Rebate vs cashback vs welcome bonus: what is the difference?

A rebate returns a share of the trading fees you pay. It applies to every eligible trade for as long as its conditions last: a new account opened through a partner link or code, the markets the rebate covers, and often a period after sign-up or a maximum amount. The exchange pays it under its partner programme, usually as ordinary balance you can trade or withdraw.

Its value grows with your trading. For someone who trades regularly it is the most predictable of the three, because it is tied to something you already do rather than to extra steps. The guide on what a fee rebate is covers the mechanics in detail.

"Cashback" has no single meaning on crypto exchanges. It usually refers to one of three things:

• Fee cashback — the same mechanism as a rebate, marketed under a retail name. Read the terms: if it is a share of trading fees, it is a rebate.
• Card cashback — a reward for spending with a crypto payment card: a share of the purchase amount, often paid in the exchange's token and sometimes depending on holding or staking it.
• Promotional cashback — a limited campaign that returns part of the fees on a product for a short time, with its own conditions and caps.

The name tells you little; the source of the money tells you everything. Ask what the share is calculated from — trading fees, card spending or something else — and who pays it.

A welcome bonus is a one-time package for new users, split into tasks: verify your identity, make a first deposit, reach a trading volume, often before a deadline. Each task comes with a reward, and that reward is often a voucher or trial funds rather than withdrawable money: a coupon that covers part of a futures fee, trial margin that can be used for trading but not withdrawn, or tokens released only after a further trading requirement.

The advertised amount is written as "up to" for a reason: it is the sum of every task, including the ones designed for large deposits and volumes. A typical new user completes a few of the lighter tasks and receives a fraction of the total. That does not make the bonus worthless — the first rewards are often easy to reach — but the headline figure is a ceiling, not an expectation.

This is how the two main numbers look today for two exchanges we cover. A value appears once we have checked it on the exchange's own pages:

It depends on how much and for how long you will trade. The rebate scales with your volume: small for occasional trades, meaningful for an active trader over months. The bonus is fixed by its tasks: attractive if you would complete them anyway, a trap if it pushes you to deposit or trade more than you planned.

The honest way to decide is to estimate the rebate for your own volume with the guide on calculating trading fee savings, then read the bonus tasks and count only the ones you would complete without changing your plans.

Often, yes. The rebate comes from the partner programme and the welcome bonus from the exchange's promotion for new users, so a new account opened through a partner link is often eligible for both. But the two programmes have separate terms: some promotions exclude certain regions, account types or sign-up channels, and the exchange alone decides who qualifies. Check the promotion's terms on the exchange's site before relying on it. Each exchange page on Getref links to the official conditions and shows when we last checked them.

Getref Rewards points are neither a rebate nor an exchange bonus. They are Getref's own points for completing tasks on our site, such as registering a new exchange account through our link and submitting your UID for review. The exchange pays its rebate and bonus under its own rules, independently of Getref's points. The current tasks are on the tasks page.