Crypto.com essentially rug pulled their Visa card customers this week

Earlier this year I wrote about the no-brainer that was getting a crypto.com card. A prepaid Visa card that gives you a percentage cashback in their utility token Cronos (CRO).

The only catch was for the higher cashback percentage cards, a staking of CRO was required.

As you can see above, not the greatest investment. But hindsight is 20/20.

I personally staked £300 of CRO (now worth £120), and ordered myself the Ruby red card that gives 2% cashback and started using it for food shopping and filling my car with gas. The 2% discount of gas during the current fuel crisis has been extremely helpful and allowed me to stack crypto without dipping into my fiat savings.

https://crypto.com/product-news/crypto-com-visa-cards-update

But as the old saying goes, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Crypto.com has announced that effective June 1st 2022 it will end staking rewards to cards lower than the £3,000 Jade Green and Royal Indigo. A bit of a kick in the teeth but OK. The interested earned from my staked CRO is tiny compared to what I've lost from the value of my stake decreasing.

The real deal breaker is cashback rewards being reduced massively. My Ruby card is going from 2% to 0.5% and that's only if I continue to stake £300 worth of CRO. If I don't restake in 20 days that drops to zero.

As well as the percentage decrease, monthly earning caps of $25 and $50 have been introduced for the red, green and indigo cards. So big purchases on cards no longer pay out.

I suppose I should think myself lucky for going for the lowest staking amount. People that staked for the top tier obsidian card have reported losses of $200,000 so for their card to go from 8% cashback to 5% on top of that has been very distressing.

Crypto.com cites sustainability as the reason for the changes, so this is no doubt a response to the plummeting price. Hopefully increased scarcity increased the value of already owned cashback earned coins, however seeing so many angry customer responses makes me doubt the future of the platform.