Binance has launched an XRP rewards campaign worth a total of $800,000, but actual eligibility is limited to users who meet strict requirements such as region and trading conditions.

According to blockchain media outlet U.Today on Tuesday, Binance unveiled a campaign to distribute XRP to holders of its stablecoin Ripple USD (RLUSD). It was designed so that users must meet strict know-your-customer (KYC) checks, country-by-country regulations, minimum holdings and trading performance requirements to receive rewards.

The biggest restriction is where users live. Binance limited eligible countries, citing stablecoin-related regulations including Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) rules and its internal compliance standards. Only users who have completed KYC can participate, and users in Canada, Japan, Iran and North Korea are excluded. Users in many European Economic Area (EEA) countries, including Germany, France, Austria, Belgium and Cyprus, also cannot receive rewards.

Even users in eligible countries must meet additional conditions. They must hold at least 0.01 RLUSD in a spot, margin or futures account and post average daily trading volume of at least $500 in the margin or futures market. The traded asset does not have to be RLUSD, but RLUSD must be used as collateral.

The rewards calculation was also designed to make simple holding difficult. Binance takes random hourly snapshots of account balances, but daily reward calculations use the day’s lowest balance. If the account balance hits zero even once during the day, no reward is paid for that day.

Participation using loans also faces restrictions. If users borrow other stablecoins such as USDT, USDC, U, USD1 and FDUSD in a margin account and convert them into RLUSD, the converted amount is subject to a 60 percent haircut in the rewards calculation. By contrast, RLUSD-denominated loans are excluded from the calculation. The structure limits strategies that simply borrow funds to seek rewards and is intended to keep actual liquidity and trading activity in place.

Rewards are paid in XRP in the form of weekly variable yields. U.Today assessed that the campaign was designed so that users must maintain liquidity on a centralised exchange and engage in active trading to receive rewards. It added that "even with a large airdrop, there are no truly free tokens" and said users must effectively bear liquidity and trading costs to receive rewards.

The campaign is interpreted as Binance’s strategy to expand the RLUSD ecosystem while strengthening regulatory compliance and internal controls. From a user perspective, it appears necessary to first check whether they can meet conditions such as residency, completion of KYC, maintaining RLUSD collateral and the trading-volume requirement, rather than focusing on the size of the rewards.