Pacifica affiliate program review: up to 40% of fees, no published starting rate, and rewards the terms can cancel

Pacifica, the Solana perpetuals venue that went live in June 2025, advertises up to 40% of referred trading fees for the affiliates it selects, and publishes nothing below that ceiling: no starting rate, no volume ladder, no affiliate agreement. We read its referral and affiliate page, its fee schedule, its withdrawal rules, the code of its referral dashboard and the terms of use dated 11 June 2026 on 6 October 2026. The ceiling is real, the fees behind it are published, and the contract lets the company cancel any reward “at the Company’s sole discretion”. Our score is 5.5/10.

Who runs the program

The terms of use, last updated 11 June 2026, open with the company: “The Interface is provided by SkyLake Global Corp”, “a company incorporated under the laws of the Republic of Panama”. The same sentence separates the interface from “the Pacifica protocol, a decentralized, permissionless set of smart contracts”, for which the company says other access routes exist “to which these Terms do not apply”. The Google Play listing of the Pacifica Mobile app (500+ downloads, updated July 2026) gives the same developer, SkyLake Global Corp., at an office on 55th Street East in Panama City. We did not find the incorporation in a public register, and no page claims a licence from any regulator. That is the usual position for a perpetuals DEX; the contrast is Lighter, whose terms name a Delaware corporation with a live Florida filing.

Pacifica’s About page dates the company to January 2025 and mainnet to June 2025, calls itself “the largest decentralized perpetuals exchange on Solana” and claims “over $220 billion in cumulative perp volume”, about $1 billion a day and 65 or more perpetual pairs. Those are Pacifica’s figures; its own trading overview still says “over thirty-five perpetual markets”, so the documentation is not kept in step with itself. DefiLlama, read the same day, showed $145.7 billion cumulative perpetual volume, $10.5 billion over 30 days and $375 million in the previous 24 hours, so the tracker’s cumulative figure is about two thirds of Pacifica’s and its daily run-rate a third. The company says it is self-funded and has raised no outside capital. For an affiliate, the relevant facts are that the product has run for sixteen months, has a mobile app in a store under a named developer, and sells perpetuals, spot, a yield product (Print) and a prediction game (Swim) from one balance.

Nobody is named as the party that owes the commission. The affiliate section of the docs is undated, carries no agreement, and sends applicants to a Discord ticket. Clause 10.1 of the terms says that where separate “Program terms” exist, “the Program terms govern solely for that Program”; no affiliate program terms are published, so an approved affiliate is working from whatever the ticket produces. One other creator-facing scheme existed: the Educators Program page now reads “discontinued until further notice”, with winning submissions still to be announced on Discord. Ask, in writing, which entity pays, in what asset, and whether the 40% ceiling is in your acceptance.

Commission structure

The program page has three bases. On trading, “for eligible trading activity across perps and spot, Pacifica Affiliates receive fee share incentives of up to 40% from their referees”, and the share “scales with the total trading volume generated by their referred users”. On Print, “an additional reward equal to 10% of the realised Print yield earned by their direct referees”, fixed. On Swim, “10% of the realised Swim wins earned by their direct referees”, fixed. There is no CPA, no hybrid, no published sub-affiliate rate, no cap and no duration. Print, per its own docs, is a target-price order that is paid “at the start of each cycle by the Print liquidity pool” while it waits to fill; the yield is recalculated every cycle, so the 10% rides on a number Pacifica resets daily. Swim’s docs describe tapping price zones on a grid and collecting “bet × multiplier any time price enters a zone you tapped”, with daily “golden boxes” drawn from “a progressive pot”. The affiliate’s 10% is of what referees win, not of what the house keeps, so a referee who loses generates nothing on that base. adbench.io does not promote gambling; Swim appears here only because the affiliate contract pays on it.

