MLM & Affiliate System
Referral trees, multi-level commission and reward payouts for Bicrypto — what the addon does, the three structures it can run, and the naming difference that makes it hard to find in the admin.
The MLM & Affiliate System turns registrations into a revenue-share programme. A member shares a link, whoever signs up through it is recorded as their referral, and activity by that referral — a deposit, a trade, a staking position, an ICO contribution — creates a commission row the member can later claim into a platform wallet.
It ships with 37 pre-built commission rules covering every addon Bicrypto sells, three tree structures (direct, binary, unilevel), an approval queue, a network visualiser, a link and QR generator, and an admin side that can create, adjust and revoke both referrals and rewards by hand.
What it requires
Bicrypto core, and nothing else. No ScyllaDB, no Ecosystem, no extra services. If your platform boots, this addon runs.
Other addons are optional multipliers rather than dependencies. Each one you own unlocks the commission rules that pay on its activity — Staking, P2P, ICO, NFT, Futures, Copy Trading, E-commerce, AI Investments, Forex and the two Forex Trading IB rebates all have seeded conditions waiting. Rules belonging to an addon you do not have are hidden from the public commission-rates page automatically, so members are never shown a commission they cannot earn.
One partial exception: a commission can be configured to pay into an ECO
wallet, which is an Ecosystem on-chain wallet. Without the Ecosystem addon the
claim still works — it falls back to the generic wallet service — but you get a
wallet row with no on-chain address behind it. Pay in SPOT unless you run
Ecosystem.
There is no screen anywhere called "MLM". There is no database table called
affiliate. Both names are correct, in different places:
| Where you are looking | What it is called |
|---|---|
| The store and this documentation | mlm |
| Admin → System → Extensions | Multi Level Marketing, extension name mlm, product id 36667808 |
| The admin menu (Business Tools) | Affiliate Program → /admin/affiliate |
| The member menu (Services) | Affiliate Program → /affiliate |
| Every URL, admin and member | /affiliate/... |
| Every API route | /api/affiliate/..., /api/admin/affiliate/... |
| Every database table | mlm_referral, mlm_referral_condition, mlm_referral_reward, mlm_binary_node, mlm_unilevel_node |
| Every permission key | access.affiliate, view.affiliate.reward, … |
| Every settings key | affiliateMlmSystem, affiliateBinaryLevel1, … |
The practical rule: you enable it as MLM, and you operate it as Affiliate. Searching the admin for "MLM" finds the extension row and nothing else.
How a commission happens
Five things have to line up. If any one of them is missing, nothing is paid and nothing complains loudly.
-
The extension is enabled. The reward engine checks for an enabled extension row named
mlmbefore it does anything at all. Disabled, it returns silently — the affiliate screens still load and still show old data. -
A referral record exists and is ACTIVE. Created when someone registers through
?ref=<user id>, or by an admin by hand. APENDINGreferral — awaiting approval — earns nothing. -
A condition matching the activity is active. Conditions are the commission rules: what triggers, how much, in what currency, above what minimum.
-
The activity clears the condition's minimum. Amounts are valued in the condition's reward currency first, so a minimum of 100 means 100 of that currency, not 100 of whatever the member happened to trade.
-
The tree structure decides who gets paid.
DIRECTpays only the immediate sponsor.BINARYandUNILEVELsplit the same commission across up to seven levels of sponsors by percentage.
The result is a row in mlm_referral_reward — an unpaid entitlement, not money.
It becomes money only when the member presses Claim, which credits their
wallet and records an offsetting platform loss.
The three structures
Set once, on Admin → Affiliate → Settings, and it changes who gets paid for every future transaction.
| Structure | Who is paid | Levels | Extra tables used |
|---|---|---|---|
DIRECT (default) |
the immediate sponsor only, at the condition's full rate | 1 | none |
BINARY |
the sponsor chain, each level taking a configured share of the commission | 2–7 | mlm_binary_node |
UNILEVEL |
the sponsor chain, each level taking a configured share of the commission | 2–7 | mlm_unilevel_node |
Both walk the sponsor chain — who invited whom — not the tree. Binary
placement, the two-child limit and spillover affect the network diagram and
nothing else. Choosing BINARY over UNILEVEL changes what members see, not
what they earn. Referral structures explains
why, and what that means for a plan you are costing.
Two engines pay commissions
This is the single most surprising thing about the product, and the source of most "why did nobody get paid" questions.
- Event-driven conditions are paid the instant the transaction happens, by the code path that processed it. Deposits, ICO contributions, staking, P2P releases, NFT sales, futures fills, copy-trading follows and 12 others work this way. There are 19 such rules.
- Cron-driven conditions are paid by an hourly job that re-reads the transaction ledger for the current calendar period, sums qualifying volume per referred user, converts it into the condition's reward currency and creates one reward per member per period.
The two engines deliberately do not overlap: the hourly job skips every
event-driven rule by name. That split determines how quickly a commission
appears, what the reward is a percentage of, and whether the period field on
a condition means anything. See
Commission conditions.
Where to go next
Turn on the extension, seed the commission rules, and prove the programme is live before you advertise it.
Direct, binary and unilevel; approval; placement and spillover; the sponsor chain that actually decides payouts.
The 37 seeded rules, the overlap guard that stops you paying 8% when you meant 5%, minimums, currencies and periods.
How an earned reward becomes wallet balance, the payout threshold, the KYC gate and what it does to your profit reporting.
The seven member-facing screens, the referral link format and the link generator.
Approving referrals, adjusting rewards, and the admin dashboard's numbers.
Every switch on Admin → Affiliate → Settings, what it does and what happens if you get it wrong.
Commissions stopped, nobody qualifies, the menu is missing, the tree is wrong.