I’ve been signing up, depositing, testing 10+ crypto cards and neobanks.

I suspect the list of “best crypto cards” today will look very different in two years.

Crypto cards are increasingly easy to launch, easy to subsidize and easy to make look attractive when compared to others.

A few things stood out:

1) Most high-reward cards are renting users, not retaining them
- 5 to 10% cashback looks great
- but for many products just an acquisition subsidy
- I doubt most of these reward rates survive the next 12 months
- The more interesting ones are already designing around sustainable unit economics.

2) Launching a crypto neobank is becoming ridiculously easy.
- With banking, card issuing, custody, KYC and infrastructure increasingly available through APIs, you can get something to market in weeks.
- The result will probably be dozens of new cards launching, followed by a lot of them running out of money or shutting down.

3) People massively overweight upfront fees and underweight recurring ones.
- Someone will reject a card because it costs $10, then happily use a “free” card charging 2% FX instead of 0.5%.
- After roughly $667 of foreign-currency spending, the “free” card has already cost more.

https://x.com/arndxt_xo/status/2089038443536068986