Crypto Sign-Up Bonuses: How to Read the Number (2026)

Every one of these offers is advertised as a single large figure and every one of them is a task ladder underneath. Here is how to work out what any of them is actually worth to you, and why the answer is usually less than the fee difference.

Why this is not a ranked list

This page used to be a list of five exchanges with a paragraph each. Every paragraph ended in "varies by promotion", which is what you write when you have not read the terms.

I have an account on one exchange. I can read one campaign's terms properly and tell you what is in them, and I could produce a confident ranking of five by paraphrasing other people's marketing, which is what the ranked lists are. The first is worth something and the second is not, so this is the first.

What follows applies to any exchange's offer, including ones I have never used.

The anatomy of a headline number

Take the one campaign whose published terms I have actually gone through. MEXC advertises its new user welcome gifts at a total, and the total is real in the sense that it is the sum of the task list. Here is the same programme measured two ways.

The left number is every task added together. The right number is the task you complete by existing. Between them sit deposit tiers running to 50,000 USDT and futures volume tiers running to 30 million USDT, plus one task requiring more than 300,000 USDT of volume at 21x leverage or higher.

No exchange I have looked at advertises differently. The structure is the industry norm: a ceiling that is technically achievable, a floor that is what nearly everyone gets, and no obligation to print the second number next to the first.

Five questions that settle it

Apply these to any offer and the headline stops mattering within about two minutes.

1. Which part of this requires nothing from me? Almost every campaign has one unconditional tranche, usually small. That figure is your realistic expectation. Everything above it is a description of behaviour you have not agreed to yet.
2. Is it money or is it a voucher? These are different products. A voucher is a credit against trading fees. You cannot withdraw it, and if you do not trade you do not receive anything at all. MEXC's sign-up tranche is a voucher.
3. How long is the window? This is where most people lose a reward they had already qualified for. MEXC publishes 15 days[src] for vouchers and futures bonuses. If the answer is not printed, treat it as short.
4. What does the top tier actually require? Convert it into your own terms. If the largest bonus needs 30 million USDT of futures volume and you were planning to deposit 500, the headline was never addressed to you.
5. Does it exist where I live? Campaign terms routinely vary by country, and the page advertising the offer is rarely the page carrying the restriction.

The arithmetic that usually decides it

A sign-up bonus happens once. A fee happens on every trade for as long as you keep the account. That asymmetry is not close, and it is easy to check with two published numbers.

MEXC's spot taker fee is 0.05%[src]. Binance's standard spot rate for a Regular User is 0.100% / 0.100%[src], and Bybit's non-VIP spot rate is 0.1% / 0.1%[src]. The gap on the taker side is five basis points.

Five basis points on 40,000 USDT of taker volume is 20 USDT. In other words, the entire unconditional sign-up voucher on the campaign above is worth about the same as the fee difference on forty thousand dollars of trading, and the fee difference keeps arriving after that while the voucher does not.

If you trade rarely, none of this is worth optimising and the bonus is a rounding error either way. If you trade often, the bonus is the wrong thing to have chosen on. Either way the headline figure is not the number to decide with. The fees guide has the full picture including the pairs that cost nothing.

Where the very large numbers come from

Search for a bonus code for any major exchange and you will find figures well above what the exchange itself publishes. I can tell you where those come from, because I am on the same side of the arrangement: they come from affiliates, and affiliates are paid on registrations.

Nobody in that chain is penalised for the number being high. The exchange did not write it, the affiliate did not promise it in a contract you signed, and by the time you find out what you actually received you have already opened the account, which is the only thing the number was for.

The practical test: if a figure does not appear on the exchange's own announcement page, it is not the exchange's figure. That test alone eliminates most of what is written about this subject, including some of what was previously on this page.

One thing that matters more than all of it

A bonus is a reason to prefer one venue over another. It is not a reason to keep money somewhere. Before comparing offers at all, the question worth answering is whether the exchange is authorised where you live and who you could escalate to if your account were restricted.

For MEXC I have done that work in detail: eight regulators have published warnings, and the Seychelles regulator has stated it cannot help users recover funds. For Binance, the relevant 2026 development is that it withdrew from EU services after its MiCA application lapsed. Neither of those facts appears on a page ranking sign-up bonuses, which is most of the reason this page no longer ranks sign-up bonuses.