30%	0.0175%	10.5 cents
300,000 or more	Gold	60%	0.010%	6 cents
600,000 or more	Diamond	100%	0%	nothing

Nothing in the affiliate materials says Based tops up a commission on discounted volume, so we assume it does not. The practical effect is an inverse relationship between how valuable a referral is to Based’s token and how valuable they are to you. The fee page’s own example makes the same point from the trader’s side: “Diamond tier eliminates builder fees entirely.”

Two products are outside the published commission, or at least outside what is written. Based runs Polymarket prediction markets inside the app, and its prediction page says “Based charges an additional 1% on top of the Polymarket Trading Fees above for transactions”. No affiliate page mentions that 1%, and the landing page’s “perp trading” sentence excludes it; the staking page lists “Polymarket” among the markets where builder-fee discounts apply, which implies the charge is treated as a builder fee internally. Until Based says in writing that prediction-market volume pays commission, forecast it at zero. The other product is the card: a separate “cards affiliate program” paid “30% of the cashback generated by every user they refer”, and the documentation says it “went live on 15 Apr 2026 and concluded on 30 Jun 2026”. There is no CPA, no hybrid and no fixed sign-up bounty for the trading program.

Attribution and cookies

Attribution is by code, at the wallet, for life. The documentation’s third step reads: “Users are permanently tied to your account — you earn commissions every time they trade, for life.” The code is “up to 12 characters, no special symbols”, and the portal’s text calls it “Set once, permanent”. The FAQ confirms the permanence from the other side: “For security reasons, referral codes cannot be changed. Create a new wallet and generate a new code.” Its hacked-wallet entry offers to “transfer your XP and referrals to your new wallet” on request, so the relationship survives a compromised key, by administrative action rather than by right.

There is no cookie window and no first-click or last-click rule, because there is no cookie: a trader either signs up with your code or link or does not. The privacy policy, dated 25 March 2025, describes identity checks and transaction data and says nothing about referral tracking. Nor is KYC a condition for a trading referral to count; the only KYC in the program materials is the staking page’s “You must complete KYC before you can stake for a card”. The portal’s text sets the one eligibility rule in writing: “Self-referrals and duplicate accounts are removed from commission; balances already earned are never clawed back.” That last promise is the portal’s; the terms, below, reserve the opposite.

“For life” means for the life of the trader’s use of Based. The builder fee is charged only on orders that Based’s software submits with its builder code, so a referral who moves to the native Hyperliquid app, to another frontend or to an API connection pays Based nothing and pays you nothing. The documentation’s permitted channels are wide, “social media, Discord, Telegram, blogs, or your personal website”, and the program has no rules on paid search, brand bidding or incentivised traffic at all. The only sentence that touches your activity is section 3.1 of the terms, which licenses the interface “solely for your personal, non-commercial purposes”.

Payouts

Based publishes two payout rules and both were live on 16 October 2026. The first is in the referral portal at app.based.one, whose logged-out page reads “Earn up to 76% of every fee your network pays” and “collect commission in USDC on every trade the people you bring make — for life”. Its programme text, as published in the app itself, says: “Commission accrues on every trade your network makes, for life. Paid in USDC — claim any time you are above $0.10.” Elsewhere: “Nothing to claim right now — commission lands here daily.” The claim dialog lists the network fee as “Paid by Based” and the arrival time as “Under 1 hour”, and the payout history carries a notice: “Payouts are sent from the Based hot wallet. Once a claim is queued it cannot be cancelled.” The $0.10 is the figure the referrals page substitutes into those sentences; the wording says “above”, the page’s own check is “at or above”, and the difference is a dime.

The second rule is in the FAQ, under “When can I claim my referral payout?”: “Payouts are processed twice a month (mid and end of month), though timing may fluctuate by 1-2 days. Delays will be announced in our Discord.” And: “There is a minimum of $10 required to claim a payout.” Nothing on either page says which rule is current, and we did not make a claim to find out. The portal’s wording is newer in style and matches the app, so our guess is that the FAQ is stale; but a guess is what it is, and an affiliate who has read “daily” and finds a fortnight’s wait has no page to point at. The portal does not say which network the USDC arrives on. Both rules sit under section 8.4 of the terms: affiliate payouts “must be claimed manually by the user within one hundred and eighty (180) days from the date on which they become available, failing which any unclaimed amount shall be forfeited”. Commission that lands daily and is never claimed is gone after six months.

