Hey folks, if you’ve followed me for some time, you’ll know that I’ve dissected Crypto.com’s prepaid visa cards a few times now, but when I saw this in my inbox, I thought it’d be worth taking another look:

I’m going to get into the 10% back stuff in a moment, but I think it’s best to do a brief rundown of what makes the Crypto.com’s cards unique, and also what changes we’ve seen them undergo over the past few months.

Each card has a staking requirement, and the rewards from staking are the cards’ benefits

For whatever tier card you’re looking to apply for, you must have the minimum number of $CRO staked in order to apply for the card. More specifically, you have to have your $CRO in “CRO Stake” as opposed to “CRO Earn.” With CRO Earn, you can earn 6% per annum on your $CRO, whereas with CRO Stake you do not accrue any $CRO — instead the benefits for your $CRO staked equate to you being eligible for the following card tiers:

If you note from the graphic above, the current staking requirements are all pegged to fiat currency as opposed to $CRO, but this doesn’t mean that if the price of $CRO drops quickly that you’ll automatically be ineligible for your current tier. Assuming that at the time you commit you have enough $CRO, you’ll be locked in no matter what happens to the price afterwards for a 6-month period.

Card Benefits (The ones they haven’t slashed)

Originally users were able to earn and accrue $CRO while they staked it for their card tiers, but unfortunately these benefits got slashed back in May. Similarly, the percentages in $CRO Rewards you could get from purchases were also significantly reduced, and in the case for the low and mid-tiers they were either capped ($25 USD for Ruby, $USD for Indigo/Jade) or slashed away all together:

The benefits that were retained were the subscription benefits, including the following:

I’m assuming that the majority of readers aren’t considering locking up $500,000 or even $50,000 dollars into an altcoin, so for the purposes of my analysis, I’m not even going to bother going in-depth about the Obsidian or the Rose Gold/Icy White, but even as I go through the mid-tier Ruby/Jade-Ingo cards I think it will be pretty clear that none of these cards have as much value as they once did.

So let’s do a deep dive into each of these cards shall we?

The Ruby Steel

So assuming that I max out all the benefits of a Ruby Steel card and use it consistently for one full year, I will be earning a maximum of $25 dollars of cashback (actually $CRO) each month, or a total of $300 worth of $CRO back in a year. In order to receive the full $25 dollars worth of $CRO every month, you would need to spend approximately $2,500 dollars each month, or $30,000 dollars on your card annually.

In addition, although this benefit is going away for users on January 23rd 2023, you can get reimbursed for a Spotify membership — up to $13.99 a month, but I’m only going to count this as $12.99 a month because given the current pricing options (at least in the States), that’s all you’ll probably get out of it:

Assuming you get a Spotify membership for the next two months, this would be a savings of $25.98.

In summation, the magic number in cashback/savings would be $325.98 dollars (most of this in $CRO) for about $30,000 dollars worth of annual spend, including $400 dollars of your $CRO locked up not earning interest.

In comparison to many no-annual fee credit cards out there that are earning you a genuine (not-tied-to-some-altcoin) 2% cashback rate, with $30,000 dollars in annual spend you could be earning at least $600 dollars worth of cashback. Therefore you are losing out on about $250 dollars worth of cashback if you’re holding onto a Ruby Steel card.

The Royal Indigo/Jade Green

Going one tier up, with a $5000 dollars worth of staked $CRO, Royal Indigo/Jade Green holders can get a monthly capped $50 dollars worth of $CRO is cashback or $600 dollars annually for a total of $30,000 dollars worth of annual spend ($2,500 monthly). And in addition to the $25.98 dollars worth of savings from Spotify, Indigo/Jade holders would get 2 months of Netflix (because this also expires in January 2023) and a full year of Lounge Key Access. The Netflix maximum reimbursement equates to $13.99 dollars a month, or $27.98 dollars for 2 months. The Lounge Key access is a bit tricky because I don’t think you can flat out buy a Lounge Key Membership, and even for programs where you can — you’ll find that it’s usually much more beneficial to simply open up a credit card. You can get the lounge passes with unlimited passes and guests for some of the big annual fee cards, but for most people it would make more sense to open up the $95 dollar annual fee Hilton Surpass American Express which includes a Priority Pass (a program that I think is personally much better than Lounge Key) with 10 free visits, that and a 130,000 point signup bonus.

