All over the world, people carry various types of cards to earn rewards points, cashback, and discounts when they spend. Different cards for different places, some give more cashback for airline purchases, some give more for gas purchases (sometimes even going so far as to have a card for each airline/store/gas station they go to regularly).
It's a reasonably safe assumption to make that you, the reader are invested in crypto and most likely at some point would like to actually spend the crypto you're holding, why not get crypto cashback on that yacht you're gonna buy in the future? Right now, the majority of people have to take their crypto to coinbase and send it to their bank account, paying transaction fees to send to coinbase and then more fees to actually process the payment to your bank account before finally being able to make everyday purchases with crypto.
All bitcoin credits cards are closed by VISA for European citizen on 5 January 2018. Affected cards are those issued by WaveCrest, including products from CryptoPay, Bitwala, TenX, Wirex, XAPO and others.
Enter the world of 2 only working CryptoCards:
Centra ( https://www.centra.tech/ ) and Monaco ( https://get.mona.co/IVWT/YQUDe0vftJ ), giving you the ability to spend your crypto directly. But not all cards are created equal.
For MonacoCard, Wirecard is an issuer/sponsor, that's it, the cards are manufactured from Gemalto and MCO handles everything else. Monaco is official visa partner. This issue with Wavecrest Visa cards does not affect $MCO at all. They aren't affected, but they aren't ready with their cards yet either. They are still in a "reserve your card before it rolls out" spot.
That said they do look pretty legitimate and interesting. Based in Switzerland, no fees.
Also when you use a referral link like this https://get.mona.co/IVWT/YQUDe0vftJ you'll get 10$ USD for free.
Centra is the other big Crypto Debit Card project which is not affected by this prohibition. They`ve made a lot of work these months, it is one of the few real working product in these niche now, as far as I know it.![]
TenX has already a new issuer so not affected. All old cards (Wavecrest) will get a replacement soon.
Here's a statement from the co-founder of TenX:
https://twitter.com/julianhosp/status/949238843462602753
- julianhosp