If you write on Square, read this before your next post. The rules changed at 00:00 UTC today, and the maths is not what it was yesterday.
What actually changed
Until today, strong creators in any format could climb a weekly top-100 ladder and reach a 50% commission rate. That ladder still exists. It just does not apply to text anymore.
Here is the new structure:
Text posts and articles: 20% basic commission. Flat. No ladder, no climbing. Your old 50% ceiling is now 20%.
Livestreams: 20% basic, plus a weekly bonus for the top 100 creators ranked by basic commission. Top 1 to 30 get an extra 30%, taking you to 50%. Top 31 to 100 get an extra 10%, taking you to 30%.
Chats: 20% basic commission. Yes, chats now pay.
The part that pays you back
In exchange for the text cut, Binance added an Engagement Bonus. For the first time, you can earn without a single reader placing a trade.
Eligible text content now draws from a weekly reward pool based on real engagement: comments, likes, and follows. Different engagement types carry different weight, and engagement coming from more active accounts counts for more than engagement from dead ones.
Read that again if you have an audience that reads you but does not trade through you. That audience was worth nothing to you yesterday.
Binance has not published the pool size, and your share is decided at their discretion. Nobody can promise you a number. Anyone who does is guessing.
How the commission half still works
A reader has to click a coin cashtag or a trading widget inside your content and complete a trade straight after. The window is one minute. You get a maximum of 3 cashtags per post, so place them where the action is, not in your intro.
Qualifying trades: Spot, Margin, Futures (copy trading excluded), and Convert Instant orders. Convert has no fees, so Binance estimates 0.1% of volume for the calculation.
What will never pay you?
Your own trades
Trades from anyone who signed up through a referral link, yours or someone else’s
API trades, market maker trades, broker trades
Stablecoin to stablecoin
Pairs with no trading fee
Anything tied to CreatorPad, which is a separate pool
What gets your engagement thrown out
Binance is explicit here, and the filters are sharper than people expect. Mutual-engagement rings, like-for-like and follow-for-follow groups are out. So is engagement from alt accounts, accounts on shared devices or IPs, and accounts with fund links to yours.
Fake engagement not backed by actual reading behaviour is stripped. The platform looks at your natural interaction history with the accounts engaging with you, so a sudden burst from people who have never read you can be treated as non-genuine. Removed likes, unfollows and deleted comments do not count, and a follow only counts once per week.
Getting paid
Weeks run Monday 00:00 to Sunday 23:59 UTC. Rewards land in USDC in your Spot wallet by the following Thursday 23:59 UTC. Minimum payout is 0.1 USDC for the week, and anything under that resets to zero.
Last week under the old rules, 12 to 18 October, settles on 21 October. Everything from today forward runs on the new structure.
The honest read
If you only write text, you took a pay cut and got handed a lottery ticket. If you can hold a livestream, that is where the 50% went, and it is a far emptier room than the text feed.
Enrollment is automatic. KYC verified, one post, you are in.