The Coinbase One Card has the potential to be a cashback king, but the devil is in the details. 4% cashback sounds great until you realize that getting there requires having $200k in your Coinbase account, and that the card won’t work with your budgeting app. This card could make sense, but only for a very specific type of user. All users are likely to complain about the fact that the only way to access live transaction data for this card is through the Coinbase app, and that it is not compatible with any budgeting apps.

This review is based on my personal experience and publicly available information as of 2025-11-16. Terms and conditions may change, and your results may vary. Before making a decision on this card, read the latest version of the card’s official terms and conditions. This review is not financial advice. Consult with a qualified professional before making any investment decisions.

Note also that this is my first attempt at writing a credit card review. I may have missed some points you’d expect to be covered or made some errors in my analysis. I welcome any and all feedback, contact info at the bottom of every page.

Basics

annual fee
$49.99 (Coinbase One Membership), higher tiers available
cashback rate
2-4%, dependent on Coinbase account balance. Higher tiers capped at $10k per month.
audience
hardcore crypto investors
budgeting app compatibility
zip, zilch, nada. This card will not work with your budgeting app right now
network
Amex
issuing bank
First Electronic Bank (via Cardless)

The budgeting app problem

I’ve used a few cards that didn’t play nicely with my budgeting apps, but that generally just meant that I had to frequently re-authenticate, or that the data came in slowly. Even cards issued by legacy banks with wretched apps and websites would give up their data if I was willing to hand over my password to Plaid or a similar data broker. Not so with the Coinbase One Card.

The only way to get live transaction data is through the Coinbase app. The card simply does not show up in the APIs that Coinbase exposes to budgeting apps. There is no website that can be scraped. There also is no “back door” access to your account through the Amex app, First Electronic Bank (the actual issuing bank), or Cardless. Cardless actually touts this lack of secondary access as a feature of their platform, since Coinbase’s card customers never leave their app.

I tested Monarch and Simplifi. Due to the lack of a website and the invisibility of this card in Coinbase’s API, I highly doubt any other apps would work, but YMMV. I am fairly hopeful Coinbase / Cardless will address this issue soon, because I highly suspect there is significant overlap between the audience for this card and the audience for budgeting apps, but as it is right now this is a massive feature gap that makes this card hard to recommend.

Break-even math

I’ll cut right to the chase: You’re probably not breaking even on this card unless you’re a crypto enthusiast.

The Coinbase One Card might look like a fairly straightforward cashback card, but since it’s so heavily tied to the Coinbase ecosystem, we can’t really assess the card’s value in a vacuum. Your annual fee is your Coinbase One membership, which you must maintain as long as you hold the card. Currently, the lowest tier is $49.99.

For most users, getting positive value out of this card will depend on both maximizing the value of the Coinbase One membership itself and earning cashback on the card. However, exactly how much value you get from each side is highly dependent on your personal situation.

Cashback

First, let’s look at what it would take to break-even on cashback only. The cash back tiers are as follows (based on the total value of your crypto and USDC holdings with Coinbase):

  • $0-10k: 2%
  • $10k-50k: 2.5%
  • $50k-200k: 3%
  • $200k+: 4%

However, looking at the rates in a vacuum is misleading, because you can get 2% cashback from many different no-annual-fee cards. So really we should be looking at how much more you could be earning compared to a 2% card you probably already have in your wallet:

  • $0-10k: 0%
  • $10k-50k: 0.5%
  • $50k-200k: 1%
  • $200k+: 2%

If you only consider cashback, the break-even spend is:

  • $0-10k: ∞
  • $10k-50k: $9998
  • $50k-200k: $4999
  • $200k+: $2499.50

So, based on cashback alone, you the break-even spend doesn’t even start to be reasonable until you have $50k in your Coinbase account. However, there is significant value to be harvested from the Coinbase One membership itself, so not all doom and gloom if your Coinbase balance is under $50k.

Coinbase One

The list of Coinbase One benefits looks long, but a lot of them are quite niche and tough to put a price to. You might be able to get more value out of your membership than my analysis can reflect, but to keep things simple I’m only looking at the following:

  • 4% APY on USDC
  • no transaction fees on $500 of crypto transactions per month
  • 5% staking rewards boost1

It’s really hard to make general statements about the last 2, because they’re so dependent on how you trade and which coins you hold2. They can definitely both have value, but you need to look at your own holdings and trading patterns to see what that value would be to you. The USDC APY boost is significantly easier to value, though:

USDC APY boost

The 4% APY on USDC is competitive with most money-market funds and easily beats most savings accounts. The only way I can think of to beat that rate with comparable risk and liquidity would be to take advantage of HYSA promotional offers, but that’s not a fair comparison, since typically doing so requires uncomfortable rearranging of your financial life, and they often don’t last all that long.

