MEXC Wants Futures Traders to Earn Interest While They Trade

Crypto exchanges have spent years trying to solve the same problem: how to keep traders liquid without letting their funds sit idle. Now, MEXC thinks it has cracked it.

Crypto exchange MEXC rolls out Futures Earn mode

The Seychelles-based exchange, which claims more than 40 million users worldwide, is rolling out a new product called Future s Earn. The idea is deceptively simple. Instead of forcing contract traders to choose between parking assets in yield products or leaving them in dead-margin accounts, MEXC will let balances earn interest — even when they’re tied up in open positions or pending orders.

If it works as promised, this could change how crypto’s hyperactive derivatives market operates. Perpetual futures now account for hundreds of billions in daily volume — $831.87 billion this month, according to CoinMarketCap. Yet behind the staggering numbers lies an inefficiency: enormous pools of collateral sitting idle, waiting for volatility that may never come.

Futures Earn blends passive income with active trading. Every USDT or USDC in a futures account generates a baseline yield. On top of that, MEXC layers what it calls a “bonus” system, where rewards increase with the notional size of open positions. A trader managing large Solana longs or Dogecoin shorts, for instance, could unlock higher rates, with overall annualized yields topping out at 15%.

Returns aren’t back-of-the-envelope math, either. The system uses three daily balance snapshots and 24 position snapshots to calculate payouts, which are credited automatically. The formula — Balance × (Base APR + Bonus APR) ÷ 365 — turns the typically static margin account into something more like a hybrid of savings and leverage.

New opportunities for growing markets 

Other exchanges offer staking and flexible savings linked to spot balances. But tying yield directly to futures accounts is rare. For a market dominated by high-frequency traders, arbitrageurs, and retail speculators chasing volatility, the ability to generate returns on idle funds could be a powerful hook.

There’s also a bigger story. Crypto markets are maturing into something that looks less like a casino and more like a financial operating system. By making collateral itself productive, exchanges like MEXC are borrowing ideas from traditional finance — where treasury desks routinely optimize idle capital — and porting them into an environment built for 24/7 volatility.

 MEXC’s pitch is that users no longer have to pick between trading and earning. Whether that reshapes the futures market or simply becomes another line item in the exchange wars remains to be seen. But the logic is hard to ignore: if margin is the fuel of derivatives, letting it idle at zero yield may soon feel like a relic of the past.