Research
Original studies of the crypto-card market, built on the Sweepbase dataset of 178 tracked cards, 141 of them live.
Why crypto cards do not work in India
No Indian law bans them. Four separate walls stop them anyway: a bank rail that runs on discretion, prepaid-instrument rules that exclude the product by construction, an FIU-IND gate that is open and priced, and the issuers’ own blocklists. Each one read from its primary document, plus a table of where the confident wrong answers come from.
Published September 2026 · updated October 2026
Earn, spend, invest: five crypto neobanks, measured inside the app
Ether.fi, Tria, MetaMask, Nexo and Hyperbeat all sell one account that earns, spends and trades. We opened all five apps on the same morning and compared the screens with the marketing: the rates diverged on three of the five, in both directions.
Published August 2026 · updated September 2026
Which balance actually earns
Most cards advertising yield pay it on money the card cannot spend. A field-by-field count of where the interest accrues across the 141 obtainable cards, what each qualifying card makes you switch on first, and the issuers who claim a yield without ever saying which balance earns it.
Published August 2026 · updated October 2026
Nine card apps, one order book
Twelve of 141 obtainable cards put a leveraged trading desk in the card app, and nine of them execute on the same venue. How each keeps spending money apart from collateral, who runs the venue behind each app, and the card cut from the list when its two country lists turned out not to overlap.
Published August 2026 · updated October 2026
What the card said, and what the statement said
Six published numbers checked against our own money on the cards we hold. Three paid what they promised, one fell short, one turned out to be a cost that appears on no fee schedule anywhere, and one we measured and still could not settle.
Published July 2026 · updated November 2026
Crypto card shutdowns in 2026
A primary-sourced record of crypto-card shutdowns, grouped by the company one layer above the brand. When a licence, an issuer or a platform goes, every card built on it is affected at once. The largest group is not a failure at all but an onboarding pause, and part of it is contested.
Published June 2026 · updated October 2026
The hidden banks behind crypto cards
A BIN-sponsor concentration analysis across 178 tracked crypto-linked cards: who issues them, and what happens to a cardholder when the sponsor bank behind a card fails.
Published May 2026 · updated October 2026
Companion guide: Yield crypto cards in DeFi, card by card: which balance earns, in which protocol, and what each card costs.