The money upstream of all this is visible, which is unusual and worth saying plainly. Hyperliquid’s builder-code documentation explains the mechanism: a trader signs an approval of “a maximum builder fee for each builder, and can revoke permissions at any time”, the fee is “processed entirely onchain as part of the fee logic”, and “Builders can claim fees from builder codes through the usual referral reward claim process.” Based’s builder address is published in its API documentation, and the exchange’s public referral state for it showed 15,429,059 USDC of cumulative builder rewards on 16 October 2026. So the base of your commission is auditable to the cent. Your share of it is not: it is a ledger inside Based’s app, paid from Based’s hot wallet, on Based’s say-so. The portal’s payout history is built to show a transaction hash per paid claim, so an affiliate can prove a payment; we found none published.

The terms that bite

Everything below is from the platform terms headed “Last Updated: 16 November 2025”, read on 16 October 2026. There is no affiliate agreement; this is the whole contract.

• Section 8.3, no entitlement. “Users acknowledge and agree that they have no contractual or proprietary entitlement to receive any rewards. The eligibility of any user for Rewards is determined in the sole and absolute discretion of the Company. The Company reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to modify, suspend or terminate any Rewards program at any time without advance notice.” Section 8.4 names “Affiliate Payouts” separately, so whether a commission is a “reward” under 8.3 is open; we would assume it is.
• Section 8.4, forfeiture and discretion. Unclaimed payouts are forfeited after 180 days, and “The Company retains the right, in its sole discretion, to withhold, delay, or deny any Affiliate Payout that it determines to be erroneous, fraudulent, obtained in breach of these Terms, or otherwise inconsistent with the purpose of the relevant promotion.” No maximum withholding period is given.
• Section 3.1, non-commercial licence. The interface is licensed “solely for your personal, non-commercial purposes”. The documentation invites you to promote on your website and blog. The two were not written with each other in mind, and the one that binds is the licence.
• Section 13.3, changes on posting. “Changes take effect upon posting (or a later date we specify). Your continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.” Material changes “will be signposted in-app or on our site”. Combined with 8.3, a rate change needs no notice and no consent.
• Section 13.9, termination for cause. Based may suspend or terminate access “at any time, with or without notice, if it reasonably believes you have breached these Terms, applicable law, or are a Prohibited Person”. That is narrower than the termination-for-any-reason clause most programs in this series carry, and it is the one clause here that favours the affiliate.
• Section 13.12, no email. “The Company does not provide email-based communication.” Notices come “in-app”, “by posting on based.one” or “through the Company’s verified social media accounts” and count as received on publication. Section 12.3 nevertheless requires you to send any dispute notice, in writing, to compliance@based.one within 30 days of the dispute arising.
• Sections 10.2 and 10.4, the cap and the clock. Based’s total liability is “the greater of one hundred United States dollars (USD 100)” or what you paid it in the preceding three months, and any claim “must be commenced within twelve (12) months after the cause of action accrues, failing which such claim is permanently barred.”
• Section 12.4, where you argue. BVI law; disputes go to arbitration “administered by the London Court of International Arbitration”, seated in London, before a sole arbitrator, “Each party shall bear its own costs”, and “no Dispute may be brought in any court located in the United States of America.”
• Section 1.2, who may not use it. Anyone on the UN, OFAC, EU or UK sanctions lists, and anyone “located, organised, or resident” in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, Belarus or the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Section 6.2 adds a longer list for the prediction markets alone: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Ontario, Singapore, Poland, Thailand, Australia, Belgium and Taiwan. The affiliate documentation ends with “This communication is not directed towards users in the United Kingdom and Singapore.” The landing page’s “Global availability” and “no regional restrictions” should be read against all three.

