At what you actually spend, which crypto card comes out ahead?

Results

“Later years” excludes the card issuance fee; “first year” includes it. Most comparison sites either amortise issuance into an annual figure or drop it — both make the first year wrong. Where a figure is a range, the outcome depends on your tier or where you spend. We do not pick one number and present it as yours.

7 cards cannot be calculated

Not an oversight on our side — the issuer does not publish enough. Treating “not published” as zero would make these cards look better than they are, so we leave the maths undone and say why.

• Bitget Wallet Card The issuer publishes only an “up to” rate, with no base rate and no stated conditions
• OKX Card The issuer publishes only an “up to” rate, with no base rate and no stated conditions
• RedotPay Card The issuer does not publish a cashback rate
• Crypto.com Visa Card The issuer publishes only an “up to” rate, with no base rate and no stated conditions
• MEXC ether.fi Card The issuer does not publish a foreign transaction fee
• Bybit Card The issuer does not publish a cashback rate
• Binance Card The issuer publishes only an “up to” rate, with no base rate and no stated conditions

7 of 13 cards do not publish enough to compute a net return. That ratio is itself the state of this market: most issuers publish a marketing number, not a fee schedule you can do arithmetic with.

How these numbers are worked out

1. The foreign transaction fee is applied to everything. These cards settle in US dollars, so spending in any other currency is a non-default-currency transaction. You pay it at your local supermarket, not just abroad. This single choice is the main reason our figures differ from other comparison sites.
2. There are two kinds of cap, handled separately. ether.fi’s “first 2,000 USD” is a spending threshold — above it the rate steps down (3% → 1% → 0.5%). MEXC’s “100 USDT a month” is a cap on the reward itself; once you hit it, nothing more accrues. Treat both the same way and one of them comes out badly wrong.
3. Tiers default to the one you actually get. KAST’s annual fee ranges from 0 to 10,000 USD, but Standard is free and Private is a deliberate purchase. Counting it as a “worst case” produced a figure showing a five-figure annual loss — that is not a risk, it is a choice nobody makes by accident. So the calculator uses the tier a new applicant lands on.
4. The exchange rate is your assumption, not our data. We verify what issuers publish; exchange rates are not that. The default is 1, which keeps everything in US dollars.

Fee data comes from each issuer’s own documents, last checked 2026-08-12, with per-item sources on each card’s review. This is an estimate, not a promise — real amounts move with exchange rates, merchant categories and promotions. Our method is written up at how we check.