Binance Card

Binance Card Review

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 Binance Card, one of the crypto debit cards out there.

General information

Binance Card is an interesting new card that we at Cryptowisser.com are very excited about. The card is formally issued by Contis Financial Services Ltd who is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority to issue e-money (Firm Reference Number: 900025) and is a member of Visa.

The card has been around since March 2020, but it was announced on 15 December 2020 that it will now also start shipping to the European Economic Area, namely:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Gibraltar, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden.

The card has a lot of interesting functions. One of which being a "auto topup". The balance on your card is backed by the balance on your Binance account. Let's say that you always want to have EUR 100 on your card, and such balance is backed by your BTC-holdings. If BTC drops significantly, so that your card balance falls below your predefined level (in this example EUR 100), the card will "auto topup", meaning that the card transfers funds from your Binance account to your card account, so that you have EUR 100 on your card again. This is done to avoid that you are in the store and want to buy something, but have insufficient balance on your card due to a price drop in the crypto market.  

For the avoidance of doubt, the Binance Card will only use the funds from your Binance Card wallet (the balance on your Binance account). The Binance Card cannot be topped up from other external platforms. Funds which are sent directly from 3rd party platforms will not be credited to your Binance Card, and might result in the loss of these funds.

The card also comes with transactionpush notifications. This means that each time you make a purchase with your Binance Card, you will receive a push notification on your Binance mobile app.

Supported Cryptos 

The card has support for BNB (Binance Coin), BUSD (Binance USD), BTC (Bitcoin), ETH (Ethereum) and SXP (Swipe). Also, it supports the EUR fiat currency (the card in other continents support other fiat currencies as well of course).

Binance Card Interface

The following picture shows how you can control the card or navigate it from your Binance account. The layout of all features seems very intuitive to us and easy to understand.

The following picture represents a card which has not yet been used (which is why there is no transaction history, no cashback etc.) and all assets on the card have been redacted from display.

Binance Card Cashback

The card from Binance also offers something very interesting: a cashback feature. What is a cashback feature? Well, it's actually quite simple, every time you use the card, a percentage of what you pay with the card gets transferred back to you in the form of BNB-tokens. And the percentage is actually from 1-8%, depending upon how many BNB-tokens you hold. The levels required for the different cashback-percentages are set out in the below table:

8% is a very high cashback level, one of highest there is. Another card company with a cashback function (Wirex), only offers 1.50% in cashback. The aggregate amount of cashbacks that you have generated are also displayed on your Binance Card Interface (see the picture above).

Binance Card Fees

Binance Card’s fees are very competitive indeed.

There are no monthly fees. There are no issuance fees. There are no minimum deposit limits. As long as you have a balance on the Binance-account that the card is connected to, you can use the card.

The most important fee of them all is the commission on spending. Binance Card has a low commission on spending, 0.90%. The 0.90% applies also to ATM-withdrawals. The only other fee you might need to think about is if you have lost the physical card and want Binance to reissue it. They will happily do that, but to a fee of EUR 25. But that's it! 

There is also a daily maximum spending limit: EUR 8,700 per day.

Transactions on digital wallets, digital banking services, crypto exchanges, stored value products, money remittance services, and certain other categories are however excluded from the BNB cashback program.

Binance Card Security

Binance Card also seems to take security very seriously, just like the Binance Exchange does. Any funds received by you are held in a segregated account so that in the unlikely event that Contis Financial Services Ltd (the formal issuer of the card) becomes insolvent, your funds will be protected against claims made by creditors.

Concluding remarks

We have a great feeling about the Binance Card. You can order one here.

If this is the cryptocurrency debit card for you, congratulations. But if not, check out one of the other cards in our crypto debit card list.

Good luck!