The trading share is the one worth modelling, and the fee schedule is published: eight tiers set daily on 30-day rolling volume, from 0.015% maker and 0.040% taker at tier 1 to zero maker and 0.028% taker above $500 million. Pacifica’s public fee endpoint returned the same eight levels on 6 October. Spot uses the same tiers but deducts the fee “from the received asset”, so a share of spot fees arrives, if it arrives, in whatever the referee bought. The table assumes the full 40%, nothing passed back to the referee, and one $1,000 execution.

Referred trader’s tier (30-day volume)	Taker fee	Maker fee	Fee on $1,000 taker	Affiliate at 40%, taker	Affiliate at 40%, maker
Tier 1 (under $5 million)	0.040%	0.015%	$0.40	$0.160	$0.060
Tier 2 (over $5 million)	0.038%	0.012%	$0.38	$0.152	$0.048
Tier 5 (over $50 million)	0.032%	0.003%	$0.32	$0.128	$0.012
VIP 1 (over $100 million)	0.030%	0%	$0.30	$0.120	$0
VIP 3 (over $500 million)	0.028%	0%	$0.28	$0.112	$0

Two things follow. The ceiling pays most on the smallest referred traders, because the tier discount runs the other way; a referred whale on VIP maker volume is worth nothing. And the market-maker program removes the best accounts entirely: “Referee accounts that become part of Pacifica’s market maker program will no longer provide cash reward to their referrers”, while the same program’s rules say “MM accounts pay regular taker fees based on total trading volume”. A referred professional can keep paying Pacifica and stop paying you on the day they opt in. On the unknown side: at a hypothetical 20% rather than 40%, every figure in the table halves, and the page gives no reason to assume a new affiliate starts anywhere near the ceiling.

The referral dashboard shows nothing until a wallet is connected, but its page code, which any browser can display, says more than the docs. It labels referrer accounts “Basic”, “Affiliate Level 1”, “Affiliate Level 2” and “Affiliate Level 3”; it gives affiliate accounts a “manage kickback” control that sets a share to pass back to referees, bounded by a maximum fee share the program assigns to each account; it shows Level 2 accounts a second tab listing affiliates rather than traders; and its payout history filters on a “paid” status. So there is a three-step ladder, a rebate split and what looks like a sub-affiliate layer, none of them with a number in public. We did not connect a wallet or claim a code, and we treat these as the shape of the program, not its terms.

The retail scheme is separate and pays in points. The link unlocks “once you have generated $10,000 in volume”; “referrers receive 10% of the points generated by their referred users” and “referees will receive a 5% point bonus”. The points page allocates 10,000,000 points a week by a formula that is “dynamic and opaque by design” and says very few team members know the details. Clause 10.3(a) of the terms adds that program benefits “have no cash value unless explicitly stated otherwise”. A retail referral link is not an affiliate acceptance and should not be priced as income.

For a media buyer the ceiling is small. At $0.16 per $1,000, a $100 acquisition cost needs $625,000 of entry-tier taker volume from that trader to break even, before any kickback to the referee, before the $1 withdrawal fee, and before whatever rate you actually receive. At 20% it needs $1.25 million. Use the rate in your acceptance, count maker and VIP volume as nothing, and keep points out of the revenue column.

Attribution and cookies

Attribution is by wallet and code, not by cookie. The program page describes the path: a new wallet opens the referral link, connects, and claims the code; “using a referral link to sign up to Pacifica will attach your account as a referee to the generator of the referral link”, and “in order to claim a referral code you must deposit”. The builder documentation shows the claim as a signed request of type claim_referral_code sent to a referral endpoint, which is a firmer attribution event than a click. One sentence deserves attention: “the referral will directly use up the amount of codes you have available”. Referrers hold a finite allowance of codes, and the page does not say how many or how to get more.

