The BitShares Referral Program is designed to promote infrastructure development. Decentralized financial networks depend upon their business partners to build an ecosystem of businesses, such as exchanges, merchant services, hosted wallets, lightweight wallets, and block explorers. With the BitShares referral program, merchants can now earn more by advertising their support for the BitShares platform. While other platforms primarily promise lower fees, BitShares offers merchants an ongoing revenue stream.
Free market competition results in many different hosted wallet providers competing to acquire new users. Each of these providers has a financial incentive to advertise their wallets by traditional means, which in turn increases the network effect for the BitShares ecosystem.