BULK Alpha Program
A guide to BULK's Alpha Program — a revenue-sharing mechanism for serious traders and market makers that's separate from the standard fee schedule. For the official terms, see docs.bulk.trade/bulk-exchange/fees.
What it is
BULK sets aside 7.5% of taker fee revenue each 30-day epoch and distributes it to participants based on a quality score — not simply volume traded. No KYC is required to participate.
How the quality score is calculated
Four weighted components make up your score for a given epoch:
| Component | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Open interest | 40% | How much outstanding position size you're maintaining, not just how much you trade |
| Spread / depth | 30% | How tight and deep your quoted liquidity is — rewards genuine market-making, not just resting orders far from the mid-price |
| Uptime | 20% | How consistently you're providing liquidity over the epoch, rather than sporadically |
| Volume | 10% | Raw traded volume — the smallest weight of the four, deliberately, since it's the easiest to game with wash-like activity |
The weighting is worth internalizing: this program pays for genuine, sustained liquidity provision — tight spreads, real depth, consistent uptime — far more than it pays for raw volume. A trader chasing this program purely by volume is optimizing for the smallest slice of the score.
Why this matters if you're a market maker
Combined with the maker rebate tiers described in Fees on BULK and the uniform low-latency environment described in High-Frequency Market Making on BULK, the Alpha Program gives BULK a genuinely different value proposition for professional liquidity providers than exchanges that only compete on raw fee discounts: you're being scored — and paid — on the actual quality of the liquidity you provide.
See also
Want in? Sign up on BULK Exchange with referral code YETI and start building your quality score.