Ether.fi Cash vs Tria Card: I hold both, so I measured both

The short version

One line decides it for most people in Europe, and it is the first one. Everything after that is preference.

What one euro costs

Both of these are now measured, by the same method, against the same benchmark. That was not true when this guide first went up: Ether.fi’s side rested on its help centre, which put the zero-FX promise in writing on 24 June 2026 and still calls the feature a beta.

Ether.fi charges nothing on euro purchases, and a live purchase says the same. A €138.00 charge on 4 August 2026 settled at $158.882436, an effective 1.151322 dollars per euro against a central bank reference of 1.1515 for that day. That lands 0.015% below the reference, and below Visa’s own published rate for that day. Anything billed in a third currency is a different matter: roughly 1%, and on Core a further half point can ride on top, because the added margin is set by membership tier rather than by currency. The card account behind it also remains dollar-denominated, with native euro support promised rather than shipped.

Tria I measured the same way, and it does not land in the same place. A one euro item on 28 July 2026 came to a total of $1.16 on the transaction screen, which works out to about 2% above the ECB rate once you divide by the central bank reference of 1.1367 for that day. The purchase has since completed at the same $1.16. The app shows the rate only as 1 USD ≈ 0.87 EUR, which is too coarse to rebuild anything from, so I rebuilt it from Visa’s own published rate for 28 July instead: 1.141999 dollars per euro. Put the 1% Visa FX fee and Tria’s 0.50% on top and you get $1.159, the $1.16 on the screen. Every fee Tria names is a fee I paid, and nothing else was added.

Look at the smaller of those two named fees. Tria’s front page used to advertise “0% Tria FX Fees” next to “1% VISA FX Fees” (the line was gone by 30 September 2026), and its card terms allow foreign exchange of up to 3%, plus up to 1% on international transactions. The fee screen on my transaction charged 0.50%: Tria’s 1% fee, halved by the Premium subscription I pay for (Tria now calls the tier Max). The front page, the contract and my statement give three different answers.

What no fee line names is Visa’s rate itself. On 28 July it sat 0.47% above the ECB reference, and every card priced at Visa’s rate carries that, whatever its fee schedule says. Reading the fee schedule harder would not have surfaced it, which is the whole reason we started buying things instead of only reading. There is a longer version of that argument in our guide to hidden FX fees.

Tria does break the charge down. It shows the rate and the fees it took, and they add up to the cent. The 0.47% only surfaces if you look up what the euro was worth that day on your own.

One more line matters at small amounts. The app shows a $0.15 per-transaction convenience fee on the lower tiers, waived on Premium. On a one euro purchase that single fee would have been 13%.

Cashback: confirmed against deferred

Ether.fi paid $0.15 on a $5.00 charge, which is 3% to the cent, settled and visible in the transaction detail. That was July 2026, and it arrived as USDC under the rules then in force. Since 12 September 2026 the payout has been ETHFI: it converts at the token price when the purchase clears, sits in a 7-day lock, and needs $5 accrued before you can claim it. Captured 27 July 2026.

A second purchase a week later held the same rate at a size worth caring about: a €138.00 charge paid back €4.14, again 3.00% to the cent, and the on-chain record puts it at $4.766473 on a $158.882436 spend. That is no surprise: the euro ladder described below starts at the same top rate, and this purchase sat under the threshold where it bends.

Read the ladder before you plan around 3%, though. On Core the top rate covers your first $2,000 in a month; the next thousand earns 1% and everything past $3,000 earns half a percent. Luxe and Pinnacle stretch that top band to $10,000 and $50,000 respectively. Euros run on a tighter scale that starts tapering at $800 in USD equivalent, which is how the 0% euro FX gets paid for. And the tier is rented, never owned: the counter resets with the calendar, so Luxe has to be re-earned monthly at 5,000 points (help centre, 8 September 2026; its fees article still prints 10,000) unless you bypass it by staking 30,000 ETHFI (help centre, 11 September 2026), holding $15,000 in Liquid, or paying $199 a year. A balance sitting in an outside wallet does not count.

Tria promises more and settles later. Rates go 1.5%, 4.5% and 6% as you move from the virtual card up through Signature to Premium, and each rate has its own monthly ceiling: $100, $1,000 and $2,000 of spend. Past that ceiling the two paid tiers fall to 1% and the virtual card falls to half a percent. Payment lands in USDC or USDT in your own wallet, whichever of the two Tria picks, and its own Season 3 post says the rail in practice is USDT on Arbitrum. Two clauses in the terms matter more than the rate: payouts may arrive as much as twelve months after the period they were earned in, and closing your account before they arrive means losing them.