Nothing states how long the relationship earns. There is no cookie window because there is no cookie: the privacy policy of 17 September 2025 says its cookies are “strictly necessary” and “not used for marketing purposes”. No lifetime promise, no expiry, no first-versus-last-click rule and no right to change referrer appear anywhere public. Compare Aster, which writes down 365 days, and Lighter, which writes down “permanent”. A referred user is identified by wallet, so a trader who arrives with a new wallet is a new user; the docs do not say whether a second wallet of the same person can claim your code, and clause 2.3 (fraud and misrepresentation) and clause 10.3(c) (forfeiture where rewards were “obtained through prohibited activity, manipulation, or abuse”) are the only rules on self-referral. The points rules exclude “self-trading, sybil or any other manipulative activities” from points; nothing equivalent is written for the cash share.

There is no identity check on the referred user. Onboarding is a wallet connection and a deposit; the terms log IP addresses (clause 9.2) and ban bypassing geography with VPNs or similar (clause 2.5), and the trading overview says access from restricted jurisdictions is blocked by IP address. The affiliate side has no KYC trigger either, which also means no written assurance that documents will never be asked for before a payout.

Payouts

The only schedule on the page is one sentence under the retail heading: “Fee and point rewards are automatically credited to the referrer account alongside the weekly points distribution, based on the referred users’ trading activity.” The points calendar fixes that distribution: snapshots “every Thursday at 00:00 UTC”, distributions “within 24 hours of each snapshot”. Read together, an affiliate’s fee share lands in the Pacifica trading account weekly, by Friday. No minimum, no asset, no invoice, no holdback and no first-payout date are published for affiliates, and the sentence sits under “Referrals”, so we would ask the team to confirm in writing that the same cycle applies to the cash tier.

Getting money out is the normal exit. The deposits and withdrawals page sets USDC withdrawals to a Solana wallet at “minimum withdrawal: $1” and “fees: $1 per withdrawal (gas)”, with “a maximum of $500,000 every 24 hours during Closed Beta” per account, an unexplained exchange-wide cap “across all assets”, and a rule that an account with a negative USDC balance “cannot withdraw USDC until the debt is repaid”. A $10 credit leaves as $9; a $100 credit as $99. Spot fees are taken in the asset the referee received, and nothing says whether a share of them is converted before it reaches you.

What Pacifica does not have is anything a publisher can verify or claim independently. The fund-security page publishes the bridge and vault addresses and describes a hot wallet “managed by the matching engine” over a multi-signature cold vault; the commission ledger lives inside that matching engine. The one audit Pacifica links, BlockSec’s report on the deposit-and-withdrawal contract (cover dated 24 April 2025), scopes itself to a program that “handles user deposits and withdrawals based on logs and backend logic” and says nothing about referrals. Builders are different: the builder program has a user-signed fee cap, a builder-set rate and a revocation call, the Hyperliquid pattern we described in the Ostium review. An affiliate has a dashboard and a promise.

The terms that bite

Section 10 of the 11 June 2026 terms is the affiliate contract until a better one is signed. Clause 10.2: the company “reserves the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue any Program at any time, without notice or liability to participants, and makes no guarantee as to the availability, rewards, or functionality of any Program”. Clause 10.3: rewards “are not guaranteed and may be adjusted, canceled, or forfeited at the Company’s sole discretion, including where the Company determines or suspects that they were obtained through prohibited activity”, and “the Company reserves the right to evaluate compliance retroactively”. Suspicion is enough, and the look-back has no limit. Clause 7.3 promises “additional notice” for material changes to the terms themselves, which 10.2 then withholds for programs. Clause 12.4 lets the company assign the terms freely; you may not.

If it comes to a dispute, clause 6.2 caps the company’s total liability at “the greater of (a) two hundred United States dollars (USD $200) or (b) the amount of fees you paid directly to the Company” in the previous six months, cumulatively. An unpaid commission balance is not a fee you paid, so for most affiliates the cap is $200. Clause 8 puts the contract under Singapore law, requires written notice of any dispute “within thirty (30) days of when it arises”, then SIAC arbitration in Singapore before a single arbitrator, and adds that neither party “may bring any dispute in any court located in the United States of America”.

Pacifica publishes two restricted lists and they do not match.

