Best Crypto card – first impressions - The Blockchain Art Exchange

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What is the best Crypto card?

I’ve been looking for a new bank account for a while since 2014. I’m no stranger to crypto cards I had one of the first in 2015ish with the Bitstamp card, this was £1 a month and you toped up via the Bitstamp site there was no real UI. Even though there was no way to see the money when it was on the card, just how much you had sent I found having a card for crypto amazing. A year later or so that all came to an end, for some unknown reason Visa decided that it no longer wanted to make crypto cards and a lot of them got cancelled including the Bitstamp card.

A crypto card is great but what is better? A crypto bank account this means you need to be able to receive bank transfers for it to replace your current card. Enter Spectro coin, this website/exchange let you have an IBAN and swift for an EU bank, card too but that went with the visa ban. Speaking of Spectro coin still waiting on that Bankera thing…

So for a year or so no cards or bank account for crypto existed sad times…

But now it is 2019 boii!… and there is a ton of cards to try and I must admit that I’ve gone a bit overboard and signed up for about 8 cards. With that said I thought I would share my thoughts and experiences. I’ve looked into all options and chose only the best to pay for if they are free accounts I got it anyway.

The contenders

Coinbase 0/10

Coinbase is out, before I even got started app doesn’t work, you may be thinking that it’s not fair to rule it out cos It maybe took an extra 15 minutes to do it on the PC rather than the App. I disagree I think it is more than fair given that all the others on this list only took one try and a few hours to get authorized, “game-breaking” bugs will not be tolerated.

So Coinbase on first impressions gets 0 out of 10, Fees seem pretty high too.

Wirex 6/10

I’ve been using Wirex for some time now, they have a pretty good app it lets you hold DAI (a stable coin), Eth, BTC, LTC, Wirex token and Wollo or some reason. Wollo is crypto for kids saving it is cool but not sure why it is on wirex.

The fees for wirex are only £1 a month for the card and you get 0.5% cashback in BTC this means you need to spend £200 a month to cover your bill. The 0.5% rewards coming in BTC is a nice touch too. The only issue I’ve had with wirex is the customer support while very helpful and polite they are a bit slow but that is just growing pains.

Overall on first impressions 6/10, this is because while it works perfectly 90% of the time the app has failed me in very important circumstances leaving me without money for hours at a time. They also lose a few points for not having any cool extras like stocks or ISA’s options. That being said wirex is the most cost-efficient platform I have used so far and if you just want a bank account that can exchange the crypto stated above they go with them.

Monolith 6/10

Monolith (token card) just launched their android app so I’ve downloaded it and signed up. The app works as it should and I’ve submitted for verification. It has taken a little longer to get authorised on this platform but that is ok. The cool thing about monolith is that you own your private keys and they can’t touch your money. This is a massive feature for anyone who cares about security, the drawback being that only ETH can the monolith token can be used in the wallet.

On real first impressions, I would say 6/10 it all works how it should and has a very cool USP. It is too early to say really.

Revolut 4/10

Revolut is cool, it has a lot of features that I want like stocks, budgeting and other cool services the team thinks about a lot of stuff. What’s more the app runs smooth, there is a massive catch though, the card is 6.99 a month or 12.99 if you want the metal one. The card comes with some great things like airport lounge access, travel insurance and fee worldwide transactions I don’t like having to pay for my bank. If you travel a lot it is a good choice but in the EU it is worth noting that the 1% cashback becomes 0.1% with A FEE OF 12.99 a month the cashback is pointless.

Even with all that said I want to make Revolut my everyday bank, simply for the other features, the app comes with but sadly because of the next issue combined with the fee makes that impossible, for now.

So Revolut should be much more upfront about what I’m about to tell you, luckily, they unlocked Crypto for me before I ordered the card so I could see it. Here’s the thing you cant send Crypto to your Crypto address in Revolut, Yep that’s right at least for now all you can do is deposit normal money and change it for Crypto. I haven’t tested if you can withdraw it, but for now, it seems like they are thinking of it as an investment option, not a paid one. Revolut does say they are working on getting Crypto fully working.

For Revolut I want to give it a 10/10, but because of the above for Crypto anyway, it has to be a 4/10, for now. But that could change on principle it is 4/10 but I want to use the app, I feel drawn to it which is very good.

Crypto.com 9/10 – but check the golden rule

No card for this yet but about a week ago they announced that the EU has been approved so not long now I hope. Now, remember “Fat Sam always follows the golden rule” what’s the golden rule? If it is too good to be true, it is. Simple right, not always Crypto.com breaks the golden rule bad, 2% cashback, 100% of Spotify back and a metal card all be it an incredibly ugly one.

The Crypto.com system is the best but something about it feels wrong I guess it is just the new way maybe. How you get Crypto.com card is to buy at least 50 MCO which is their token and stake it for 6 months. This will set you back around 160 GBP at time of writing, however, you will get all of your money back and if you’re like me it went up in value. It’s like an ICO that works there is a reason to hold the token and a necessity for buying them. The cards come in different levels the most expensive of which will set you back 100kish. After your MCO tokens have been held for 6 months you get them back but if you withdraw them you cut your cashback in half.

On first impressions, Crypto.com gets a 9/10, lose one point for those cards they are ugly. One major thing that annoyed me about them is that they didn’t make it clear that the card wasn’t in the EU yet before taking my money. But MCO went up a lot so I made money so I’m not as mad as I would be if they lost it.

Other considerations

This article is getting a little long so to warp it up quickly here are others I looked into;

Nexo wallet – card not out yet Crypto credit card that you get credit based on your Crypto holdings (card offers 5% cashback, but you have 8% APR on the loans, so you do the math)

N26– not crypto but offers a free card.

Anna– for business nice invoicing software and account

Starling– same as coinbase app didn’t work

Monzo – meh

Tide – meh

Best Crypto card – first impressions