Kraken bases liquidity-provider tiers on share of trading activity

The program measures contribution

Kraken announced a five-tier liquidity-provider program on 4 September 2026. Qualification uses a provider’s share of maker activity over a rolling thirty-day period. A maker supplies an order that another trader can take. The release described separate spot and futures qualification routes, a launch grace period, and limited exceptions for missed performance. Credit-line eligibility begins at LP 3, subject to separately agreed terms; a tier is not a promise of a loan.

What the program page adds

The official program page, checked for this review, describes four qualification routes: spot maker share, futures maker share, alternative-asset activity, and US derivatives. It says any one can qualify, with one tier setting rates across supported markets. Tier changes apply at midnight UTC on the following day. The page advertises zero maker fees at LP 1 and rebates from LP 2, while warning that taker fees, spreads and other charges can still apply.

Kraken asks prospective participants to obtain the detailed fee schedule and qualification thresholds through its institutional contact process. The published page does not justify assigning an account a tier from a guessed percentage. Its current description also has a broader set of entry routes than the original announcement; readers should use the applicable program guide when evaluating an application.

Why unchanged trading can produce a different share

Consider a fictional provider that makes one million dollars of qualifying trades while the relevant market total is one hundred million. Its contribution is one percent. In the next comparison period, assume its own qualifying activity remains one million but the market total doubles to two hundred million. Its share becomes half of one percent. The provider has not reduced its dollar activity; the denominator has grown.

The reverse can happen too. If the relevant total falls to fifty million while the provider still contributes one million, the share becomes two percent. These examples explain relative measurement. They do not establish any actual Kraken threshold, decide which trades qualify, or assign one of the five tiers. A percentage is useful only after the provider knows both what enters its own numerator and what enters the venue-wide denominator.

A rolling period adds another practical effect. Imagine that a large trading day lies just inside the thirty-day window today and drops outside it tomorrow. The next calculation can change even if tomorrow’s trading is ordinary. A desk comparing two snapshots should therefore inspect the dates included in each. Otherwise, it might attribute a changed result entirely to today’s execution when an old high-volume day simply stopped being counted.

A rebate is one part of an execution result

Use a second invented example to see why a favorable fee line is not the whole outcome. Suppose a desk receives two dollars in maker rebates on a small sample of transactions but loses eight dollars when prices move after those fills. Before any other cost, those two effects combine to a six-dollar loss. The rebate is real within the example; it is simply smaller than the adverse price movement.

Now compare another fictional sample with no rebate and a three-dollar execution loss. Judging only the fee column would prefer the first sample, yet the combined result is worse. This arithmetic is not a forecast about Kraken or a claim about typical market-maker performance. It illustrates the reason a professional evaluation needs matched time periods, the same strategy definition and a complete cost measurement.

How to compare an offer with the desk’s actual activity

For a concrete review, imagine a desk with a spot strategy and a futures strategy run by different teams. Combining their headline turnover before understanding the qualification route could create a misleading estimate. The desk can instead model each proposed route using its own eligible activity, then apply only the rate schedule that the program actually offers. That preserves the distinction between discovering an entry route and forecasting the benefit of that route.

The operational question is whether the proposed economics improve the desk’s existing trading after all relevant effects are included. Increasing turnover purely to reach a hypothetical tier can add execution losses that outweigh the fee change. The contribution-based structure changes how qualification is measured; it does not remove the need to assess whether the underlying trades make economic sense.