Two of the biggest names in crypto publish a page that says "earn up to 50%". One of them is an affiliate program you can apply to as a publisher. The other pays existing customers for inviting their friends, and has no route in for you at all.
From outside, they look the same. We know because we listed both as affiliate programs, and had to correct it.
What actually separates them
A referral scheme pays an existing customer for bringing in a friend. You usually have to hold an account yourself, the reward is often credit or a fee rebate rather than cash, and there are no content terms because the company isn't expecting you to publish anything.
An affiliate program pays a publisher a commission on sales they drive. You apply as a business, you get tracking links and marketing assets, and you agree to terms covering what you can say and where you can say it.
The distinction matters because a referral scheme cannot be built on. There's no dashboard, no deep links, no account manager, and frequently a cap measured in hundreds of dollars a year.
The five-point test
Run these against any page before you spend time applying.
1. Does it ask you to log in first?
Referral schemes almost always require an existing account — the link lives in your account settings, not on a public page. Affiliate programs have a public signup that doesn't assume you're already a customer.
2. Is the reward cash, or credit?
"Fee rebate vouchers", "account credit", "$50 in Bitcoin when your friend trades" — these are referral rewards. Affiliate programs pay in money, to a bank account or PayPal, on a stated schedule.
3. Is there a cap?
"Earn up to $1,000" as a lifetime total is a referral scheme. Affiliate programs describe rates, not ceilings. A cap of a few hundred or a few thousand is the clearest single tell.
4. Does the page mention a network?
Impact, CJ Affiliate, ShareASale, Awin, Rakuten, Partnerize. If a network is named — or the signup button points at app.impact.com or similar — it's an affiliate program. Referral schemes never route through networks, because networks exist to manage publisher relationships.
Checking the destination of the signup button is the fastest version of this test. Hover it and read the URL.
5. Are there content rules?
Brand bidding restrictions, prohibited site types, disclosure requirements, rules about coupon codes. Nobody writes those for a customer inviting a friend. Their presence is near-proof you're looking at a real affiliate program.
Where this goes wrong in practice
The confusion isn't accidental. Several large brands run both, on similar URLs, with similar headline numbers:
- One major exchange's
/referralpage and its/affiliatepage both advertise up to 50%. Only the second is open to publishers, and it runs on a mainstream network. - Another's older affiliate URL now silently redirects to the referral offer, so an outdated link lands you in the wrong place with no warning.
When we went through one category program by program, several listings we'd recorded as affiliate programs had no publisher program at all — only a customer referral scheme. Those entries came off the site.
This is also why directories get it wrong at scale. If you're compiling listings from search results rather than reading the pages, a referral scheme and an affiliate program are indistinguishable. Both rank for "[brand] affiliate program". Both have a big percentage on the page.
What to do when a brand only has a referral scheme
Sometimes there genuinely is no affiliate program, and that's worth knowing early rather than after you've written a review.
Check three places before giving up: the site footer (look for "Partners", "Affiliates" or "Publishers", not "Refer a friend"), the network dashboards you already have — searching the brand name inside Impact or CJ takes ten seconds — and the brand's press or business pages, where partner programs are sometimes filed under business development.
If none of those turn up anything, the honest conclusion is that the brand doesn't want publishers, and your effort is better spent on one that does.
Why we care about this
Every listing on this site names the network where we've confirmed one, and we've removed entries that turned out to be referral schemes rather than affiliate programs. Where a brand publishes no commission rate at all, we leave the field empty rather than filling it with a number from somewhere else.
That's the standard we'd want applied to a directory we were relying on, and it's covered in more detail in how to judge an affiliate directory.