So let me preface by saying that I'm not some type of financial advisor, nor am I giving any recommendations for people to follow what I do. I can really only describe the way that I I've processed Crypto.com in my brain, and hopefully it will make sense to you why I've held off for so long before really poking into it. And no, as much as I know people are poking fun of him, it's not because of Matt Damon. 

I mean c'mon, he was awesome in Good Will Hunting.

A Bit of Background

I initially heard of Crypto.com initially in terms of their Visa Debit Card benefits, when they were still known as the MCO rewards cards. Rather than of crypto.com itself and it's value as a cryptocurrency, the only thing that stuck with me was the 8% back on their Obsidian card, which in the world of miles and points, is pretty insane.  I am a points and miles guy by nature. I've opened more credit cards (for signup bonuses) than I'll care to admit, which has inevitably allowed me to travel to more than 70+ countries, go roundtrip business class to the Maldives in overwater bunaglows for my honeymoon, among other things. In terms of the Visa Debit Cards, no other card has an 8% return across all categories. None. Not to mention one that technically has no annual fee. But the fact that you needed so much CRO to stake in order to get those types of benefits (to date its $400k worth of CRO), no way was I ever going to park that much money there. Also, at the time, I was more about manufactured spending to earn points and miles, not really investing per se. The Crypto.com products are all technically prepaid debit cards. That, and these cards hand no signup bonuses, a critical reason why I never really gave these a second thought. 

So why now?

Once again. Not Matt Damon. It's actually because of Glitter Mines. VVS's Glitter mines to be exact. I stumbled upon them after doing some surfing, and saw some really astronomical APY's:

In fact, about a week ago, the Auto VVS rates were in the 1000's, so 768.60% is a significant drop. Could I stake some and just forget about it? Sure. So the only way to get connected with these glitter mines was to go through crypto.com, which prompted me to do try to do some more homework about the brand of visa debit cards I wrote off so long ago. And FYI, you should also check out their links to their BSC-based dapp, Beefy Finance, they have some pretty nuts-so daily interest rates. 

Getting started with Crypto.com

I was immediately annoyed at trying to fund my account, and to be honest, I still kind of am. They for some reason have a huge problem with mastercard debits (which my SoFI card is), which really leads to only ACH transfers or wires, which can take days. That and their transfers can take forever too. When i was transferring some ETH from the Crypto.com exchange app to the Crypto.com Defi Wallet app, it took about 15 hours, no joke. And speaking of apps, I was also confused as to navigating between their Defi wallet app, wallet extension, and their regular exchange app. Way to complicated at first for a newbie like me. 

But because of this confusion, I learned to really like Crypto.com. I'll explain. When you transfer a lot of ETH over and it doesn't go through, what do you do? You panic right? After hearing so many stories of people making mistakes I immediately had a sinking feeling that I must have done something wrong, like send my money to a lost wallet in the void of darknet. So I immediately saw if they had any customer support on the app, and low and behold they did! I won't spend this whole article gushing about their customer service, but they were absolutely awesome! They were quick, responsive, clear, and super helpful, and it was dedicated into the app with extra capabilities of having their responses e-mailed to you if you didn't actually have the app open to check their responses. Anyways, back to my original issues,  they told me not to worry and explained that it was very normal. And they were absolutely right, the transfer eventually went through the next day. 

Things are really cheap on the Crypto.com network

This leads to my next point. Sending things over the CRO network can be frustrating slow, but yet amazingly cheap via gas fees. I'd take paying .2 CRO versus .02 ETH any day of the week. And on average, even to move ETH wasn't bad either. The flip side of all this was as I said before, transfers could have a huge lag time and you might be waiting for a full day. 

If you buy into CRO, you should buy into with the whole Crypto.com system

What I realized with more digging was that if you really bought into CRO, then why wouldn't you want to buy into everything else? They have several different perks that all makes sense if you love CRO. For instance: If you purchase CRO you can get reward diamonds, which unlock more CRO. CRO has some of their best staking rates, which was around ~12% at time of this post. On top of that, if you have enough CRO staked, you can be eligible for one of their higher tiered cards, ranging from $400 worth of CRO staked, all the way to $400k. And going even further, the better CRO visa debit card you have, the more percentage cash back (of course in CRO, not USD) you'll get to support your probably full-blown CRO addiction. Before opening up a card however, one major thing to consider is that the Crypto.com cards are all prepaid debit cards, and if you look in the T&C's, you can't just load them up with money and expect to open up your Crypto.com app and buy everything at a discounted rate. I learned this the hard way: do NOT expect to be able to open up a debit card, top it up, and then start buying CRO and get CRO cashback. It just doesn't work that way.

Wrapping things up

After reading what now seems like an incredibly long informercial on Crypto.com, I fully recognize that you might be thinking that I drank the Kool-aid. And maybe I have. For the foreseeable future, I do plan to continue to mess around with it, possibly for a while until I bite the bullet and qualify for their 3% or 5% back card, but I'm still not convinced I want to have that much staked into CRO.   I guess it's kinda the same with Matt Damon. You either love him, or you hate him. 

Interested in trying Crypto.com for yourself?

Right now there is a $25 worth of CRO signup bonus, which honestly isn't as good as it used to be. On top of that, it really only unlocks once you have roughly $400 USD worth of CRO staked, which is also incidentally the same amount you need to have staked to be eligible for their Ruby Visa Debit Card. Regardless, if you are planning on signing up, consider using my referral link when you do: https://platinum.crypto.com/r/xya2fj7g7a or else you can put my referral code xya2fj7g7a on the signup page.