Document	Named territories	Scope
Terms of use, 11 June 2026	United States, Canada, United Kingdom, China, Russia, Ukraine, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, the Philippines, plus any jurisdiction under comprehensive UN, US, EU or UK sanctions	Persons who “reside in, are located in, are incorporated in, or have a registered office or principal place of business in” them
Trading overview, undated	United States, Cuba, Crimea including Sevastopol, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, “but not limited to”	Trading access, enforced by IP address

The contract is the longer list and it binds the affiliate as well as the trader: a publisher incorporated in the UK or Canada is outside the terms before sending a single click, and so is every referred user in China, Russia, Ukraine, Venezuela or the Philippines. The overview omits five of those and adds Afghanistan. Neither is a whitelist, and the sanctions clause can extend either at any time.

Nothing public addresses brand bidding, paid search, incentivised traffic, dormant accounts or sub-affiliate recruitment, so every one of those is a question for the ticket. A publisher buying inventory through a crypto network such as Coinzilla should get Pacifica’s written permission for the channel and the countries first, and should check the network’s own rules on prediction and betting products, because a landing page for a venue that sells Swim is not a plain exchange creative. The network’s approval of a campaign settles nothing about the commission.

What affiliates report

There is no payment record in public. Trustpilot has no page for pacifica.fi at all: the address returns its “page could not be found” notice, read on 6 October 2026, the same position as Lighter and Ostium. We found no thread about Pacifica’s program on the affiliate forums, no non-payment report and no dated statement from an approved affiliate of what rate they were given.

What exists is promotional. A post on r/referralcodes dated 20 October 2025 shares a Pacifica referral link and an access code with the pitch that the venue is “the next hyperliquid or aster”; it says nothing about money received, and we have not reproduced the code. A Solana subreddit thread about daily perp DEX volumes mentions Pacifica among the venues; its figures are participants’ claims and we have not used them. Links being shared is evidence that the retail scheme exists, not that the cash tier pays. We report that as the state of the record, not as a verdict on the program.

Pacifica against the alternatives

We re-read Lighter’s and Aster’s referral and fee pages on 6 October 2026 and take GRVT from our GRVT review (Ambassador guide of 1 April 2026). The per-$1,000 column is our arithmetic: the published share of the venue’s own fee on one $1,000 taker execution at the tier named, cash only, before any split with the referee. Ostium is left out because its builder fee is a charge on top of the venue’s fee, a different product; the Ostium review has that comparison.

Program	Published share	Fee base used	Per $1,000 of taker volume	Duration	Credit and minimum	Entity named
Pacifica affiliate (selective)	Up to 40%; no floor published	0.040% tier-1 taker	Up to $0.160	Not stated	Weekly with the points cycle; no minimum or asset stated	SkyLake Global Corp, Panama (interface)
Lighter referral	10% / 20% / 30% by referral count	0.028% unstaked Premium taker	$0.028 / $0.056 / $0.084	Permanent	Every Monday as L2 transfers, $1 minimum	Elliot Technologies, Inc., Delaware
Aster referral	10% default; approved 20% on VIP 1, 10% on VIP 2 and above	0.04% general-crypto taker	$0.040; $0.080 approved	365 days by default	By the following day, in the fee asset; no minimum	None
GRVT Ambassador	25% / 30% / 35% by tier	0.045% Level 1 taker	$0.1125 at 25%	Not stated	Not stated	Panama company

Sources: Pacifica’s program page and fees; Lighter’s referral page and fees; Aster’s referral rules and fee page.

Pacifica’s ceiling is the highest number in the table and the only one without a floor under it. Lighter publishes the whole ladder, its thresholds (15 and 50 referrals active on five days), a weekly Monday payment, a $1 minimum and permanent attribution, on a fee base so thin that its Gold tier pays about half of Pacifica’s ceiling. Aster publishes an entry rate anyone gets, a duration and a next-day credit, and its approved affiliate tier (20% on VIP 1 traders) is a documented step rather than a Discord conversation. GRVT publishes the best entry rate for a referrer who qualifies and nothing about when it pays. Against them, Pacifica’s genuine advantages are the breadth of the base (perps, spot, Print and Swim) and a fee schedule that starts higher than Lighter’s; its disadvantage is that the only number it publishes is the one you are least likely to get.