Not published anywhere: a brand-bidding or paid-search rule, an incentivised-traffic rule, a holdback period, a sub-affiliate agreement for the lower levels, or a clause on retroactive rate changes beyond the general powers above. An affiliate planning paid acquisition is working without a written permission and without a written prohibition, under a licence that says “non-commercial”.

What affiliates report

Very little, and none of it about payment. Trustpilot’s profile for based.one showed a TrustScore of 3.4 from one review on 16 October 2026, unclaimed, with “No history of asking for reviews”. The review, three stars, dated 24 May 2026 and titled “Mediocre support”, opens with “..this review is only about the Cash Card side of Based. I didn’t test the trading part.” It complains about support response and about cashback being capped despite staking, and says nothing about referrals.

The one forum thread we found is promotional: a 14 November 2025 post in r/AirdropCryptoAlpha titled “Based (Hyperliquid #1 Builder) – 10% bonus”, by a user farming points, which calls Based “the #1 builder on Hyperliquid”, cites “$28B volume” and carries the poster’s own referral link. The one exchange in the comments is a reader asking whether they can still join and the poster answering “create account and join with metamask”. Nobody in it reports a commission paid or withheld. We found no thread about Based’s program on the affiliate forums, no dated statement from an affiliate of what rate their dashboard shows, and no report of a payout denied. For a program that has run since July 2025 on a platform claiming 100,000 users, the silence is the finding: there is no track record in public either way, and the rule in this series is that we do not infer one.

Based against the alternatives

The honest comparison is the other ways to earn from Hyperliquid order flow, because that is where Based’s traders are. We reread the Hyperliquid, Pacifica and Ostium pages on 16 October 2026. The per-$1,000 column is our arithmetic on ordinary perpetual taker volume at each program’s entry fee, with no staking or volume discounts. For a perp DEX that shares the venue’s own fee, up to 60% of 0.045%, see our edgeX affiliate program review.

Program	What you get	Per $1,000 of referred perp volume	Published payout rule
Based affiliate	60% of Based’s 0.025% builder fee, plus 9–12% and 3–4% on two levels below	$0.15 direct	Portal: USDC daily, claim above $0.10, from the hot wallet. FAQ: twice a month, $10 minimum. Terms: 180-day forfeit
Hyperliquid native referral	10% of the referred user’s exchange fees “less any fee discount they receive”; the user gets 4% off	about $0.03 (6% of 0.045%)	Claim on the exchange “once >$1”, credited to spot balance; rewards on the user’s first $1 billion of volume; code needs $10,000 of own volume
Pacifica affiliate	“up to 40%” of Pacifica’s own fee, for approved affiliates, scaling with referred volume	up to $0.16 (40% of 0.04%)	Credited weekly with the points distribution; referred market makers stop paying; see our Pacifica review
Ostium builder fee	A charge you set yourself, 0 to 50 bps, on opening trades sent through your integration	$0.10 at 1 bp, $5.00 at the ceiling, on opened notional only	On-chain fee account; an integration, not a link; see our Ostium review

The Hyperliquid row explains why Based can pay five times the exchange’s own referral programme. Hyperliquid’s rules share 10% of a 0.045% fee and deduct the referred user’s 4% discount from it, which leaves $0.027 per $1,000. Based does not share Hyperliquid’s fee at all; it adds its own 0.025% on top and shares that. The trader pays 0.070% instead of 0.045% for the app, and your commission is funded by the difference. Any trader who works that out, or who stakes 600,000 BASED, stops paying it. The Lighter and Ostium builder programmes are the same idea sold to developers rather than publishers: you set the surcharge, you collect it on-chain, and nobody between you and the fee. Based has done that work for you, collects the fee into its own address, and pays you a share from its hot wallet. That is the trade: more volume than you could route yourself, in exchange for a counterparty with discretion. For an exchange-style program with a signed affiliate agreement and published tiers, see the exchange comparison, where the centralised venues sit.

