Kraken is one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges.
Tiffany Hagler-Geard | Bloomberg via Getty Images
A fintech app from the makers of the crypto exchange Kraken is launching a cashback U.S. debit card, vying for a place in consumer wallets as crypto evolves from an asset class into infrastructure for mainstream financial products.
The card, called the Krak Card and issued by the affiliate money app of the same name, offers up to 2% cash or bitcoin back, with the rate increasing based on the value of assets a customer holds. Rewards are paid directly as money rather than points.
It also lets customers spend directly from more than 600 currencies and crypto assets, automatically converting whichever balances they choose into dollars at the point of purchase. Users can set the order in which their assets are spent and have the option to split a single purchase across multiple balances.
The move puts Krak in more direct competition with payments and fintech super apps — including Block’s CashApp, PayPal’s Venmo, SoFi, Robinhood and Chime. It comes as crypto is increasingly embedded within the broader financial system, and industry players are competing to serve as the distribution layer for a wider range of financial products.
The opportunity for Krak goes beyond interchange fees, those generated when customers use its debit card. Krak offers the card through a partner bank, which issues the card and is subject to U.S. limits on debit card interchange fees. Those limits constrain how much transaction revenue is available to support rewards, which makes a 2% reward difficult to fund from card spending alone.
Kraken is likely more interested in increasing the amount of each customer’s financial life it can capture, using the new debit card to retain deposits, drive spending and keep more customer assets on its platform.
Kraken, founded in 2011, historically has been the exchange that serves crypto natives. Its core user base comprises institutions, trading firms, professional traders and active leverage traders, and many of its retail users have likely been trading crypto for many years (although the company is trying to expand its user base with agentic trading capabilities in its newly rebuilt app). By contrast, Coinbase has positioned itself as the gateway to crypto, and Robinhood as the gateway to investing broadly.
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At a time when it seems like the future of crypto is less “crypto” — that is, less trading of meme coins and more tokenized stocks, commodities, IPOs and dollars — Kraken seems to be doubling down on its distinctly crypto-native identity. Its roots stretch back to crypto’s earliest days, when decentralization and financial autonomy were core to the movement, and rather than distancing itself from that culture as the industry has matured, Kraken appears to be making it a defining part of its brand.
“People have lost trust in how the financial system treats them, in the rates they’re paid, the fees they’re charged, and how rewards actually work. They’re right to,” Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Kraken parent Payward, said in a statement.
The debit card was built around a growing disconnect between American consumers and the financial products available to them. According to a national survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, commissioned by Krak, 63% of Americans say they feel financially behind, while 60% would switch to a debit card that offers meaningful rewards without requiring them to take on debt.
“For decades the system has run on a quiet subsidy: ordinary people’s deposits, fees, and spending fund the returns, and those returns rarely flow back to them. The old deal was simple: if you wanted rewards, you had to take on debt to get them. That deal is over,” Sethi said. “The Krak Card turns whatever people choose to hold into money they can spend anywhere, and pays the value back as cash, not points.”
Beyond its crypto exchange, Kraken offers spot and derivatives trading, institutional custody and tokenized equities. It also has a Wyoming bank charter and earlier this year became the first crypto company to secure a Federal Reserve master account, meaning its banking subsidiary can connect directly to core U.S. payment rails.