Ever since the European Union implemented legislation against credit card companies charging more than 0.3% to merchants on credit card transactions, Europeans credit cards have lost almost all of their rewards and perks as credit card companies simply cannot afford to provide much value back to their customers when being forced to charge such low rates to merchants. The idea of course was that the merchants would be able to lower their prices as the fees that they had to pay on credit card sales was far lower. The actual result, as tends to happen with government interference in the free market, was that the prices merchants charged for their products and services remained the same as consumers were used to paying these prices. Meanwhile, consumers lost their side of the power, which is all of the perks and rewards that came with the credit cards.

The good news is that this is about to change with the new cryptocurrency cards from Crypto.com that are coming to Europe. These cards have perks that are unheard of in Europe since the introduction of this legislation which took power away from the consumer and gave it to the corporations. The perks have cashback in MCO (one of their cryptocurrencies) which ranges in value from 1-5% of your transaction, depending on the tier of the card you have. On top of that, there is even the possibility to have your Netflix and Spotify subscription included, as well as high levels of cashback on bookings made on Expedia and Airbnb. All of this with no card fees. How is that possible? The beauty lies in the details of the design of their card's ecosystem.

In order to be eligible for specific tiers of cards, you must first purchase and then stake MCO which is a cryptocurrency that trades freely on the market and is owned by Crypto.com. The amount of MCO you stake will determine what tier of card you can claim and thus, the magnitude of the perks you can acquire from your card. You can see an outline of the perks and MCO staked required below:

Outline of perks per card tier

As you can see, even the free tier provides a 1% cashback, requiring no MCO stake at all, while the tiers that require MCO stake provide an increasingly luxurious set of perks.

Now, staking MCO does come with some risk of course. MCO is a cryptocurrency that is traded freely on the market. As of writing this article, it is valued at around $4.95. This value could plummet or could skyrocket at any time. MCO is a fixed supply cryptocurrency, meaning that more MCO will never be created. Thus, the beauty of this ecosystem design is that a lot of the supply of MCO will be locked by people who wish to have amazing credit card perks that are unheard of in Europe and are even rare in the United States, reducing the active supply trading on the market. It gets better.

The cashback you earn by making purchases on the card is actually purchased from the market by Crypto.com when the card transaction is made. This means that as people are using the cards to make real life purchases, a percentage of the money spent on those purchases is being used to directly purchase MCO up off of the market and distribute it to the spenders as cashback. This puts constant purchasing pressure on MCO which should increase the price. With that said, there will also be selling pressure occasionally as people cash in on their earned cashback by selling MCO for other currencies. This gives MCO a very strong use case for its existence. It gives MCO a utility that is rarely seen in cryptocurrencies.

Not only that but they also double up as the elusive gold-based debit card, thanks to PAXG which is a cryptocurrency that is pegged to gold. This means that you can hold precious gold as a cryptocurrency and then spend it directly from your card and not only that, get rewarded for it with up to 5% cashback on your transactions.

If all of that sounds as good to you as it does to me, I recommend signing up to get your debit card from Crypto.com and saving money on every transaction you make with that sweet cashback.