Kraken Debuts Debit Card to Let Customers Pay in Crypto

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has introduced a debit card for British and European Economic Area customers.

The Kraken Card, announced in a news release Monday (July 13), is designed to link a customer’s crypto and cash balances to everyday spending.

“Our new debit card connects your Kraken balances to everyday spending, whether that’s online or in shops, so the money you hold is also money you can use,” the release said. “Your crypto finally works like money.”

The company added that the card — available in physical or virtual formats — is designed to feel like an extension of a customer’s Kraken account, letting them fund it from any crypto or fiat balance they hold, and spend any place that accepts Mastercard.

According to the release, the card pays up to 2% cash back in bitcoin, euros or pounds, with no Kraken transaction or ATM fees. Cardholders can spend from more than 600 crypto and cash currencies, “converted in near real-time at the moment of purchase,” the company added.

The news follows last year’s announcement of Kraken’s Krak Card, a debit card that allows for instant spending using multiple balances and earns 1% cash back rewards on all purchases.

PYMNTS examined the crypto card payment landscape earlier this year, writing that businesses mulling crypto acceptance increasingly want to understand who bears volatility risk during settlement windows.

“They want clarity on whether refunds are issued in fiat or digital assets,” that report said. “They want assurances that enterprise resource planning systems can reconcile transactions without introducing manual accounting workarounds.”

In addition, these merchants want to know how disputes will be adjudicated if tokenized payments move across hybrid systems involving blockchain infrastructure and traditional card rails at the same time.

“Accepting a crypto payment is not super simple,” WalletConnect CEO Jess Houlgrave told PYMNTS in an interview in March. “You’ve got to have the connectivity, the user experience, the wallet infrastructure, the settlement infrastructure, the conversion and liquidity infrastructure. There’s a lot of pieces there.”

“The majority of merchants don’t want to change their accounting processes,” she added. “They want it to be a switch-on in a dashboard or an email saying, ‘Switch on my crypto payments.’”

That reality, the report added, has placed payments services providers into a more strategically important role, beyond just optimizing transaction routing and merchant acceptance.

“In the crypto era, they increasingly function as translators between blockchain-native systems and the conventional financial infrastructure businesses still rely upon,” PYMNTS wrote.