Tria’s own pages no longer match those caps. On 30 September 2026 the home page and the help centre called the tiers Lite, Pro and Max and put the virtual card’s ceiling at $1,000 a month, ten times the $100 in the terms. The help centre’s rate table also gives Pro a $2,000 ceiling, while its own worked example and the home page say $1,000. When an issuer’s documents disagree, the one you agreed to is the one that governs, so plan on the terms until Tria updates them.

In practice my all-time counter read $0 for months. The first payout landed on the one-euro purchase from the section above, on 28 July: six cents on $1.16. At that size a cent of rounding cannot separate 5% from the advertised 6%, so I log it as proof the mechanism pays, not as confirmation of the rate. It is the one measurement in our log that stayed inconclusive.

Yield: on the balance or beside it

This is the structural difference, and it is bigger than the rates.

On Ether.fi the balance the card spends from is the balance that earns. In Direct Pay mode a purchase is deducted straight from the vault, out of the USDC or the yield-bearing LiquidUSD position, so the money works right up to the moment it leaves. Which of the two goes first the help centre does not say. Borrow mode does the opposite trick, drawing credit against collateral at a variable rate with no number published (one help centre article names Aave v4, another names its own lending market) so the collateral never has to be sold. Either way there is nothing to move.

On Tria the card is a 0% APR credit line against crypto collateral, repaid from your linked wallet, and yield lives in separate self-custodial Earn strategies the card does not touch. To earn on money you also want to spend, you move it, and moving it costs.

The cost is measurable. A deposit of 1,000.25 AUSD made on 24 January was worth 1,015.54 when I closed it on 21 May: 1.53% across 117 days, or roughly 4.8% a year. A tile in the app quoted up to 22.17% on the very same pool on 28 July, 9.41% a month later and 9.38% on 30 September, with 2 of those points reserved for the paid Max tier. Slippage on the way in and the way out ate most of the difference, and because that toll is close to fixed, a smaller deposit would have kept even less of it. Measured 28 July 2026.

What the cards refuse

Ether.fi will not pay for alcohol or tobacco. The first refusal I put down to a bad terminal. It happened again elsewhere, then in another country, and by the fourth time the pattern was obvious: the shops had nothing in common except selling something age-restricted. The email that follows a decline says so outright and points at a help article about high-risk categories.

Everything else about the card works, which is exactly why this belongs in a comparison. It is one narrow blind spot in a product that otherwise behaves, and no fee table anywhere would warn you about it. Carry something else if your spending runs through off-licences and tobacconists.

I have not reproduced anything equivalent on Tria. That is not the same as saying Tria has no restricted categories, only that I did not find one.

What happens if you get frozen

In May, Ether.fi suspended my card services on suspicion of cashback farming, which I was not doing. Card gone, bank transfers gone, Pix gone. Support reviewed it and restored the account in under 24 hours; the only lasting cost was reissuing the card.

The part worth carrying into any self-custody comparison is what happened to the money. Nothing. Withdrawals stayed open on-chain the entire time, so even if the appeal had failed, the funds would not have been trapped. That is the practical difference between a card sitting on your own vault and a card sitting on someone’s balance sheet, and it is very hard to learn without it happening to you.

Tria I have not had frozen, so I have nothing first-hand to compare against.

The app and the humans behind it

Tria takes this one, and not by a small margin. It is the best-built app I have used in this category: fast, coherent, and it does more than the card. Write to support and a human writes back, quickly, having read what you sent.

The plastic is where it falls down. Mine was paid for on 24 January, and six months later, in late July, it still had not arrived in Europe. Tria ships the physical card only to countries it has opened for shipping, and it keeps adding to that list. You can order the card; whether it gets to you depends on where you live.

Ether.fi’s physical card is plastic on Core and metal above it. Core does not include one, and the plastic costs $50; Luxe includes one metal card and Pinnacle two, and an extra physical card on those tiers is $100 (help centre, 11 September 2026). The tier ladder is at least visible in the app instead of buried three menus deep. Its rough edge is the mirror image of Tria’s: the product works, and the presentation asks more of you.

Which one to carry

Ether.fi if you spend in euros or dollars. Two measured euro purchases, 0.015% under the reference against about 2% over it, show a fee gap that recurs on every purchase. Add cashback that is paid in ETHFI, locked for 7 days and claimable once $5 has accrued (help centre article 262374), and a balance that earns until you spend it, and the money side is settled. Accept that you will occasionally be declined somewhere that sells cigarettes, and check that your country is not one of the excluded ones.

Tria if Ether.fi will not have you, or if the app is what you live in. Its international card covers 150+ countries for applicants who are not US citizens, minus a prohibited list, and it gives you the better daily experience by a distance. Read the cashback caps before believing the 6%, treat Earn as a separate decision from the card, and expect the euro rate to cost you about 2 points more than the alternative.

Both are self-custodial and both are Visa. Between two cards that agree on the important architecture, the statement is what separates them, and the statement took six months and about two hundred dollars to read.