Hello again!
I wanted to share with you my first impressions of the Coinbase card after being on the waitlist for what feels like an eternity. I finally got the email about 10 days ago that I was able to order the card so I did just that. It was super easy and instantly I was able to add it to Google Pay before the card even shipped. As someone who had a Shift card from the beginning to the end, it was a nice surprise when the Coinbase card was finally announced. I loved my shift card, which I still have as a collector item because I'm weird. If you've never heard of the legendary Shift card, it was a debit card linked to your coinbase account that let you pay in BTC, LTC, and ETH without selling crypto first. As you can see I had it for a while and it definitely got used more than it should have. It was killed off in April 2019 for some reason, they never actually said why. Here it is compared to the new Coinbase Card.
The good
The new Coinbase card allows you to spend any asset held in your Coinbase account and it can be switched instantly in the app any time. There is no need to sell crypto and load it in advance like the Bitpay card. You can choose to either get 1% cash back in BTC or 4% cash back in XLM. This can also be changed any time. This cashback is instant as well, so if you want to maximize you can get the cashback in XLM and swap it to whatever other crypto you want. It can even be used at ATM's. This is pretty damn awesome if you ask me.
The bad
Every time you spend crypto other than USDC with the card incurs a 2.49% fee. This subtracted from your 4% cashback in XLM is still 1.5% cashback on debit purchases. If you choose to use USDC, which make sense, you wont incur any fee. This 2.49% fee also applies to ATM withdrawals. Even if you do want to spend some Bitcoin, you can still get 1.5% cashback in XLM. The smart thing to do would be just swap your Bitcoin for USDC so you get 4% cashback in XLM. Either way it's a win win situation.
Here's an example where I spent bitcoin and got 4% back in XLM. You can see that the 2.49% fee was taken out. You can also see the amount of the cashback reward.
Overall
I like it. I've always been an advocate for being able to spend crypto anywhere. Obviously this is not the ideal way because it's heavily tracked and the merchant is still receiving Fiat currency. It is, however, a good move in the right direction of crypto adoption. Here's a pic of the Coinbase card next to the new Bitpay card. It looks nice. You can definitely tell which one has been used.
Thanks for reading.
Peace.