The Era of Futures Earn Has Arrived: A Comprehensive Overview of a New Model of Trading and Earning

In traditional cryptocurrency futures trading, margin and idle funds not yet allocated to open positions remain dormant inside user futures accounts and do not generate yield. For many exchanges, if users wish to earn on their idle assets, they must transfer these funds back to their spot or Earn accounts. This process is cumbersome and leaves users facing a dilemma: whether to maintain high liquidity to capture market opportunities, or to lock up funds in exchange for fixed returns.

To address these challenges, interest-generating futures earn products have emerged. Among them, MEXC Futures Earn stands out with a max APR of up to 15% and features a low participation threshold. Through a one-stop mechanism, it enables users to trade and earn simultaneously, thereby maximizing overall capital efficiency.

The Futures Earn Battle: Which CEX Leads the Pack?

Futures Earn is a financial product offered by MEXC for Futures users. Once activated, eligible funds in the Futures Account automatically participate in the Earn program, generating daily interest without affecting position opening, closing, or margin operations. This mechanism strikes an effective balance between active trading and stable returns, significantly enhancing overall capital efficiency and growing account values.

The following provides a systematic comparison of major CEX Futures Earn products across three core dimensions, analyzing their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Earn APR: APR directly determines user interest returns and is the primary factor considered when selecting a platform. MEXC and Coinbase adopt fixed-rate models, allowing users to precisely calculate and lock in returns. MEXC offers up to 15% APR, achieved through a combination of a base APR and a position booster, while Coinbase provides a tiered structure ranging from 4.1% to 12% APY. Binance, Backpack, and OKX adopt floating-rate models that fluctuate with market supply and demand, resulting in higher volatility but greater potential upside.

Capital Utilization: The supported assets and utilization efficiency directly determine the actual interest earning potential. Coinbase supports only USDC, while Binance limits participation to LDUSDT. OKX and MEXC both support USDT and USDC, and Backpack covers up to 10 assets, including USDT and SOL. MEXC, Coinbase, and Binance include idle funds, margin, and open orders in the interest calculation, whereas OKX and Backpack go further by incorporating unrealized profits, achieving near-100% utilization efficiency.

Participation Threshold: The participation threshold determines how accessible each product is to different user groups. MEXC and Coinbase require only 1 USDT or USDC, with simple participation processes suitable for beginners. OKX requires a minimum of 100,000 USDT to participate. Binance requires users to subscribe to Simple Earn and convert USDT to LDUSDT, adding procedural complexity. Backpack has no minimum requirement but, due to its DeFi-integrated mechanism, it is more suitable for users familiar with on-chain operations.

MEXC Futures Earn Explained: A Retail-Friendly, High-Certainty Approach to Trading and Earning

MEXC Futures Earn combines stability and flexibility through a dual APR structure that enables additional interest. It is particularly suited for retail users, offering an equal opportunity solution that allows small-scale investors to easily enjoy predictable, high-certainty returns. The total interest is driven by two core mechanisms:

1. Base APR: Guaranteed Return

By simply enabling the Futures Earn feature, the USDT or USDC wallet balance in a user's Futures Account automatically earns a fixed base APR of 3%. Whether the balance is 100 USDT or 1 million USDT, all users are

treated equally with no upper limit. This effectively removes the traditional whale-only barrier seen in conventional Earn products, allowing retail traders to earn stable returns without large capital requirements or complex operations. This mechanism provides exceptionally high certainty for risk-averse investors, offering stable earnings even amid market fluctuations.

2. Bonus APR: The More You Trade, the Higher the APR

This APR rate is determined by the position values of all open USDT-M and USDC-M Futures (the net value of all open positions) and follows a dynamic structure: For Futures position values below 100,000 USDT, the principal earns a 3% APR. For position values above 100,000 USDT, the rate increases up to 15% APR.

For active traders, this offers a clear advantage. The more frequently positions are opened and the larger their net value, the higher the bonus APR. Even small retail traders can easily reach a 100,000 USDT net value using only a small amount of margin and low-to-medium leverage to unlock the 15% APR.

Larger users can achieve the same benefit through larger capital allocations and low leverage (1-2×), balancing risk and return. Compared with Coinbase, which requires more than 10 million USDT in positions to access a 12% APY, MEXC significantly lowers the entry threshold, making it genuinely retail-friendly. To maintain fairness, MEXC also applies a principle cap: the 15% APR tier applies to up to 25,000 USDT of principal, and any amount beyond that continues to earn the base 3% APR.

Through its dual APR structure, MEXC Futures Earn delivers the following key advantages:

• Retail-Friendly: With a low entry threshold and no upper limit on the base APR, combined with dynamic, tier-level rate boosts, users can enjoy both passive and active interest without needing large capital.

• High Certainty of Returns: Fixed rates and transparent rules ensure predictable and stable income. This structure optimizes capital efficiency while lowering participation barriers.

