What the offer requires
Coinbase's welcome offer is structurally one of the cleaner ones we cover. There is no token to buy, nothing to lock for a year, and no five-figure ceiling that nobody reaches.
The published pattern is: open a new account through a referral, verify identity, deposit, and make a qualifying trade within a window. Reported terms have included a $25 deposit and $100 of trading, with the qualifying purchase made within 180 days of signing up.
Two conditions catch people. Stablecoin purchases are excluded from current offers, so buying USDC will not qualify you. And only genuinely new accounts are eligible — closing an old account and opening a fresh one does not reset this.
Check the live figures, not this page
Amounts and windows change, and they differ by country. We deliberately do not treat any specific dollar figure as permanent. Read Coinbase's own promotion terms before you act, and treat any third-party page quoting a precise number as possibly stale — including this one.
The mistake that voids it
Of everything on this page, this is the part that costs real money, and it costs the whole bonus rather than part of it.
The referral has to be attached before the account exists. Open the referral link, then complete registration in that same session. If you create the account by any other route — the app store, a search result, a friend's verbal recommendation — and try to add a code afterwards, it will not apply.
Support cannot fix this. It is not a policy they are choosing to enforce harshly; the attribution simply was never recorded, and there is nothing to retrieve. The bonus is permanently gone.
This rule is not specific to Coinbase. It governs essentially every exchange welcome offer covered on this site, which is why it leads our bonuses page too. If you learn one thing about exchange promotions, learn this one.
Learn and earn
Separate from the welcome bonus, and more reliably available.
Coinbase partners with crypto projects that pay to be featured. You watch a short lesson, usually a minute or two, answer a handful of multiple-choice questions, and a small amount of that project's token credits to your account.
The amounts are small — a few dollars per campaign. Campaigns rotate every few weeks, old ones expire, new ones appear, and availability differs by country. Any published list of current campaigns is out of date within a month, which is why we do not publish one.
The honest assessment: worth the few minutes if you already have a verified account, and a poor reason to open one. The lessons are also a reasonable way to learn what a project claims to do, which is arguably worth more than the token. Our free crypto page compares this against the other routes.
Things Coinbase no longer does
Two discontinued features still generate search traffic and still appear in guides, so they are worth correcting.
Coinbase gift cards are no longer sold. Existing balances are honoured, but you cannot buy one. If the goal is giving crypto to somebody without an account, an open crypto voucher is the product designed for exactly that — it redeems to any wallet the recipient chooses, with no requirement that they join a specific platform.
Coinbase does not accept prepaid or gift cards for buying crypto. It states plainly that it cannot support prepaid cards or cards without an associated billing address. This comes up constantly in searches, and the refusal is structural across the licensed industry rather than a Coinbase quirk. Our dedicated guide explains why and covers what genuinely works instead.
Is it worth choosing Coinbase for?
Almost certainly not, and that is not a criticism of the offer.
A welcome bonus is paid once. Spreads, trading fees and withdrawal costs are paid on everything you ever do. A venue with pricing a percentage point worse recovers a modest bonus quickly, and then keeps taking it.
The sensible order is: pick the exchange on licensing in your jurisdiction, the assets you want, the spread and the withdrawal costs. Then, having chosen, check whether a welcome offer exists and follow the sequencing properly to claim it. Our US page covers how state licensing narrows the field before any of this matters.
The comparison worth making
Against Crypto.com, Coinbase's offer is smaller and far simpler: no token to buy, no lock, and the reward is in the asset you were buying anyway. Against the offshore exchanges advertising five-figure ceilings, it is a fraction of the headline and considerably more likely to actually arrive.
Smaller and real beats enormous and conditional, every time.