Ether.fi Cash now pays cashback in ETHFI
Cashback on Ether.fi Cash is now paid in ETHFI. Card spend, assets traded, and USD or EUR borrowed all earn in the same token, and it shows up in the account asset list as ETHFI rather than as dollars.
The rate did not change. What changed is the unit, and with it the point at which the value is fixed.
Cashback is priced in dollars and paid in tokens
The payout runs through four stages. When a purchase is authorized, the cashback is calculated in dollar terms and sits as pending. When the purchase clears, that dollar amount is converted to ETHFI at the price at that moment, and enters a seven-day lock. After the lock, it becomes claimable. Claiming is manual, from the cashback page, and only then does the ETHFI reach the account. Trade and borrow cashback follow the same seven-day lock.
So a 3% rate on a $200 purchase is $6 of ETHFI at the clearing price, not $6 received. Between the conversion and the claim, the balance is a token position. The rate describes the size of that position at one moment; what it is worth on arrival depends on where ETHFI trades by the time it is claimed and sold.
There is also a $5 minimum to claim, and pending and locked amounts do not count toward it. At Core, whose top rate is 3%, reaching $5 takes about $167 of qualifying spend. Below that, the cashback exists but cannot be moved, and it stays denominated in ETHFI while it waits.
The rate ladder steps down inside each month
Rates are applied progressively against a monthly spend counter rather than as one flat number. At Core, the first $2,000 each month earns 3%, spend from $2,001 to $3,000 earns 1%, and anything above $3,000 earns 0.5%. Luxe holds 3% through $10,000 and Pinnacle through $50,000, each with the same step down to 1% and then 0.5%. Business accounts earn a flat 1%.
The practical effect at Core is that $3,000 of monthly spend earns $70, not $90, and every dollar past $3,000 earns a sixth of the headline rate.
EUR spending has its own ladder with a much thinner tail
Euro purchases run on separate thresholds: 3% on the first €800, 1% from €801 to €1,500, and 0.1% above €1,500. That last band is five times lower than the 0.5% USD equivalent, and Ether.fi attaches the reduced rate to the 0% FX treatment on EUR transactions. Anyone spending heavily in euros is trading reward rate for exchange cost, which is a reasonable swap but not a neutral one.
The two currencies share a single monthly counter, so euro spending pushes dollar spending down the ladder and the reverse. Each transaction is still rated against the thresholds for its own currency, with euro amounts converted at an oracle rate to track counter progress. Refunds and reversals subtract from the counter. Declined transactions and purchases at blocked merchants do not count toward it at all.
A discount and a token position are not the same thing
A cashback program paid in stablecoins is a discount. A cashback program paid in a platform token is a small, recurring, involuntary purchase of that token, sized by spending and released on a schedule the cardholder does not set. Both can be worth having. They are not the same thing, and they do not belong in the same column when comparing cards.
The check worth doing is whether the seven-day lock plus claim delay is acceptable for the amounts involved, and whether ETHFI is a token worth holding briefly on those terms.
Sources: How does cashback work?, Membership level benefits.
