Crypto Card Research Notes

A lot of crypto cards advertise themselves as "no fees" or "zero fees" cards. The label is technically true and practically misleading. I have looked at the cost structure of around 139 different crypto debit and credit cards, and almost every one of them has at least one cost that is not labelled as a fee but absolutely is. What "no fees" usually means "No fees" almost always refers to the monthly account fee, the issuance fee, and the in-network ATM fee. Those are the three places a card can hit you with a small line item. Removing them is genuinely helpful, but it does not make the card free. What the fee schedule does not show Two costs sit outside the fee schedule on most cards. The first is the conversion margin. When you top up with a stablecoin or pay in a non-account currency, the card charges a spread on top of the mid-market rate. On the better cards this is 0.5 to 1 percent. On the worse ones it is 2 to 3 percent. That is not a ...

Six months ago I started a spreadsheet to track crypto debit and credit cards. The first row was Crypto.com Visa. The second was Coinbase. By the end of that first week I had twenty cards. Now there are around 140. Some things only become obvious when you put them all next to each other. Here are the patterns I did not expect. Most "global" cards are actually five to ten countries Marketing pages like to say "available worldwide" or "EEA, UK, USA, and more." When you click into the actual eligibility list, the long tail is rarely longer than ten markets. Truly global cards exist but they are a minority. The honest way to filter is by your specific country, not by the global label. Stablecoin support is more concentrated than you would think USDC works on basically every card that supports stablecoins. USDT is on maybe seven out of ten. DAI is on three out of ten and shrinking. If your funds are mostly in something else, the card list narrows fast. Visa and...

When you tap a crypto card at a checkout, two completely different things might be happening behind the scenes. The one your wallet experiences day to day depends on which custody model the card uses, and the gap between the two has gotten bigger as more options enter the market. A custodial card works like a normal debit card, but the funds sit on the issuer's exchange. You top up your account, the issuer holds the crypto, and when you spend, they debit your balance and pay the merchant in fiat. Coinbase Card, Crypto.com Visa, and Binance Card all work this way, alongside most of the cards you have probably heard of. Read more about the full set at sweepbase.net . A self-custody card is different. Your funds stay in your own wallet, often a smart contract wallet like Safe. When you tap the card, the transaction triggers an on-chain spend from your wallet to settle the purchase, with the issuer acting only as a settlement processor. Examples include Gnosis Pay, MetaMask Card, a...

Most crypto card reviews open with the cashback number. Eight percent on Crypto.com Obsidian. Five percent on Nexo Platinum. Two percent on Coinbase. Those numbers are true, but they are also the part that matters least once you spend a few months with an actual card. The two fees that decide whether a card is worth holding are the FX spread and the stablecoin conversion markup. Neither gets much attention on issuer marketing pages. Both are larger than the cashback tier on almost every card I have compared at sweepbase.net . The FX spread is not what the issuer advertises Most issuers advertise a 0 to 1 percent foreign transaction fee. That is the fee you pay for using the card in a currency different from the account currency. For a card denominated in USD used in EUR, the advertised fee might be 0.5 percent. What the issuer does not advertise is the FX rate they use. Visa and Mastercard network rates are public and close to the interbank rate. The issuer rate is usually 0.5 to 1 per...