Verdict

6/10. On the surface Based clears every bar the series sets for a high score: a published rate card, lifetime attribution, a minimum that is $10 at worst and a dime at best, no negative carryover to speak of, and no non-payment report anywhere. What keeps it at 6 is the contract and the contradictions. The only agreement is a player terms document in which you have “no contractual or proprietary entitlement” to rewards, commissions can be withheld “in its sole discretion”, unclaimed money is forfeited after 180 days, and your use of the app is licensed “non-commercial”. The portal and the FAQ disagree on when and above what amount you are paid; the documentation and the landing page disagree on what the second and third levels pay. Your share is settled off-chain by a BVI company that does not do email, under London arbitration at your own cost. Against that, the revenue base is the most transparent in this series, 15.43 million USDC of builder fees on a public ledger, and the rate on it is the highest share of a frontend fee we have seen. Ostium and Lighter score 6.5 for giving the builder the fee directly; Pacifica scores 5.5 for an unpublished starting rate. Based sits between them.

Who it suits: a publisher or community whose readers already trade perpetuals on Hyperliquid and would use a mobile app and a card, and who will treat the two lower levels as a bonus rather than a plan. Who it does not suit: anyone whose audience trades growth-mode stock perpetuals, where the commission is 1.2 cents per $1,000; anyone whose best referrals are whales who will stake to Diamond; and anyone who needs a payout date in writing before they spend on acquisition. Before you forecast, do three things: check which level rates your dashboard shows, classify your audience’s markets against the fee page, and claim often, because the clock in section 8.4 is running.

FAQ

What is the Based affiliate commission?

60% of Based’s builder fee on every trade by a user you referred directly, plus 9% of the fee paid by people they refer and 3% from the level below that, “boostable” to 12% and 4% according to the documentation; the landing page and portal show 12% and 4% outright. The builder fee is 0.025% on ordinary perpetuals, 0.002% on growth-mode markets and 0.1% on spot sells, so the direct share is 15 cents, 1.2 cents or 60 cents per $1,000 traded. Hyperliquid’s own fee is not shared.

How and when does Based pay affiliates?

In USDC, by a claim from the referral portal. The portal’s own text says commission “lands here daily” and can be claimed above $0.10, with the network fee paid by Based and arrival in under an hour, from Based’s hot wallet. The FAQ says payouts are “processed twice a month (mid and end of month)” with “a minimum of $10”. Both were live on 16 October 2026. Section 8.4 of the terms forfeits any payout not claimed within 180 days of becoming available.

Is the Based affiliate program legit?

The program is real and the revenue behind it is on a public ledger: Based’s builder address, published in its own API documentation, had 15.43 million USDC of cumulative builder rewards on Hyperliquid on 16 October 2026. The counterparty is Based Technologies Limited of the British Virgin Islands, named in the terms and absent from the BVI regulator’s VASP list. We found no report of an affiliate commission unpaid and no report of one paid either; Trustpilot has one review, about the card. The affiliate’s protection is the portal’s wording, not a contract, since the terms give “no contractual or proprietary entitlement” to rewards.

Does Based have a cookie window or lifetime attribution?

Lifetime, with no cookie. A trader who signs up with your code or link is “permanently tied to your account” in the documentation’s words, and the FAQ says codes “cannot be changed”. Commission stops only if the trader stops trading through Based, stakes enough BASED to zero the builder fee, or is removed as a self-referral or duplicate. The privacy policy of 25 March 2025 mentions no referral tracking at all.

Is a Based referral code different from the affiliate program?

No. Based has one three-level program, and the same code serves a friend and a publisher; the documentation addresses “a trader, card user, content creator, or community builder” together and the portal calls the page “Referrals”. The 2025 “Based Partners” tier, which needed $5 million of referred volume or an invitation and unlocked the 12% and 4% boosts, is the only distinction ever published between retail and professional referrers, and the portal now says “Rates are flat”. Separate routes are the ambassador programme (application and waitlist) and the Builder-on-Builder offer for apps that integrate Based.

Do all trades on Based earn commission?

No. Spot buys carry no builder fee, growth-mode perpetuals carry 0.002% instead of 0.025%, and a trader with 600,000 BASED staked pays no builder fee on anything. Prediction-market trades carry Based’s own 1% charge, but no affiliate page says that charge is shared, and the landing page says the revenue share “comes from perp trading”. The card referral campaign, at 30% of referred users’ cashback, ended on 30 June 2026.

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