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Who this is for: DEXs that have signed the CBTC reward-share agreement and want to turn it into real trading revenue. This playbook covers the reward structure, four activation plays, and how to track your ROI. Your BitSafe account manager will walk through it with you.

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The deal: your reward share

Every CBTC swap on your DEX burns traffic fees on Canton and generates Featured App rewards. You earn a share of those rewards, paid on a simple split net of DA fees — one clean structure, no netting formulas.

Every venue starts on the same clean baseline: 50%. Volume tiers that raise your share are introduced after your first weeks live: we establish your venue's real transaction baseline first, then design the specific gates with you — calibrated to your business, not a one-size-fits-all chart.

Preview of the tier shape (specific gates set with you after your baseline period):

The tiers exist for one reason: as your volume grows, the extra margin funds your own growth — liquidity, market makers, user incentives. The DEXs earning the most today treat the reward share as working capital, not passive income.

The core insight: activation beats acquisition

The DEXs winning on CBTC aren't the ones with the most users — they're the ones that give existing traders a reason to swap today. Three plays consistently work:

1. Volume leaderboards — reward your most active traders
2. A dedicated market maker — so there's always a tight, two-sided market to trade against
3. Short-term growth campaigns, co-funded with BitSafe — time-boxed fee coverage that gives users a reason to trade right now

Play 1: Run a volume leaderboard

The highest-volume DEX on the network runs a monthly trading leaderboard funded from its reward-share income — currently a pool of roughly 450–500K CC per month — and it is the single biggest driver of CBTC volume on the network.

How it works:

• Fund a monthly rebate pool from your reward share. Size it so it's meaningful for your top ~20–50 traders. The leaderboard itself is just the measurement mechanism — it ranks genuine activity and determines each trader's share of the pool.
• Rank by traded volume over the month, with payouts weighted toward the top of the board.
• Pay out monthly, publicly, on a predictable schedule — consistency is what builds the habit.
• Use API rate limits as your control knob. Keep a conservative default (e.g. a few orders/min) and raise limits (10–20 orders/min) for verified leaderboard participants. This lets you scale activity up without opening the door to abuse.

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Compliance guardrails (important). Canton's Featured App rules apply to any incentive program. Structure your leaderboard so that:

• Rewards offset real costs users paid (fees, spreads) — frame prizes as fee rebates or trading-cost offsets, capped at what the user actually spent.
• No net-paying users: a user should never earn more from rewards than they spent to generate them.
• No artificial volume: self-trading, wash trading, and bot-farmed volume are prohibited and will disqualify activity from rewards.
• No reward recycling: rewards can't be structured so they're earned by transacting rewards themselves.

We'll review your program design with you before launch to make sure it's inside the lines.

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Play 2: Own your market-maker relationship

A DEX with a dedicated market maker has a tight, always-on order book; a DEX without one has a spread nobody wants to cross. The MM relationship should be yours — you set the terms, you hold them accountable, and your reward share is designed to fund it as you grow. The best-performing DEXs on CBTC all manage their MM directly.

This section covers the essentials — for the full deep dive (deal structures, the KPI grid, negotiation tips, and ROI tracking), see Working with Market Makers — A Guide for Canton DEXs.

What to ask for (KPI checklist):

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Name CBTC pairs explicitly in every commitment — spread, depth, and any volume-linked terms only count if the agreement says which pairs they apply to.

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Hold monthly reviews against these KPIs. Market makers routinely under-deliver without oversight — the venues that get value from MMs are the ones that measure them.

What it costs, and when it pays for itself:

• Typical retainers run ~$10K–20K/month based on the quotes we've seen; tier-1 MMs run $25K–50K. Some will quote higher with inventory loans bundled in.
• Several MMs will work retainer-free in exchange for order flow and access to your incentive programs — worth asking before you commit to a retainer, especially pre-volume.

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Break-even math

If your reward share nets you ~$0.10–0.15 per swap at current marker levels, a $10K/month retainer pays for itself at roughly 70–100K incremental transactions per month (~2.5–3.5K/day). Above that, the MM is profit.

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What BitSafe provides:

• Warm intros to market makers active on Canton
• Warm intros beyond MMs — wallets that can route order flow to you, and other Canton ecosystem partners
• CBTC inventory loans where it makes sense, so your MM can quote from day one
• Benchmark terms so you don't overpay </aside>

Play 3: Run a short-term growth campaign with us

Time-boxed campaigns are the fastest way to manufacture a "trade now" moment — and BitSafe will co-fund them. The flagship format: we fund a CC pool that covers user fees on CBTC trades for a set period (e.g. 2–4 weeks of fee-free trading), and you promote it to your users.

When to run one:

• Launching a new CBTC pair or kicking off your first leaderboard
• Your market maker going live — tight spreads plus zero fees is a strong combined hook
• Running a co-marketed trading competition — we'll help design the mechanics and prize pool, and co-promote it alongside you
• Re-engaging users after a quiet stretch

How it works:

• Agree the window, eligible activity, and a capped CC pool with your BitSafe account manager
• Announce a clear start and end date — the deadline is what drives urgency
• Fee coverage is tracked against the pool; the campaign ends when the window closes or the pool is spent, whichever comes first
• Measure volume lift vs. your pre-campaign baseline, and retention in the weeks after — a campaign that doesn't leave residual volume behind needs a different hook next time

Fee-coverage campaigns fit naturally inside the compliance guardrails above: the reward offsets a real cost the user actually paid, capped at what they spent — the cleanest possible incentive structure under the Featured App rules.

Play 4: Deepen liquidity with a stablecoin pair (Brale)

A longer-lead play with high payoff: list a stablecoin issued via Brale to create a CBTC/stable pair on your DEX.

• A stable quote asset concentrates liquidity in one pair instead of fragmenting it, and makes quoting dramatically easier for your market maker.
• Stable pairs are what most institutional flow wants to trade against.
• Lead time is longer (issuance and compliance run through Brale), so start the conversation now even if the launch is a quarter out. BitSafe can make the introduction.

Operational compliance: staying live

Beyond the incentive-program guardrails above, two operational points keep your rewards flowing:

• Separate your wallet from your DEX. If you operate both, they need to run under separate PartyIDs with their own agreements — mixing them is a known trigger for having rewards paused.
• Be able to explain your volume. Venues that can articulate their activity strategy — who trades, why, and what policies prevent artificial volume — are far less likely to run into trouble under the network's anti-wash-trading rules. Keep it documented.

Your account manager can walk you through the latest Featured App guidelines and review your setup.

Measure what matters

Your dashboard and API show your reward share and earnings daily (UTC). The three numbers to watch weekly:

1. Daily transactions — the baseline that will shape your tier design
2. Traffic burned ($) — the underlying economic activity; a swap burns ~5× what a simple transfer does