How your crypto card balance earns interest, paid daily

Interest, not cashback — and why the difference matters

Most crypto cards advertise a reward that depends on spending: pay for something, get a percentage back. That is cashback. It rewards turnover, it usually comes with tiers, caps and a staking requirement, and it is worth nothing to a card you are not using this month.

This is the other thing. Your balance earns 4% a year simply for sitting there. The base is the money you hold, not the money you move. A card that stays in a drawer for six months earns exactly the same rate as one used every day.

The practical consequence is that the number is predictable. You do not have to model your own spending to work out what you will get: hold an average balance of $1,500 across the year and you end it roughly $61.21 better off, whatever you did with the card.

Two things follow from that, and they are worth stating plainly. First, there is no minimum and no tier: the same rate applies to $40 and to $40,000. Second, there is nothing to opt into. No separate savings pot, no "earn" toggle, no lock-up period. The balance you spend from is the balance that earns.

How the daily calculation actually works

Every day at 00:00 UTC the same three steps run for every account:

1. we take your closing balance — what was there when the day ended;
2. we multiply it by the annual rate divided by 365, which is 0.010959% a day;
3. we credit the result to your spendable balance.

It appears in your transaction list as an Interest line, dated 00:00 UTC, and the money is immediately available. There is no pending period and no separate account to sweep it out of.

A worked example on a $1,500 balance:

The word doing the work in step 1 is closing. Interest is not calculated on your average balance, nor on the highest point it reached during the day. It is calculated on what is there at midnight UTC. Deposit $1,000 at 23:50 and the whole day earns on it; spend to zero at 23:50 and that day earns nothing, no matter what the balance was at lunchtime.

In practice this rarely matters — balances do not usually swing wildly inside a single day — but it is the rule, and you should know which rule you are being paid under.

Why 4% a year is really 4.08%

Two numbers are published for the same rate, and both are true. They answer different questions.

• 4% is the nominal annual rate. It is the number that gets divided by 365 each day. This is the rate in the arithmetic.
• 4.08% is the effective annual rate — what you actually end up with after a year of daily payments. This is the rate in your pocket.

The gap is compounding. Each day's interest joins your balance, so the next day is calculated on a slightly larger number. Repeat 365 times and the small increments add up to more than the headline.

Over one year on $1,500 the difference is modest — a little over a dollar. It widens with time and with size. Left alone for two years, $1,500 earns $124.92 compounded against $120.00 if the interest had simply been set aside instead.

Publishing both numbers is deliberate. A service that quotes only the higher one is flattering itself; a service that quotes only the lower one is hiding something you are entitled to. Neither is useful. Here is what the same rate looks like on different balances, held for a full year:

What happens to fractions of a cent

This is the detail that separates a real daily rate from a marketing one, so it is worth a section.

A balance can only move in whole cents. But one day of interest is rarely a whole number of cents: on $30 held it is $0.0033. If a service rounded that to the nearest cent it would pay you nothing, every day, forever — and a "daily" rate would quietly become "nothing under a certain balance". If it rounded up it would be paying nearly five times the advertised rate on small balances.

Neither happens here. Interest is calculated to a millionth of a dollar and the fraction below one cent is carried forward. It is credited on the first day the running total reaches a cent.

So on $30 held, you see a payment roughly every 3 days rather than every day — and across a year the total is exactly what the rate says it should be. Above about $92 held, a single day already exceeds a cent, so a payment lands every morning without fail.

You can check this yourself. The /interest endpoint returns one row per day with the closing balance used as the base. Days where the amount was carried show amount_usd: 0 — nothing has vanished, it is in the carry.

Where the money comes from

A rate that arrives without an explanation is a rate you cannot judge. Here is the mechanism.

To settle card payments the moment they are authorised, we hold a reserve against customer balances. That reserve has to be liquid — it is what pays the merchant — but it does not all have to sit idle. A portion is placed in short-duration, low-risk positions: lending against overcollateralised borrowing, and staking on established networks. Those positions generate a yield, and a fixed share of it is what you are paid.

Two consequences follow, and they cut in opposite directions.

The good one: because we pay a published rate rather than sharing a variable return, a bad month for those positions does not become a bad month for you. Your balance stays payable in full, on demand, and the interest already credited is yours. We absorb the difference.

The honest one: the rate is variable. If the underlying yield environment changes for long enough, we will change the rate rather than pay one we cannot fund. Where a change reduces the rate we publish it at least 14 days before it applies, on the homepage and in section 9 of the Terms. An increase can take effect immediately.

This is also why the interest has nothing to do with your card spending. It is not funded by interchange, and it is not funded by other customers' fees. Those pay for the service; this comes from the reserve.

What this is not

Being clear about the limits is the only way the rest of the page means anything.

It is not a bank deposit. We are not a bank. Your balance is not covered by a deposit-guarantee or insurance scheme in any jurisdiction. If you are comparing this to a savings account that carries a state guarantee, they are not the same product and the rate is not the only difference.

The rate is not fixed. It is not a term product and there is no maturity date. The 4% you see today is the rate today, on the notice terms above.

It is not investment advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to hold a balance rather than do something else with the money, and we are not licensed to give you that advice.

The activities behind it carry risk. Lending and staking involve counterparty, stablecoin and protocol risk. We hold that risk rather than passing it to you — but "we hold it" is a statement about a company, not a guarantee from a government, and you should weigh it as such.

What you can rely on is narrower and firmer: interest already credited to your balance is yours and is not clawed back; your balance is payable in full at any time; and a reduction in the rate comes with 14 days' notice.

Tax, and what we do not report

Interest may be taxable where you live. That is between you and your tax authority, and we cannot advise you on it — the treatment differs by country and by what else you hold.

What we can tell you is what happens on our side: nothing. We do not withhold tax and we do not report interest to any authority. That is structural rather than a policy choice. A no-KYC account holds an email address and a balance; there is no name, no address and no tax identifier to attach a report to.

If you need a record, your transaction history lists every payment with its date and amount, and the API returns the same data day by day for as far back as you need. Export it before you close an account — a closed account's history goes with it.

Where to see it in your account

Three places, depending on what you want to know.

• The Earn tab in your dashboard shows the rate, what today is accruing so far, how much has been paid to date, and a projection at your current balance. The accruing figure updates live — it is the day's interest scaled by how much of the UTC day has passed, so it is an estimate of tonight's payment rather than money you already hold.
• Your transaction list shows every payment as an Interest line, alongside top-ups, card payments and fees.
• The API exposes it twice: as a yield object on GET /balance, and day by day on GET /interest.

If a payment looks smaller than you expected, the closing-balance rule in the second section is almost always the reason — check what the balance was at midnight UTC, not what it averaged.

Frequently asked questions

Product references and further reading

• CryptoCard fees and funding minimums
• CryptoCard Terms of Service

Published by CryptoCard. Product terms, eligibility and third-party features can change; use the linked reference for the current details.