All-in-all because of the Hilton’s annual fee of roughly $100 dollars, I’m calculating the priority pass at about $100, which in summation gives a grand total of savings for the Indigo/Jade of approximately $753.96 worth of $CRO savings. Compared to a regular 2% Cashback card earning $600 dollars, that’s not as bad.

Additional “up to 10% cashback” benefits

With all the different Crypto.com prepaid debit cards they’ve announced a partnership with Dosh where you can earn up to 10% cashback on select merchants. This might sound enticing, but what I fail to understand is why you just simply don’t open up a free Dosh account to access these benefits yourself with any credit/debit card that you link. From what I’ve seen, the only benefit by having these cashback rewards is that you don’t have to open up a separate Dosh account because it’s automatically linked to your Crypto.com card. Furthermore, given the price action that we’ve seen with $CRO, I’d much rather be getting fiat in return for my purchases:

This kind of altcoin pricing leads me to my next section…

Other factors to consider

As I’ve mentioned before, there’s some significant disadvantages that I think you have to consider if you’re looking into getting a Crypto.com versus a regular TradFi debit/credit card:

Price action for $CRO sucks, at least for now: Several months ago I was contemplating buying $400 dollars worth of $CRO in anticipation of opening up a Crypto.com Ruby card, simply for the Spotify benefits. However at that time, had I gone through and purchased $400 dollars worth of $CRO at $0.40 a token, my $400 dollar investment would now be worth roughly $170 dollars, or $0.17 a token. That means that my Spotify membership would have in fact cost me almost $40 dollars a month.

Lost Opportunity Cost: If I had $4000 dollars worth of $USDC locked up in a platform like Midas, I could make roughly about $500 dollars worth of interest over the course of a year. However if I had $4000 dollars worth of $CRO staked, I would be making nothing. Therefore I think it’s important to consider that although the Crypto.com offer you some cool benefits like lounge access — those “cool” benefits have a cost, roughly to the tune of at least $500 worth of interest you could have been earning something else.

TradFi Cards/Checking accounts have signup bonuses, Crypto.com does not: To Crypto.com’s credit there are technically no annual fees, but there’s tons of credit card offers out there that can offer 100’s of dollars worth of miles/points in signup bonuses. I think the only consolation with Crypto.com cards is that there is no annual fee.

What about the Upper Tier cards (i.e. Icy White/Rose Gold/Obsidian)?

These might be a better deal than the Ruby/Indigo/Jade cards, but then the opportunity costs and price volatility factors should be weighed a lot more. Once again, if I had $500,000 dollars worth of $USDC instead of $CRO, I could easily make around $63,000 dollars off of one year’s interest and if it were $CRO, $500,000 dollars could have turned into $212,500. #rekt If you have that much to set aside in one place, I’d seriously re-evaluate how much the additional Crypto.com card benefits are worth. Or in other words, are they really worth $63,000 dollars?

Conclusion

I really don’t understand why a big company like Crypto.com with all their great savvy marketers can’t produce a product that’s more competitive and in-line with some of the basic TradFi products out there. On a simple cashback comparison, I think cards like the Jade/Indigo might be worth considering, but I still feel like they’re taking potential customers for suckers by having them buy in and lock in for crazy amounts of $CRO.

And to be fair here, I do use Crypto.com (not for their Crypto.com cards) but I do think that it’s a good product and I think they’re doing great things for the Crypto-industry by making things mainstream and easily accessible for the public. But with their cards…I simply just don’t see the value.

If you’re a current Crypto.com prepaid debit card holder and you strongly disagree with my analysis, I would definitely like to hear the reasons for why you chose Crypto.com over something else…really anything else. Are you super bullish on Crypto.com? Are you a huge fan of Matt Damon? Please let me hear about it in the comments below.

And if you haven’t used Crypto.com before and are curious to try it out, I’d recommend NOT going through anyone’s referral link because there’s a better signup offer through swagbucks.com:

All you have to do is make any cryptocurrency purchase of at least $15 dollars and you get 3000 swagbucks, which can be cashed out for $30 dollars via paypal. Plus, if you’re not a member of swagbucks already, consider using my referral link and you can earn an extra $10 dollars worth of swagbucks for signing up.

Thanks for reading, and as always, please be sure to follow me on twitter to read all about my latest findings and updates: https://twitter.com/CryptosWith

Disclaimer: None of this information is financial advice, and is just speculation from me, a random guy on the internet. Please consider this for purely educational and entertainment purposes. As always, please do your own research or contact a financial advisor to find what investments might be best for you.