The Binance Card Program is Done, What Do You Do Now?

Recently, the global crypto community was shocked by the news about the Binance card program closure. This October, Binance users from EEA countries got notifications that after the 20th of December, all Binance cards issued in this region will be terminated.

However, this news did not come as a surprise to experts. For example, I wrote about the possible closure of the program back in late August. Indeed, even then, we received information that both VISA and Mastercard would likely end their interaction with Binance. It’s clear that payment networks have immediately stopped their cooperation with Binance because of its global legal issues, especially court cases against the SEC and CFTC in the United States.

Additionally, a Binance Card program with Mastercard for Latin America and the Middle East was terminated in August. However, there was a chance that in the European Union, Binance/Visa would make an exemption and let to use already-issued cards for existing users. This didn’t happen. In August, Binance hastened to reassure its clients and announced support of direct withdrawal to fiat accounts by Binance Pay for Latin American users.

For EU residents, direct fiat withdrawal was unavailable after PaySafe European payment provider was rejected from cooperation with Binance this September. However, on 19th October, the exchange claimed that it had new partners to provide EURO payments, deposits, and withdrawals. That’s why, if you are a Binance user living in EEA countries, you can easily withdraw your funds to your bank account in EUR. Nevertheless, thousands of Binance card users in the European Economic Area are frantically looking for alternatives.

Crypto cards: key stats

Today, cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency payments have already become quite popular in Europe. For example, this is evidenced by ECB Stats 2022 research, which contains actual data about crypto adoption in payments in the EU. It includes only Eurozone 19 counties: Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Finland, Greece, Slovenia, Cyprus, Malta, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

According to that research, the average percentage of crypto owners in 2022 inside the European Union was about 4%. Countries where crypto assets are most popular include Slovenia (8%), Luxembourg (8%), Germany and France. This research also gives an overview of the most common use cases for crypto-investment purposes and as a payment solution. As you may see on the chart below, currently, crypto is more of an investment than a payment solution.

However, 11 EA19 countries presented in the chart have at least 30% of crypto owners who use it for payment for payment purposes only and/or both for payment and investor purposes.

We also may conclude that there are 7 countries where at least 10% of crypto users enable it for payments only: Lithuania (24%), France (18%), Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Slovenia, Spain, and Greece. The average percentage of crypto users in EA19 countries that use it for payment purposes only is almost 10%, and for both, about 20%.

There are relatively low levels of crypto payments, according to the chart we have in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, and Estonia.

Crypto card transaction volume for Europe is still unknown. However, there is data about global transaction volume for the last few years. For instance, based on Invezz, the total value of transactions made using crypto credit cards exceeded $1 billion in 2021. The number of crypto credit cards then was fewer compared to today. In the first quarter of 2022, Visa customers made $2.5 billion in payments in crypto-linked cards. That was 70% of the company's crypto volume for all of fiscal 2021. Probably, it lets us estimate the total value of all VISA crypto card transactions in 2022 as $10 billion.

Hypothesis: Based on PopularFintech in 2021, VISA and Mastercard reported a Payment Volume (for ALL PAYMENTS) of $10.89 trillion and $5.96 trillion, respectively. Taking this ratio similar to crypto transactions globally, it’s possible to estimate total global crypto card transaction volume in 2022 between $10-20 billion, based on VISA's 2022 numbers.

Alternative Crypto Cards

So, as we see, there is a broad audience of crypto holders who use it for payment purposes, and there is a growing demand for crypto cards, too. That’s why, for many people, an opportunity to change crypto and withdraw it is not enough.

Crypto cards provide easy payments with low fees for the daily needs of crypto users. So, it’s not a surprise that people are looking for substitutes after the closing of the Binance card program in Europe. And there are at least dozens of crypto cards in the world in total. In our study, there are almost 100 of them, and these are only the cards that are publicly available on the net in English. This number doesn’t contain cards and crypto card providers still in development - only complete solutions.

Nevertheless, not all of them are available for EEA countries, and at least we can talk about 20 different crypto cards public in the European Economic Area. Large crypto exchanges such as Coinbase, Gemini, Bybit, Bitstamp, Kraken, Nexo, Crypto.com, eToro, and Bitpanda have their crypto cards. Also, crypto card providers such as Xapo, Wirex, Choice (exCrypterium), Plutus, Monolith, and ShakePay.

A basic list of existing crypto cards can be found in the Crypto Penetration database in Notion with Crypto Cards Overview. According to our research, there are at least 87 crypto cards in the world. Another public survey from the CryptoWisser portal contains only 27 crypto cards there. And we haven't found any other crypto card research or tracker with the list of available crypto cards there.

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