Leading American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has debuted its Visa enabled payment card dubbed Coinbase Card to its United Kingdom-based customers. The exchange made the announcement on Wednesday, April 10th through a blog post published to its Medium platform. Holders of the Coinbase Card will now be able to make in-store purchases and other online payments directly with their cryptocurrency held in Coinbase accounts.
As it’s enabled by Visa, the customers will be able to shop and make payments across the globe. According to the announcement, Coinbase will make crypto-to-fiat conversions instantly to allow the customers to make payments in non-crypto supporting Points of Sale (PoS).
The Coinbase Card supports all cryptocurrencies available on the Coinbase consumer trading platform which includes Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and Ripple’s XRP among several other digital assets. Users will be able to select from which wallet the transaction amounts will be deducted.
Previously as noted by Coinbase, users of crypto-enabled payment cards were supposed to preload their cards before they use them. However, with the Coinbase Card, the card is directly linked to the users’ Coinbase accounts thus saving them the need to send any funds to the card before being able to spend it.
The Coinbase Card fees are quite hefty. First of all, the card costs £4.95 ($6.50) to order, however, for the first 1,000 customers to order the card, they will acquire it at no cost.
Transactions will be processed at a 2.49% fee while conversions to fiat are charged at 1.49% with an extra 1% for each conversion transaction. If the user chooses to make any transaction outside the UK but within the EU nations, the transaction fees rise slightly to 2.69%.
Use the card in any other location outside the UK and EU and the transaction costs skyrocket to as high as 5.49%. These are pretty high, and most customers will probably be better off resorting to normal Visa cards or other less expensive crypto-enabled cards.
In addition, a chargeback fee of £20 ($26.20) is also slapped on the user for any chargebacks effected to their failed or canceled transactions.
According to the announcement, the card is regulated and authorized by the Paysafe Financial Services Limited and issued by Apto Payments, the company formerly known as Shift Payments. Coinbase has previously collaborated with Shift Payments to bring a payments card to the US customers but the service was discontinued. The card will be available to the wider EU community in the near future.