As with cashback above, we must compare the rates we get to a free and easily accessible benchmark in order to find the real value. If we take Fidelity’s SPAXX as a benchmark, its last 7 day yield was 3.60% (as of 2025-11-13), giving us a real value of just 0.4%. This gives a break-even balance of $12,497.50.

How reasonable this number sounds to you is highly dependent on how much you trust stablecoins. For a non-crypto investor, the idea of moving that much money from an FDIC-insured bank account and into Coinbase just to take advantage of a cashback credit card would probably sound ridiculous. I suspect a lot of crypto enthusiasts would rather have their money in something more exciting than USDC. If you’re somewhere in the middle, and already have sufficient emergency funds in FDIC-ensured accounts or similarly secure instruments, maybe throwing some cash into your Coinbase account makes sense.

I can’t tell you how much you should keep in USDC, but if you’re going to hold USDC one way or another, Coinbase One can probably give you some value.

Combined break-even example

When you put the two sides of this card’s value proposition together, it starts to make more and more sense for smaller crypto holders and smaller spenders. There are a lot of ways this could play out, but just as an example, let’s consider the following cardholder:

  • Annual Spend: $5k
  • Holdings: $8k USDC, $2k staked crypto at average base APR 3.5%
  • Trading: Buy $500 in various crypto monthly3

This user would earn $125 in total cashback, or $25 in cashback over a free 2% card.

They’d earn $320 in USDC interest, or $32 over SPAXX.

The staking APR boost is basically worthless in this scenario, coming in at a whopping $0.35 in value.

It’s hard to estimate what their trading fees would have been, given how variable Coinbase’s fee structure can be, but to be conservative let’s say they’re only paying the 0.6% maker fee on the advanced trading view, bringing their savings to $36 dollars for the year.

So this gives a grand total of $93 in value, easily offsetting the $49.99 annual fee, although probably not by enough to be worth diverting spending from more lucrative points-based cards. Still, it’s not nothing, and most people in this card’s target audience probably have considerably larger crypto holdings, and might be able to better take advantage of the more fringe Coinbase One benefits for some additional value.

Minor considerations

Amex network

This card comes with the main drawback of an Amex card, that is, being on the Amex network, without having the benefit of Amex’s great customer service, since everything flows through Coinbase. That said, you do get some benefit from being on the Amex network:

  • Retail Protection4
  • Extended Warranty
  • Return Protection
  • Amex Offers
  • Amex Experiences™
  • Worldwide Car Rental Loss & Damage Insurance
  • Trip Cancellation/Trip Interruption
  • Lost or Damaged Luggage Insurance
  • Roadside Assistance
  • Emergency Assistance

I don’t rate the value of these super highly, and I have other Amex cards that offer the same benefits. If you don’t have another Amex card they might have more value to you.

Physical card

The physical card itself looks and feels great, if you like a nice heavy metal card. I do wish they’d dropped the tap-to-pay so the card could clank. The genesis block text on the front is crisp, and the satin texture looks great in most lighting conditions. Overall I’d say it feels premium and looks exactly like Coinbase’s pictures.

Conclusion

There isn’t much to this card beyond the dollars and cents it can earn you, and earning those dollars and cents relies on you being deeply embedded into Coinbase’s ecosystem. I really question how big the actual market for this card could be, considering that any prospective holder would need to both have enough crypto to gain positive value, but not be such a crypto enthusiast that they refuse to use custodial wallets.

My opinion of this card fluctuated wildly as I was putting together this review. On one hand, it is nice to see a proper crypto-based premium credit card offering, but on the other, it has a glaring flaw in its budgeting app incompatibility. For me personally, it does work in my wallet as a catch-all to backstop my category-based cards, but the rewards aren’t juicy enough to divert any of my category spending.

If you’re going to subscribe to Coinbase One one way or another, then the card is a nice freebie, but it’s probably not worth shifting assets into Coinbase just to take advantage of this card.

  1. Multiplying percentages by percentages together always confuses people, so let me spell this one out really clearly: If your crypto earns 1% APR as its base staking rate, after the boost it will earn 1.05%. ↩

  2. E.g., if you hold a crypto that earns 5% APR as its base rate, after the boost it will earn 5.25%. Compare this to the previous example to understand how much the base staking APR affects the value of this benefit, but also just how tiny it actually is even for an unrealistically high-yield crypto. ↩

  3. Note that I’m ignoring any staking rewards from this newly-purchased crypto to keep the math simple. ↩

  4. Note that this is the more basic coverage present on lower-tier Amex cards, not the Platinum’s enhanced benefit. ↩