Advertised crypto card rates against measured ones
By August 2026 we had checked 6 published numbers against our own money on 2 cards. 4 paid what they promised, 1 did not, and 1 we could not settle.
Every other number on this site was copied out of a fee schedule. We read what the issuer published, wrote it down, and linked the source. That work is sound, and it is also the ceiling of the method: a fee schedule can only tell you what the issuer chose to put in one.
So we started buying things. Below are the 6 figures we have produced ourselves so far, on 2 of the 3 cards an editor here holds. It is a small sample, and we would rather publish it small than wait until it looks impressive.
The log
Each row gives the issuer's claim, what we got, and enough method that you can go and disagree with us.
Tria Card: Cost of a foreign purchase
How to repeat it. Buy something priced in euros and read the dollar total off the transaction screen. Divide it by the European Central Bank reference rate for that day to get the total cost, then rebuild it from Visa’s published rate for the same day (usa.visa.com exchange-rate calculator, fee set to 0) and the fees the app names. Here both sides meet at USD 1.16.
Tria Card: Earn yield on the AUSD pool
How to repeat it. Deposit, leave it, withdraw, and annualise the difference between the two balances. The swap into the pool and back out is included, because a depositor cannot avoid paying it.
Tria Card: Cashback at the top tier
How to repeat it. Too small to settle it. Cashback pays to the cent, so a purchase this size cannot separate 5% from 6%. A purchase above about USD 20 would.
Ether.fi Cash Card: Cost of a euro purchase
How to repeat it. Buy something priced in euros, read the settled dollar amount off the on-chain spend record, then divide by the European Central Bank reference rate published for that day. The exact settlement was USD 158.882436 on EUR 138.00, rounded to the cent above. Deliberately the same method as the Tria row above, so the two numbers can be put side by side.
Ether.fi Cash Card: Cashback rate
How to repeat it. One point-of-sale purchase, cashback read off the transaction detail screen once it settled.
Ether.fi Cash Card: Membership points on staked ETHFI
How to repeat it. Read the position size and the monthly points total off the Club Tian breakdown, then check them against the published per-token rate.
The finding that does not fit in a fee schedule
One euro cost us a dollar sixteen, about 2% over the ECB reference rate of 1.1367 for that day. Tria's screen names two charges, the 1% it attributes to Visa and its own 0.50%, and they add up exactly. Visa's own published rate for 28 July was 1.141999 dollars per euro; put the 1% and the 0.50% on top and you get $1.159, the $1.16 on the screen. Every fee Tria names is a fee we paid, and nothing else was added. The purchase has since completed at the same $1.16 (checked 30 September 2026).
The part of that 2% that no fee line names is not Tria's. Visa's own rate that day sat 0.47% above the ECB reference. That is the network's rate, and every card priced at Visa's rate carries it, whatever its fee schedule says. So a card can be truthful about every fee and still cost more than its fees add up to, because the rate the fees sit on is not the ECB's. Our own guide to hidden FX fees was built by reading fee schedules card by card, and this is the one thing that method structurally cannot see.
Compare our two cards. Ether.fi charges 0% FX on euro purchases and settles them out of a dollar balance. Its €138.00 purchase settled 0.015% under the ECB reference, and below Visa's own published rate that day. Tria charges the 1% and the 0.50% it names, on top of Visa's rate. Two Visa cards, both self-custodial, neither of them hiding anything: 0% over the ECB rate on Ether.fi against about 2% on Tria. A reader comparing them on published fees alone would miss the 0.47% that Visa's rate added before either fee.
What we could not settle
The Tria cashback row is the one we most wanted to nail down and could not. Six cents came back on a dollar-sixteen purchase, and cashback pays to the cent, so that figure sits comfortably with the 6% advertised for Max (formerly Premium) and just as comfortably with 5%. The test was too small, and the fix is to spend twenty dollars rather than one. We are publishing it in that state deliberately. A log where every measurement resolves into a clean story is a log that quietly dropped the boring ones.
Why is the sample so small?
Measuring a card costs money and takes months. The Tria yield figure needed a thousand dollars parked from January to May. The physical card was paid for on 24 January and still had not arrived by late July. There is no way to do this at the pace of a comparison site, which is why comparison sites, ours included, run almost entirely on transcription.
So the plan is slow. We hold 3 cards, we have measured 2 of them, and each new figure gets added here with its method attached. If a number on this page turns out to be wrong, we would rather hear it from a reader than keep it tidy. The card pages carry the underlying screenshots, redacted where an on-chain hash would expose a wallet.
Method
Foreign-exchange cost is measured against the European Central Bank reference rate published for the day of the purchase, not against the issuer's own quoted rate, because the quoted rate is the thing being tested. Yield is measured as a round trip: money in, money out, annualised over the days held, with swap costs included, since a depositor cannot avoid paying them. Cashback is read off the settled transaction rather than the running total, which on both cards lags by days. The full process, including what we do not do, is on how we test.