Why Most Crypto Cards Feel Different — But Break the Same Way
Why Most Crypto Cards Feel Different — But Break the Same Way
Most crypto cards look different.
Under the hood, they’re running the same engine.
What’s different is the marketing.
Different brands.
Different metal finishes.
Different launch photos.
A lot of what’s marketed today as “crypto banking” isn’t really built.
It’s assembled.
The Same Stack, Repackaged
Cards sit on Visa.
Fiat accounts are often issued by Bridge.
Custody lives with BitGo or similar custodians.
Yield products are frequently white-labelled from Gauntlet.
Payments and FX are routed through regional providers like Reap.
Card programmes increasingly rely on infrastructure from Rain and its peers.
Each integration solves a real problem.
Stacked together, they create something that looks like a bank.
But they also create a long chain of dependencies that the user never sees.
Where the Economics Reappear
KYC is yet another external vendor.
Swaps are sold as “internal liquidity”, but often route to third-party exchanges — with a spread attached. Settlement, compliance, and FX risk all live somewhere else.
When you have five or six parties in the flow, the economics don’t disappear.
They just resurface in places most users don’t look:
- FX spreads hiding inside advertised flat mark-ups
- Charges on low-value transactions
(I thought the whole point was paying for coffee with crypto.) - Fees triggered when a transaction is declined due to programme rules, not user intent
And the user pays for the friction.
“The costs don’t vanish. They just move out of sight.”
The Question That Actually Matters
Which brings me to the part that matters.
What is the product here?
Imagine a single upstream provider changing terms, losing a BIN sponsor, or exiting a geography. Overnight, features disappear. Accounts pause. Support queues fill up.
Not because anyone messed up — but because control was never really there.
The whole “neobank” wobbles.
This isn’t a failure. It’s the natural limit of aggregation.
Aggregation Is Useful — Until It Isn’t
Aggregation is a legitimate strategy.
It’s fast.
It ships quickly.
It tests demand.
But over a ten-year horizon, aggregation alone rarely compounds.
The companies that last will be the ones that own licences, settlement, custody, and risk — not just the interface stitching everything together.
If one key partner disappears tomorrow, what do you still control?
Aside from apologising for the inconvenience in a mass email and scrambling for a fallback vendor.
As discussed previously in the context of stablecoin checkout and payment rails, infrastructure decisions compound quietly — until stress exposes who actually owns the system.
Distribution vs Durability
Everything else is distribution and brand.
Useful when the market is expanding.
Fragile — and sometimes fatal — when conditions tighten.
And that difference is starting to show.