Most exchanges run influencer marketing as a series of campaigns. Pay a wave of creators, get a wave of posts, watch signups spike and settle, repeat next quarter.
It works, in the sense that it produces users. It also resets to zero every time. The exchanges that build durable acquisition move their best creators off fees and onto revenue share — and the sequencing of that move is what separates a programme that compounds from one that just recurs.
Why the paid campaign comes first
You cannot pick affiliates before you have data, and creators cannot commit to revenue share before they know the product converts.
So the first phase is a normal paid campaign, with one non-negotiable difference: every creator gets a unique tracked link. Not a shared campaign code, not a blended UTM. Their own link, resolving to their own referral code, attached to every account that signs up through it.
This is the entire foundation. Without it you finish the campaign knowing you got signups and not knowing who sent the good ones.
What the data tells you, and when
Give it sixty to ninety days after the campaign, because the number that matters is not signups.
It is how many of those signups were still trading in month two, and what they traded. That gap is enormous and it does not correlate with follower count in the way anyone expects.
In practice you tend to see three groups:
- High reach, low retention. Large accounts whose audience signs up for an incentive and never returns. Expensive per retained trader.
- Modest reach, strong retention. Mid-tier creators whose audience actually trades — often technical analysts, educators, or people running a real portfolio publicly.
- Everything in between, which is most of them.
The second group is who you convert. They are usually a minority of the original wave, and they are rarely the names anyone was excited about when the campaign was booked.
Making the offer
The conversion conversation is straightforward when the data is on the table, because it is genuinely good for both sides.
You are offering a creator an ongoing share of the trading fees generated by the users they refer, for as long as those users stay active, typically with tiers that improve as their referred volume grows. In exchange, the fee-per-post relationship ends.
A creator with a genuinely engaged audience will usually earn more this way than on placement fees, which is why the good ones say yes. A creator whose audience does not trade will decline, and that is the structure working exactly as intended — it selects for the thing you want.
Some practical points that matter more than they sound:
- Lifetime revenue share beats per-signup bounties. Bounties reward volume of signups, which is precisely the behaviour that fills your book with dead accounts.
- Pay reliably and visibly. Affiliates talk to each other. A venue with a reputation for slow or disputed payouts cannot recruit good ones at any commission rate.
- Give them a dashboard. A creator who can see their own referred volume in real time promotes harder than one waiting on a monthly email.
- Keep briefing them. Affiliates who understand a new product feature will talk about it. Ones left alone go quiet.
The part exchanges get wrong
Two failures show up repeatedly.
The first is converting everyone, usually because someone wants the programme to look large. This drags in creators whose referred users never trade, dilutes the support effort across people who will never earn, and makes the programme look like it is underperforming when really it is just full.
The second is treating affiliates as a channel that runs itself. The revenue-share structure removes the per-post cost; it does not remove the relationship management. The exchanges with strong affiliate books have someone whose job is talking to those creators every week.
What we run, and what we report
We source and vet creators on audience data rather than follower count, negotiate the placements, brief on message priorities rather than scripts, and make sure every single placement sits behind its own tracked link.
Then we run the conversion — identifying which creators sent traders who stayed, structuring the affiliate terms, and managing those relationships ongoing.
Reporting covers each placement separately: reach, response, referred signups, and how those cohorts behaved over the following months. What that traffic is ultimately worth sits inside your own numbers, and you are the only one who can connect the two. We report on what the campaign did and adjust against what performs.
Common questions
What is the difference between a crypto KOL campaign and an affiliate programme?
A KOL campaign buys a defined set of placements for a fixed fee. An affiliate relationship pays a creator a share of what their referred traders generate, for as long as those traders stay active. The first is a marketing cost with a known ceiling; the second is a partnership where the creator carries some of the risk and keeps earning if the audience they sent actually trades. Most exchanges need both, and the strongest affiliates usually start as paid KOLs.
How do exchanges convert influencers into affiliates?
Run the paid campaign first, measure which creators sent traders who actually stayed, then offer those specific creators a revenue-share deal. Converting everyone is a mistake — most creators in a launch wave send signups that never trade twice. The ones worth converting are identifiable within a couple of months from their own tracked links, and they are almost never the biggest accounts in the original campaign.
What commission structure works for exchange affiliates?
A percentage of trading fees generated by referred users, paid for as long as those users remain active, usually with a tier that rises as a creator's referred volume grows. Lifetime revenue share attracts more serious partners than a one-off bounty per signup, because a bounty rewards volume of signups and a revenue share rewards quality of them. Bounty-only structures reliably attract the creators whose audiences sign up once and vanish.
How do you track which influencer sent which trader?
Unique tracked links per creator, resolving to a referral code that persists through signup and attaches to the account. Every creator gets their own, nothing is blended, and the reporting shows each placement separately. Without per-creator tracking you cannot tell a genuinely valuable partner from a well-followed account that sent nothing, and you will end up renewing the wrong people.
How does Corum8 run influencer and affiliate programmes for exchanges?
We handle creator sourcing and vetting on audience data rather than follower count, negotiate the deals, brief on message priorities rather than scripts, put a tracked link behind every placement, and then run the conversion into affiliate terms for the creators whose referred traders actually stayed. We have been running KOL and affiliate work for exchanges since 2016, with 95+ people across influencer, community, performance and engineering.
