Coinbase Credit Card: A Six-Month Review

What This Card Does Right

I wanted this card to work so bad. As someone who's always looking for ways to stack more Bitcoin, the Coinbase One Amex was an easy sell on paper: 2 to 4% back in Bitcoin on up to $10,000 in monthly spend. What's not to like?

I've been using it as my daily driver since early September. At current prices, with Bitcoin around $68k, I’ve stacked almost $1k in rewards over that stretch.

The amount of Bitcoin you get back is tied to how much you hold on the Coinbase platform. Hold over $200k and you get 4%; hold over $50k and you get 3%. There are also 2.5% and 2% tiers for smaller balances. That's a small price to pay to unlock those rewards. For me, it just acts as a separate custodial wallet. My Bitcoin sits there, untouched, and gives me access to the higher rewards tiers.

The rewards settle immediately. The moment a charge clears, Bitcoin shows up in your account at the corresponding amount. Not having any waiting period for rewards was a pleasant surprise when I first started using it. It does, however, make refunds a little odd. If a transaction is refunded, you’ll see a corresponding entry called “Adjustment,” which is just the dollar value of the reward they originally gave you.

If you're a Bitcoiner who wants to passively accumulate through daily spending, as of today there's nothing else on the market that competes with this.

But Everything Else Is a Problem

That’s the good news. Everything else is where the card starts to fall apart.

First, Coinbase doesn't connect to Plaid, which means none of your transactions sync to any bookkeeping or accounting tool. Every single charge has to be manually entered. When this is your main card, that’s dozens of transactions a week you’re entering by hand. Not prioritizing this feels like a weird miss for Coinbase, and I’ve seen no indication that they plan to fix it. I can't be the only one who does bookkeeping and has multiple credit cards.

Next, this card lives entirely within the Coinbase app — and when I say that, I mean the mobile app specifically. For some reason, credit-card-related features are not accessible on the web. If you want to review transactions or manage your card, you're doing it on your phone. This may not be a big deal for some people, but there’s something inherently odd about a company trying to position itself as the next generation of finance while not offering basic power-user tools.

But the thing that really made me reconsider this card was the fraud experience. A fraud ring hit my account. I still don't know how the card number got compromised, but one day I had about 20 Uber charges show up within an hour. I shut the card off immediately and got a replacement sent out.

Then I tried to dispute the charges. Coinbase's dispute process is entirely over email. There is no phone number to call, no chat, and no way to talk to a person. I clicked “Dispute” in their mobile app, and then the process dragged on for weeks. After just one email, they came back and told me they could not confirm the transactions were fraudulent, so “the temporary credit will be removed from your account.”

Twenty Uber charges in one hour. On a card I reported and replaced the same day. And they couldn't find fraud.

With Chase Reserve or a traditional Amex, this wouldn't have lasted five minutes. The charges would be reversed, I'd have someone on the phone, and I'd move on with my day. Coinbase isn't in the same area code as those cards when it comes to service.

All of it has been incredibly disappointing.

The Verdict

I really wanted to like this card. But the problems outside the reward structure are too big to ignore. No Plaid integration, no desktop access, and customer support that falls well short of what you’d expect from a premium card are product killers.

The rewards are best in class for Bitcoiners. Everything else around them isn’t close to where it needs to be. You’d think a fintech company would have nailed the fintech basics before launching a premium credit card.

Unfortunately, they haven’t.