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170 cards in database Last verified
Sweepbase rates 170 crypto debit and credit cards using a 12-factor formula. Every score on the site can be reproduced from the published data and the rules below. There is no editorial discretion, no manual reranking, and no affiliate influence on the math.
This page explains how the formula works, what data goes into it, where that data comes from, and how to verify any individual card's score yourself.
Most crypto card comparison sites do not disclose how they rank cards. They publish ordered lists, claim to be "independent," and rely on readers to trust the order. In practice, those orders are often driven by affiliate commissions: the highest-paying issuer ends up at the top, and low-paying or non-paying issuers disappear from the list entirely.
We publish the formula because anyone should be able to challenge a rating. If our score for a card seems wrong, you can walk through the same factors using the public data on our card page and tell us where we are mistaken. Once an error is confirmed we correct it ahead of the next scheduled review pass.
Every field in our card database is collected from primary sources only. We do not aggregate from other comparison sites, scrape user reviews, or accept submissions from issuers without verification.
When a screenshot appears on this site, it was taken during that research, and the caption says what it shows: a page on the issuer's own site, a page of a fee schedule, a screen inside the app, or a transaction on a card we hold. Marketing renders supplied by an issuer are never captioned as evidence of testing.
The current database holds 170 cards with around 25 normalised data fields per card stored in our schema. The most recent full audit (April 2026) corrected 57 data points and removed 4 cards that no longer exist as standalone products.
Most of the database is researched from primary issuer sources. 4 of the 170 cards are held by an editor and spent on, and those carry a Tested hands-on badge. When we test a card first-hand, this is what we actually do, end to end:
Everything else is labelled for what it is. Four levels, and every card in the database sits in exactly one of them:
| Label | What it means | Cards |
|---|---|---|
| Tested hands-on | An editor holds the card and pays with it. | 4 |
| Verified against issuer docs | We read the issuer's own fee schedule, terms, and product pages. The card was never in our hands. | 155 |
| Pre-launch watch | Announced, but no customer has been issued one, so there is nothing to test yet. | 5 |
| No badge at all | Nobody has read a primary source for this card, so it makes no verification claim. | 6 |
The second row covers most of the database, so it deserves the same detail as the first. Reading a card's documentation means four specific things, every time:
The last row is the one worth explaining. One of those cards can still be obtained today: Emoney, whose terms PDF answers 403 to every request we have made. Nobody has read it, so the card gets no badge rather than a badge it has not earned.
Every card starts at a base score of 2.5 out of 5. From there, we apply nine bonus factors and three penalty factors. The final score is clamped to the [2.3, 4.9] range and rounded to one decimal place.
| Factor | Points | When it applies |
|---|---|---|
| Meaningful cashback | +0.5 | Card pays cashback that is not capped behind unrealistic staking tiers |
| Self-custody | +0.4 | Funds remain in the user's wallet until the moment of purchase |
| Premium card tier | +0.2 | Visa Signature, Platinum, Infinite, Black, Obsidian, or premium credit product |
| Virtual + Physical | +0.2 | Card is offered in both virtual and physical formats |
| Yield on deposits | +0.3 | The issuer runs a real yield product — either on the card balance itself or in a linked earn/staking product on the same platform. Fields that open with "No" or "None" never count, even when the rest of the sentence mentions APY |
| Low FX fee | +0.3 | FX fee is 1% or lower |
| Zero issuance + annual fees | +0.2 | Both issuance fee and annual fee are free |
| Apple Pay / Google Pay | +0.1 | Card supports Apple Pay or Google Pay mobile wallets |
| Live IBAN / SEPA rail | +0.2 | The IBAN/SWIFT/SEPA field affirmatively describes a working bank-transfer rail (personal or pooled IBAN, or a live SEPA path) — not gated by whether SWIFT specifically is disclosed |
| Factor | Points | When it applies |
|---|---|---|
| High FX fee | -0.3 | FX fee is 2% or higher |
| 3+ missing key fields | -0.4 | Three or more of cashback, issuance fee, annual fee, network, or regions are unavailable |
| 1-2 missing key fields | -0.2 | One or two of those key data fields are missing |
After bonuses and penalties are summed, we add a small deterministic noise value of roughly +/-0.1 derived from a djb2 hash of the card slug. This prevents dozens of cards from landing on identical rounded scores. Because the noise is deterministic, the same card always receives the same final rating. There is no randomness on each request.
The final score is clamped to the [2.3, 4.9] range and rounded to one decimal. We do not award a perfect 5.0 because no card on the market is flawless across every dimension we measure, and we do not award scores below 2.3 because that would publicly shame products beyond what their data warrants. We simply de-prioritise or remove them.
Below is the full step-by-step calculation for the 1inch Debit Card, taken directly from our database. You can verify every value on the card's detail page. This example is included so you can see the formula applied end-to-end, not just described in the abstract.
| Step | Delta | Running | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base score | 0 | 2.5 | Every card starts at 2.5/5 before applying any factors |
| Meaningful cashback (2% BXX / 1% BTC/USDT) | +0.5 | 3.0 | Cashback is paid in liquid assets, not capped reward tokens |
| Self-custody check | 0 | 3.0 | Custody field reads "Custodial", so no self-custody bonus |
| Premium tier check | 0 | 3.0 | Mastercard Standard is not a premium tier, no bonus |
| Virtual + Physical formats | +0.2 | 3.2 | Both card formats are offered |
| Yield check | 0 | 3.2 | The yield field opens with "No" — the live card page asserts no yield, and 1inch's lending products are credit against collateral, not interest on the balance — so no bonus |
| Zero issuance + annual fees | +0.2 | 3.4 | Both fees marked Free in our database |
| Mobile pay check | 0 | 3.4 | Mobile Pay reads "Yes" but neither Apple Pay nor Google Pay is named in the card copy, so no bonus |
| Live IBAN / SEPA rail | +0.2 | 3.6 | IBAN/SWIFT/SEPA field confirms a live SEPA-capable rail (via Crypto Life account rails) |
| Low FX fee (0% FX fee) | +0.3 | 3.9 | FX Fee column leads with "0%", at or under the 1% threshold |
| Deterministic noise (slug hash) | +0.0965 | 3.9965 | djb2 hash of this slug yields +0.0965 (range is +/-0.1); reproducible, prevents identical scores from clustering |
| Clamp to [2.3, 4.9], round to 0.1 | 0 | 4.0 | Score is already inside editorial bounds; rounding to one decimal gives the published rating |
Final published rating: 4.0 / 5 (with deterministic noise, no clamp applied). You can find this card and its full data at /cards/1inch-debit-card.
Sweepbase earns revenue through affiliate partnerships with some card issuers. Affiliate status has zero effect on the calculated rating — the formula only reads objective attributes from our dataset, worth up to +2.4 / -0.7 points around the base score. Cards with a verified partner link are labelled with a visible Editor's Pick badge on their detail page, but that badge is a disclosure label, not a scoring input.
We list every significant crypto card we are aware of, including those with no affiliate relationship. If you find a card on the market that we have not covered, please email contact@sweepbase.net. We add new cards within one week of confirmation.
Read our full Affiliate Disclosure for details on which cards on Sweepbase carry affiliate links and how the commercial relationship is structured. Our Editorial Policy covers the full sourcing, verification, update, and corrections process in one place.
The most recent full audit of the Sweepbase database was completed in April 2026. Headline numbers from that audit:
If you spot a value that does not match the issuer's current published terms, please report it. Reader-submitted corrections are investigated as they arrive rather than held for the next scheduled pass.
Methodology version 1.0 · Last verified · Reproducible from public card data
