Solid Card tiers are earned by balance, not by card spend
The Solid Card rewards programme has three tiers — Core, Prime and Ultra — and each one sets the cashback rate, the monthly cashback cap and the foreign exchange fee at the same time. Reading the rates alone gets the card wrong, because the tier is reached almost entirely through what sits in the account rather than what goes through the card.
Points accrue by the hour on balances, and once per dollar on spending
Every $1 held in a savings vault or on the card earns 1 point every hour, across the USDC, ETH and FUSE vaults. Card spending earns 1 point per $1, once. Swaps earn 1 point per $1, once.
Those are not comparable rates. A dollar held for a year earns 8,760 points. A dollar spent earns one. Prime opens at 5,000,000 points, which a balance of roughly $571 reaches over a full year, or roughly $6,850 reaches in a month. Ultra opens at 35,000,000 points: about $4,000 held for a year, or about $48,600 held for a month.
Against that, a $2,000 month of card spending contributes 2,000 points — four hundredths of one percent of the Prime requirement. Someone using the card heavily and holding nothing will not climb. The alternative route is staking FUSE: 50,000 for Prime, 400,000 for Ultra, with the tier reverting to whatever the points support if the stake is withdrawn, and a 30-day cooldown before the tokens are released.
The cashback cap binds well before most people notice
Cashback is 3% at Core, 4% at Prime and 5% at Ultra, paid in USDC and credited 14 days after the transaction settles. The monthly caps are $50, $100 and $200.
Divide one by the other and the caps arrive quickly: Core stops paying after $1,667 of monthly spend, Prime after $2,500, Ultra after $4,000. Past those points the marginal rate on further spending is zero, so the headline percentages describe a band rather than a rate. A Core member spending $3,000 a month is earning 1.7%, not 3%.
Subscription cashback and ordinary cashback share one cap
Prime adds 25% back on AI tools, streaming and music. Ultra adds 50%. Both are paid in USDC and both count toward the same monthly cap as everything else.
That turns a headline benefit into a trade-off. At Ultra, $400 a month of eligible subscriptions returns $200 at 50% — the entire monthly cap — leaving nothing for the 5% on groceries, travel or anything else that month. At Prime, $400 of subscriptions at 25% returns $100 and fills that cap just as completely. The two benefits do not stack; past a modest subscription bill they displace each other.
The practical shape is that subscriptions are the efficient way to use the cap and everything else is the inefficient way. Someone with $150 a month of AI, streaming and music at Ultra collects $75 from those alone and has $125 of cap left for the remaining spend, which at 5% covers $2,500.
The FX fee has no cap, while the cashback does
Non-USD card transactions carry a conversion fee of 1% at Core, 0.5% at Prime and nothing at Ultra. That fee applies to every non-USD dollar spent, with no ceiling, while the cashback stops at the monthly cap.
The two run in opposite directions as spending rises. A Core member spending $3,000 a month abroad earns the capped $50 and pays about $30 in conversion fees, netting $20 — about 0.67% on $3,000, against a headline of 3%. The same $3,000 at Ultra earns $150, sits under the $200 cap and pays no conversion fee at all. The gap between Core and Ultra is far wider than the gap between 3% and 5% suggests, and it widens with every non-USD transaction.
Bank deposits, swaps and crypto purchases follow the same pattern: 0.5% at Core, 0.25% at Prime, free at Ultra. Crypto deposits, card issuance and monthly fees are free at every tier.
The card issuer depends on the country, and is assigned automatically
Cards run on one of two programmes, Rain or Wirex, chosen by country of residence rather than by the cardholder. The mechanics are the same either way, but the counterparty is not, and cardholders do not select it. For anyone weighing that, the Rain Solana contract incident is the reference point for what a card-programme dependency looks like in practice.
A Yield Boost of +2% APY at Prime and +3% at Ultra is listed as coming soon and is not yet running, so it cannot be counted in a tier comparison today.
Sources: What is the Solid Card, How does Solid Rewards work?, X trigger.
