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Crypto Cards Paid 2.1% of Spend Back in August 2026

Fees

Paymentscan now tracks cashback paid onchain by six card programs and puts the cumulative total at $29.76M across 25 months, from September 2024 to a partial September 2026. Because the same tracker publishes monthly card spend for each of those programs, the two series can be divided into each other, and the result is a realised rate rather than an advertised one.

For August 2026, the most recent complete month, the six programs paid $3.665M of cashback on roughly $173M of card spend. That is about 2.1% blended, against headline rates in the group that run from 0.5% to 8%.

Realised rates cluster between 1% and 3.5%, whatever the headline says

August spend, August cashback paid, and the ratio between them:

  • Ether.fi Cash: $109.5M spent, $2.616M paid, about 2.4%. Headline is 3% base and 4% at VIP.
  • Wirex One: $34.94M spent, $535.1K paid, about 1.5%. Headline is 0.5% base and up to 8%.
  • Plasma One: $19.9M spent, $419.9K paid, about 2.1%. Headline is 2% base and up to 4%.
  • Gnosis Pay: $8.328M spent, $78.19K paid, about 0.9%.
  • Ethena Pay: $259.8K spent, $8.912K paid, about 3.4%. Headline is 4% base and 5% at the top.
  • Hyperbeat: $482.7K spent, $7.372K paid, about 1.5%.

Wirex One is the widest gap in the group. A range of 0.5% to 8% collapsing to 1.5% is what a tier structure looks like when most spending sits near the bottom of it, since the 8% figure applies only to the highest membership levels and only up to a monthly ceiling. Ethena Pay lands closest to its headline, which is the expected shape for a program three months old: it caps 4% at $100 a month and 5% at $1,000, and at $260K of total monthly spend across 116 addresses, very few cardholders are anywhere near a cap.

Ether.fi Cash sitting at 2.4% against a 3% base is the clearest illustration of a stepped structure doing its job. The rate steps down as monthly spending rises, so any month where a meaningful share of volume comes from heavy spenders lands below the entry rate.

The timing mismatch pushes every number in the same direction

Cashback paid in a month is not cashback earned on that month's spend. Ether.fi converts a cleared purchase to ETHFI at the price at clearing and locks it for seven days, with a $5 minimum before a claim. Plasma One holds boosted cashback for 45 days after capture. Payouts therefore lag the spending that generated them.

That matters because every program here grew during the period. When spend rises month over month, dividing this month's payouts by this month's spend understates the rate, because the payouts largely belong to a smaller earlier month. Ether.fi went from $100.3M in July to $109.5M in August, so the bias is modest. Ethena Pay went from $62.94K in July to $259.8K in August to $500.2K in September, and for a program on that slope the ratio is closer to a lower bound than to an estimate.

Gnosis Pay is the one case where the bias runs the other way. Its spend has been flat to falling for most of 2026 — $10.18M in May, $6.629M in June, $8.364M in July, $8.328M in August — so the timing effect is small, and 0.9% is close to what it actually pays.

The 29.76M total is a floor, not a full count

The total is a floor rather than a full count. Paymentscan marks the data as onchain only, so cashback distributed off-chain, held inside an app balance, or paid in a form that never touches a tracked contract is outside the measurement. Programs not on the list contribute nothing to the $29.76M regardless of what they pay.

There is also a composition point hiding in the cumulative figure. Ether.fi alone accounts for most of it, and Gnosis Pay, which led every month until late 2025, peaked at $286.3K in October 2025 and has run under $120K a month through 2026 while the overall total more than doubled. The aggregate grew because one program grew.

For choosing a card, the headline rate still decides what a specific pattern of spending earns, since caps and bands apply per account rather than per program. What the realised rate answers is a narrower question: how much of the advertised number survives contact with tier structures, monthly ceilings and the spending mix of the people actually holding the card. Across every program tracked here, the answer in August was less than the base rate.

Sources: Paymentscan cashback data, Ether.fi card metrics, Plasma One card metrics, Gnosis Pay card metrics, Wirex One card metrics, Ethena Pay card metrics, Hyperbeat card metrics.