Spend is proud to host our first Reddit AMA and use this opportunity to interact with our communities around the world. Starting with our agenda, let’s go over our latest updates and news.

By now, you are all aware that the Spend Visa Cards are available for users residing in the United States. Your desired card can be ordered directly through the Spend App on your iOS device.

We would like to inform our community that we will no longer display a “Partners” web page on Spend.com and will no longer be disclosing the names of our partners, unless noted otherwise, publicly. The reason for the change of this business model is due to the nature of the cryptocurrency payments industry. For Spend to provide an a la carte array of banking, payment, and financial services that tie to cryptocurrencies, we are required to find banks and partners that are willing to put the traditional banking thought process aside to work within this industry. Finding these partners is an extremely difficult task and once obtained allows Spend a competitive advantage. Exclusivity is hard to obtain and would hinder our speed to market to find a partner that would work with us exclusively. Once we start releasing the names publicly, all this does for Spend is impact us negatively by allowing our competitors to solicit these partners and obtain them for processing. Therefore, removing our partners page will allow us to maintain our competitive advantages.

Now, without further delay, we are proud to announce new services releasing on Spend App v2.5.

Spend Now Supports 27 Fiat Currencies with Multi-Currency Virtual IBANs in Global Partnership

Through our new banking partnership, Spend now offers fiat support for 27 currencies including USD, CAD, EUR, GBP, KRW, JPY, CNY, and many more! You may find the list of the newly supported currencies here: https://help.spend.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020046153-Fiat-Currencies-Supported-.

Each verified user will have the ability to activate and utilize up to 27 fiat currencies through their profile tab under the Currencies menu. A user will be assigned a virtual IBAN number that they can perform bank wires and SEPA transfers with. All of these fiat currencies will be exchangeable through our Canadian licenses and regulated MSB. The new currencies will be available in version 2.5 of the Spend App.

Instant eGift Cards Using Pay by Spend (Paying with Crypto)

Spend now has the ability to instantly issue eGift Cards from a wide selection of premium brands that may be paid for with all 16+ cryptocurrencies that we support with retailers in USA, Canada, Australia and online globally. Users will be able to directly utilize the Spend Wallet to purchase a gift card that will be instantly issued from within the app. Some of these brands include Amazon, Starbucks, iTunes, Apple Music, eBay, Lowes, Best Buy, Walmart, Whole Foods, StubHub, Groupon, Home Depot, Target, and more with a full list that may be found here: https://help.spend.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020045393-Spend-Instant-e-Gift-Cards.

Spend Cards Coming to a Region Near You!

We are pleased to announce we have established relationships with service providers to bring the Spend Visa Card to the following countries:

Europe:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Asia Pacific:

Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Philipines, and Malaysia.

We don’t want to estimate on a specific timeline of completion for these new regions at the moment, due to the fact that we have no control on how long the service providers may take. However, we plan to launch between Q3, 2019 to Q2, 2020 in the listed countries above. If your country is not listed, it does not mean you are out of luck. We still plan to look for more service providers and in the interim, our Spend Union Pay Cards will be available, as long as you are located in a non-restricted country. Countries that are restricted can be found here: https://help.spend.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011129814-Which-countries-or-states-are-restricted-to-use-the-Spend-Wallet-and-Spend-Card-.

Spend Referral Program

We are relaunching this service in version 2.5 to give instant referral rewards to our users. We are also enabling the enhanced referral rewards system for our Spend Preferred and Spend Black Members. This will allow users to get real time rewards for their referrals.

Spend Preferred & Spend Black Membership Stake Increase

Due to popular demand of the Spend Preferred & Spend Black Cards, the staking requirements will increase on April 18, 2019. The new 6-month staking requirement for Spend Preferred will be 10,000 SPND and the new requirement for Spend Black will be 100,000 SPND.

We will now switch gears to the Spend Foundation updates.

Blockchain University & Cross Ledger

For users who have not read our Cross Ledger White Paper, Blockchain University will be a decentralized educational platform aimed to disrupt the broken education system throughout the world. We want to bring more clarity on this topic and have decided to release a White Paper for this endeavor in April so users can better understand how this project will work. We are also planning to change the crypto-economics of Blockchain University and will release more updates on this exciting topic soon.

Cross Ledger is our main network and remains unchanged for how it will operate once launched. From a development standpoint, we are building in the background the infrastructure needed to support this system. We don’t have any public updates on this topic yet, but are working to get more information about this posted in the near future.

We will host AMAs once a month and continue to offer progress updates to our communities.

We will now address the questions the community has and answer them below.

1. “I’m US resident. Selling crypto to USD is considered taxable event in US. If I use spend debit card, I expect Spend wallet sells crypto real time in an exchange to get USD and use it in transactions. If this is correct guess, I think every single debit transaction is taxable event. Do you guys provide or have plans to provide tax documents for these transactions at the end of tax year?”

We can’t offer tax advice due to our compliance policies. However, we will provide a complete report module that will allow you to print out your full transaction history to bring to your accountant to see what tax requirements you may have.

2. “Say I convert TUSD(or any stable coin which will be listed) to USD by using Spend debit card. Do I have to pay 0.x% of trading fee anyway because it still is a crypto to fiat conversion on exchange behind the scene?”

Yes, this conversion still has a 1% fee, even if it’s stablecoin to fiat. We are looking at ways to reduce this with the stablecoin providers directly, but for now it’s the standard 1% fee.

3. “When will the Android app be available?”

The Spend Team is working diligently to deliver the best version of the Spend App on Android. This requires a review from both compliance and development to meet the banking standards we have. We anticipate to release it no later than the end of this month (March).

4. “When will spend be available in the EU?”

As mentioned in the updates above, we plan to launch in Europe between Q3, 2019 to Q2, 2020.

5. “Is SPEND going to have its own mainnet ? how different is this mainnet compared to other mainnets like eth and TRON?”

Yes, Spend plans to have its own mainnet. More information on our mainnet can be found by visiting crossledger.org.

6. “When will banking and Visa card services be available in Canada?”

We plan to roll-out the CAD Wallet, EFT, Interac, and Spend Visa Cards between this month (March) and April. We have already received the necessary approvals from our bank and Visa for launch in Canada.

7. “What are your adoption goals in card numbers for 2019?”

Spend has a roadmap of goals that is private within our organization. On a public level, we will try to bring our services to as many regions worldwide as possible.

8. “What is the “union pay shipping” event before end of march about?”

We are on our final lap of quality assurance testing before we release the reloadable Spend Union Pay Cards. We hope to have this completed by end of the month (March).

9. “When do you plan to have lending available and are you looking to launch more financial services in the future?”

We are working on bringing Lend by Spend in more regions as we obtain the licenses or service providers required in specific regions.

10. “Do you plan on supporting RUB?”

As mentioned above, yes! RUB will be included in our new supported fiat currencies.

Spend has new financial features coming out in the future but for now we will keep that non disclosed. As mentioned above Spend has an extensive private road map for more features on the app.

We appreciate all questions and everyone’s time in reading this today. If your question was not answered, it was due to our compliance policies restricting us from specific topics. Thank you for continued support!

No cryptocurrency is loaded on to the Spend Visa® Card. All assets are converted to local fiat currency prior to loading on the Visa® network.