Wirex Card
A common argument for regular money (also known as fiat currency) as opposed to cryptocurrency is that you can't use cryptocurrency to buy groceries and other everyday items. Well, through the use of a cryptocurrency debit card, you can. This is a review of Wirex Card, one of the crypto debit cards out there.
General information
Wirex Card supports 10 different cryptocurrencies: BTC, LTC, ETH, XRP, WAVES, WOLLO, DAI, NANO, XLM and Wirex Tokens. With respect to fiat currencies, Wirex Card supports 150+ different currencies. To our knowledge, this is more supported fiat currencies than any other crypto debit card out there.
In August 2019, the Wirex Card received Type II membership of the Japan Virtual Currency Exchange Association (JVCEA). They were the 8th financial services company to do so. Membership is a huge milestone on the road to becoming a legal Crypto Asset Exchange Service Provider in Japan.
The Wirex Card also managed to have 2,600,000 registered customers, in September 2019. 3,000 people are registering every day. Between them, Wirex customers apparently buy an average of 1,126 cups of coffee every day across 193 countries. In the UK, the most popular places to use a Wirex card are Amazon, Sainsburys and McDonalds.
Advantages
Out of all potential advantages with the card, Wirex themselves highlight five things: global reach, in-the-know, instant rewards, high limits and zero fees. Out of these advantages, we think that the global reach and instant rewards are most attractive. High limits, zero fees, are of course also good.
Mastercard
Wirex Card is a Mastercard, meaning that you can use the card at any point of payment that accepts Mastercard. This is of course a great advantage, seeing that Mastercard (and VISA) are the most accepted cards in the world.
The card was previously a VISA-card, and was actually the second cryptocurrency firm ever to be the principal member of Visa. With that identity, Wirex could expand their business, including issuing Visa cards, providing related financial services and apply for other licences, as well as offering payment services for customers to pay at Visa merchants. We assume that Wirex Card has roughly the same capabilities from their affiliation with Mastercard instead.
Wirex Card Fees
Wirex Card's fees are extremely low.
There is no monthly fee. This is a bit unusual. There is no issuance fee. This is very unusual.
ATM-usage results in a fixed fee of USD 2.50 per withdrawal. This might be disadvantageous in countries where the normal ATM-machines only allow smaller amounts of withdrawals (USD 20 for instance). In such scenarios, in order to withdraw a larger amount you need to withdraw several times, thus triggering the fixed fee each time. You can usually avoid this by just going to a local bank at the relevant place. Local banks normally permit higher withdrawals. In any event, the ATM-fee is not particularly high.
Furthermore, the most important fee of them all, the commission on spending. Wirex Card does not have a spending fee, but it has a loading fee when it comes to cryptocurrencies amounting to 1.00%. So in effect, when using the card to pay with crypto somewhere, you will indirectly have paid 1.00% in a spending fee. We have therefore included this 1.00% as the spending fee in our database (even though it is really a deposit fee).
There is no maximum balane for the Wirex Card, only a maximum spend per transaction and per day (USD 10,000 for both). This is also extremely competitive.