Original Title: "Breaking Down the Barriers of 'Trading & Earning', CEX Wealth Management Paradigm is Undergoing Major Changes"
Original Author: Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
Today, a piece of news about "Coinbase updating its derivatives rules to provide tiered subsidies for USDC used as collateral, with annualized subsidies reaching up to 12%" has sparked widespread discussion in the community.
KOL benmo.eth from the Chinese community was the first to disclose this update on X, commenting: "This product directly targets funding fee products like BFUSD and USDE. In the current low-fee environment, the rewards have already turned against us. For example, if you have a margin of 1 million USDC and open a BTC long position worth 2 million, your margin of 1 million USDC naturally earns an annualized return of 8%; if your margin is 10 million USDC and you open a contract worth 20 million, then your 10 million USDC will receive an annualized return of 12%. As competition in derivatives intensifies, Circle and Coinbase's direct cash subsidies aim for the USDC market in derivatives. This move has significant strategic implications and further drags the entire funding fee market into a red ocean battlefield."
As mentioned, Coinbase's update is actually targeting Binance's BFUSD, but since it does not involve currency exchange, the model is relatively more straightforward.
BFUSD is a reward-based margin asset launched by Binance for contract users at the end of last year. Users only need to hold BFUSD to continuously earn returns, while also using this stablecoin as collateral for their contract accounts, achieving "earn while you use." As shown in the figure below, although the current basic annualized return for BFUSD is "only" 5.82%, historical data shows it has repeatedly exceeded 10%.
Coincidentally, OKX has recently launched a similar feature that breaks down the barriers between trading and wealth management, and the model is even more aggressive—covering not just contracts but also spot trading.
On August 15, OKX announced the launch of the "Automatic Coin Earning for Trading Accounts" feature for VIP users. This feature allows users to automatically lend out assets in their trading accounts to earn returns without affecting the assets used for staking and trading margins—most importantly, assets used for open orders or as full-margin collateral can also automatically earn coins. The initial phase only supports USDT and is applicable to spot, contract, cross-currency margin, portfolio margin, and other account models, with plans to gradually open up more currencies in the future.
For a long time, due to the need for risk isolation, major centralized exchanges have generally adopted a partitioned account design—trading accounts and wealth management accounts are independent of each other (even spot trading and contract trading under the same trading account are independent). Although transferring funds between different accounts is not obstructed, this isolation design prevents users from balancing "trading" and "wealth management." In general scenarios, users can choose to "trade when needed, manage wealth when idle," but when placing orders or opening positions, they must forgo the corresponding wealth management returns during that time period.
In short, this is a "decision-making dilemma" commonly faced by exchange users: should assets be kept in the trading account, ready to seize market opportunities, or transferred to the wealth management account to earn stable returns? Pursuing returns means that funds cannot be used flexibly for a certain period; maintaining liquidity inevitably means giving up potential interest returns.
For many years, this paradigm has become a common habit for users, but habit does not mean perfection, and from a product perspective, there is clearly room for optimization.
With leading exchanges like Binance, Coinbase, and OKX successively launching targeted new features, this long-standing paradigm is being completely overturned. From the user's perspective, this means that the aforementioned "decision-making dilemma" will be broken, allowing for higher efficiency and earning potential of funds; from the exchange's perspective, this may signal the emergence of new product standards, with the boundaries between trading accounts and wealth management accounts becoming increasingly blurred, and in the future, "trading equals wealth management" is expected to become a standard feature of exchanges.
In summary, being able to balance trading and wealth management needs in a simpler way is clearly good news for countless exchange users, and all of this is thanks to the competition among exchanges for users and funds—amidst the ongoing competition in the trading arena, those who can better empower users will win their favor. Looking ahead, as cryptocurrency compliance deepens, more new players will enter the market, and the competitive landscape will only become more intense. As an ordinary user, I hope "they can make it even more lively."
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