Binance Alpha Points: The 15-Day Cycle
and Day-16 Rolling Deduction, Explained

The first time I farmed Alpha points I made a very typical mistake: I assumed the points just kept adding up — bank a little today, a little tomorrow, and sooner or later you clear the threshold. After more than a week of farming, I opened the app to find my points had fallen, not risen, and figured the system had a bug. Only after rereading the official rules page did it click — not a bug, I just hadn't understood its rolling window.

This piece is about that one thing: how Alpha points' cycle and "expiry deduction" actually work. Get this straight and "shrinking the more you farm" won't spook you, and you'll be able to work out how to farm far more precisely.

01Why so many people miscount

The trouble comes from a very natural instinct: "points" sound like savings — whatever you deposit should stay there. Experience in a game, miles on a credit card, all only go up, so people assume Alpha points are the same — each day's farmed points stack, 10 today plus 10 tomorrow makes 20, accumulating until you clear the threshold to claim the airdrop.

Farm on that instinct and you reach two wrong conclusions: one, "I can farm any day, it'll all bank"; two, "farm enough once and I'm set for good." Do that and you'll likely find two things don't add up: you clearly farmed plenty the previous days, yet a few days on the points have shrunk; you finally get near the threshold, then stop for two days and it drops back down.

The root is this: Alpha points aren't a "total account balance," they're more like a sliding statistic counting only a recent stretch of time. Points banked on earlier days don't stay on the books forever; at some point they get "cleared" out. That's the rolling window covered below.

02The cycle: points are scored on a rolling window

Picture a fixed-length window — say it holds "the last so-many days" of points (how many follows the round's announcement; here it's just the mechanism). The rule roughly goes:

• The points you bank each day through balance and volume get logged into "today's" slot;
• When the system works out your current points, it sums every day inside the window, not a running total from the day you started;
• Each day that passes, the window slides forward one slot — the oldest day's points drop out of the window and no longer count toward your current points.

In other words, the "current points" you see is roughly the sum of what you banked each day over the past window. The window rolls forward, taking in new points at one end and spitting out old points at the other. The so-called "day-16 deduction" just means: when a given day's points outlast the window length, on the day they're due to leave the window, they get subtracted from your current points.

03A timeline that makes the deduction clear

In the abstract it's slippery; a timeline is clearest. To avoid pinning down numbers, assume you steadily bank x points a day, with the window length written as N days (what N is follows the round's announcement). Watch how the points change:

• Day 1: bank x points, current points = x.
• Day 2: bank another x, two days in the window, current points = 2x.
• … and up it goes, +x each day.
• Day N: the window is exactly full at N days, current points = N·x — the ceiling for this farming pace.
• Day N+1: you bank another x today (+x), but day 1's x drops out of the window on schedule (−x). One in, one out, they cancel, current points stay at N·x and climb no further.

Grasp that step and "rolling deduction" makes sense: as long as you farm steadily each day, points climb linearly to N·x, then enter a plateau of "one in, one out" and hold there. They stop rising because old points are dropping off in equal measure, not because your farming was wasted.

So how does "shrinking the more you farm" happen? Take another case: you bank x a day for the first N days and climb to N·x, then stop for a few days. While stopped, no new points come in (+0), but the window still spits out old ones (−x a day). So from N·x the points fall, x a day, x a day, visibly sliding down. When you come back and farm again, you have to refill from the part that emptied out. That's the truth behind so many people crying "I clearly farmed, where did my points go?"

04What this means for your farming

Once the rolling window clicks, a few practical conclusions follow naturally:

• To hold a high score, keep farming. The points "leak" — old ones drop off every day. To stay at a level long-term, make sure each day's new points roughly cover what leaves the window that day, or you'll just watch it slide back.
• Stop for a few days and the score will fall. That's not you doing anything wrong, it's the mechanism. If you genuinely can't farm some days, know it going in: you'll come back to a lower score and have to spend time refilling.
• Time the window when chasing a threshold — don't peak too early. If you max the score out too many days ahead, by your target day the earliest points have long dropped off, so you banked them for nothing. Ideally, on the target day the points accumulated within the window just clear the threshold — pace it by working backward from the window length.
• Don't binge-farm for a small airdrop. Volume trading carries fees, and farming continuously means paying continuously. When you do the math, count the "maintenance" cost too, not just the few days you push for the threshold.

How to bring daily points, window length, and the target threshold together and work backward gets more detail elsewhere: the full Alpha points playbook explains where the two parts of points (balance + volume) come from, and the lowest daily cost breaks down the fee side of farming. To try numbers directly, plug your assets and planned volume into the Alpha points calculator — easier than estimating on paper. Still unclear on where Alpha sits among the four programs? Circle back to how to choose among the four types.

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