• Comprehensive Advantage: Funds in the Futures Account can generate interest while being actively traded, more flexible than traditional Earn products and more stable than high-risk investments.

Currently, MEXC Futures Earn supports USDT and USDC, with plans to expand to additional assets in the future, further enhancing the flexibility of trading and earning simultaneously.

Three User Perspectives: The Value of Futures Earn

With the launch of the Futures Earn feature for Perpetual Futures, MEXC clearly demonstrates consideration for the needs of different user segments. The following analysis examines the value this feature brings from three perspectives: retail users, professional traders, and the platform ecosystem.

Retail Users: Earning While Trading, Reducing Cost Pressure

For small and medium-sized retail investors, the most direct benefit of Futures Earn lies in its ability to offset part of their trading costs. Under high-leverage and long-term holding conditions, funding fees can gradually erode returns over time. The Futures Earn feature allows users to earn interest on their wallet balance while holding positions, effectively using passive income to hedge part of the transaction fees and funding costs.

For example, when a user holds a long position and needs to pay funding fees, the interest generated from the account balance can partially compensate for those expenses, thereby reducing the capital burden of long-term positions.

More importantly, this "earn while trading" model gives small-cap users the opportunity to accumulate additional interest. Even with limited capital, the daily interest earned, though modest, can grow into meaningful income over time, effectively increasing the overall rate of return. In addition, the presence of steady interest income helps stabilize sentiment during market volatility. It acts as a psychological buffer, reducing the pressure of short-term losses and discouraging premature stop-losses or exits.

Professional Traders: Enhancing Capital Utilization and APRs

For professional or high-frequency traders managing large amounts of capital, the main appeal of Futures Earn lies in its ability to significantly improve the efficiency of idle funds. These traders often maintain substantial margin balances on exchanges to enable quick position openings or to hedge risk exposure. However, in the past, these reserve funds generated no yield when left unused, resulting in relatively low capital utilization.

With the Futures Earn feature, idle margin can now continuously earn APRs ranging from 3% to 15%, effectively turning inactive capital into a steady source of interest.

Traders who adopt long-term holding strategies also stand to benefit. Many professionals hold certain futures positions for weeks or even months based on macro market trends, during which recurring funding fees can significantly increase position costs. The interest income generated through Futures Earn can partially offset these funding fees, encouraging traders to maintain positions longer and capture broader market trends.

Notably, MEXC's maximum APR of up to 15% is comparable to yields typically offered by stablecoin Earn products in the broader market. This presents a compelling value proposition for professional users managing large portfolios, particularly those seeking steady single-digit annual performance improvements on substantial capital bases.

Platform Ecosystem: Increasing Capital Retention and User Retention

From the exchange perspective, the launch of the Futures Earn feature is expected to create a win-win ecosystem for both the platform and its users.

First, it significantly improves capital retention. Previously, many users would withdraw idle funds to participate in other Earn products or DeFi mining whenever they were not actively trading, leading to outflows of capital and lower platform activity. With the introduction of Futures Earn, users are now more inclined to keep their assets on the exchange. Since idle funds can still generate interest, there is less incentive to move them elsewhere.

Moreover, this Earn mechanism has no lock-up period and keeps full control of funds with the user, making it ideal for idle balances in Futures trading accounts. Users no longer need to transfer assets back and forth or worry about missing market opportunities. Their funds remain readily available for trading at any time. This combination of convenience and interest accrual greatly enhances users' reliance on the platform.

Second, Futures Earn helps strengthen user retention and loyalty. It effectively acts as a unique performance boost for Futures trading, incentivizing users to stay active. As engagement deepens, the overall platform ecosystem becomes more vibrant: greater retained capital leads to higher Futures market liquidity, larger trading volumes, and deeper order books, which in turn attract more professional traders and market makers, creating a positive feedback loop.

With the launch of the Futures Earn feature, MEXC is poised to further solidify its user base and establish a differentiated advantage in product innovation across the exchange industry.

Risk Reminder and Conclusion

While Futures Earn provides users with additional income opportunities, it is important to recognize that interest earnings do not eliminate the inherent risks of trading. Market volatility remains a significant factor. If extreme price movements lead to unrealized losses or even liquidations, the interest income will not be sufficient to offset those losses. Therefore, users should always maintain strong risk awareness and continue to manage positions and leverage prudently when using this feature.

Overall, the introduction of MEXC Futures Earn creates a triple-win value proposition for the ecosystem:

• Retail users benefit from an additional stream of passive income,

• Professional traders improve their overall returns through higher capital utilization,

• The platform retains more funds, strengthening user engagement and ecosystem stability.

Against the backdrop of intensifying competition and refined operations among centralized exchanges, this innovative integration of trading and earning is emerging as a new focal point of differentiated product innovation in the industry.