For the broader market, the exchange affiliate comparison has the centralised venues, where 30% to 50% of fees is a published default rather than a ceiling.

Verdict

5.5/10. In Pacifica’s favour: a published ceiling on a published fee schedule, so the maximum is calculable to the cent; a named interface company with a store listing at a street address; a weekly credit cycle written down; three reward bases rather than one; an attribution event that needs a deposit; and no complaint on record. Against it: no starting rate, no ladder and no affiliate agreement in public, while the dashboard code shows three levels and a rebate split that the docs never mention; no duration; no payout minimum, asset or first-payment date for the cash tier; a retail scheme that pays only points with “no cash value”; rewards cancellable on suspicion with retroactive review; a $200 liability cap under Singapore arbitration; two country lists that disagree; and nothing an affiliate can verify or claim on-chain, which our DEX rubric requires for 8 and above. It sits half a point under Aster because Aster publishes an entry rate and a duration, and a point under Lighter, which publishes everything except a reason to be confident the share will survive next month.

It suits a trading community whose members already use Solana wallets and trade enough to sit in the first fee tiers, run by someone who can get the rate, the kickback cap, the payout asset and the survival of accrued commissions into a written acceptance before sending traffic. It does not suit paid acquisition on the strength of “up to 40%”, and it does not suit a publisher whose audience is in the UK, Canada or the United States, which the terms exclude on both sides of the link.

FAQ

What is Pacifica’s affiliate commission?

Up to 40% of the trading fees paid by referred users on perpetuals and spot, plus 10% of their realised Print yield and 10% of their realised Swim wins. The 40% is a ceiling that “scales with the total trading volume generated by their referred users”; no starting rate or threshold is published. At the entry taker fee of 0.040%, the ceiling is $0.16 per $1,000 traded.

How and when does Pacifica pay affiliates?

Rewards are credited to the referrer’s Pacifica account “alongside the weekly points distribution”, which snapshots on Thursday at 00:00 UTC and distributes within 24 hours. No affiliate payout minimum, asset or holdback is published. Withdrawing from the account is a USDC transfer to a Solana wallet with a $1 minimum and a $1 fee.

Is the Pacifica affiliate program legit?

The program is documented on Pacifica’s own site, the fee schedule behind it is public, and the terms name SkyLake Global Corp of Panama as the interface provider. We found no non-payment report, but also no public evidence of any affiliate being paid, no affiliate agreement, and no Trustpilot page. The terms allow rewards to be cancelled at the company’s discretion. That is the extent of what can be verified.

What is the difference between Pacifica’s referral and affiliate programs?

The referral scheme is open to any account with $10,000 of its own trading volume and pays 10% of referees’ points, which have no stated cash value. The affiliate tier is selective, applied for by Discord ticket, and pays cash: a share of trading fees up to 40% plus the Print and Swim rewards. Holding a referral link does not make you an affiliate.

Does Pacifica offer lifetime attribution?

Not in writing. A referred wallet is attached to the referrer’s code when it claims the code and deposits, and no document states how long that relationship earns, whether it can change, or any cookie window; the privacy policy says cookies are not used for marketing. Lighter states “permanent” and Aster states 365 days; Pacifica states nothing.

Can US, UK or Canadian affiliates join Pacifica?

The terms exclude anyone who resides, is located or is incorporated in the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom, along with China, Russia, Ukraine, Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea and the Philippines, and we found no affiliate exemption. The same list applies to the traders you would refer.

adbench.io earns nothing from the programs discussed here. We do not use referral links. adbench.io does not promote gambling; this article is about the affiliate contract.