Neo · · 28 min

What Moto Learned Building a Credit Card for People Who Spend $10K a Month

With Shimon Newman

Key takeaways

  • Moto counts a member as truly wealthy if they regularly spend more than $10,000 per month, while Shimon Newman puts Amex's average at about $2,000.

  • Moto has spent about four months in an extended beta and has grown only through word of mouth and referrals, with no paid marketing.

  • Newman calls the neobank cashback race a war of attrition and says Moto will compete with private banking instead.

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0:00Moto has spent four months in beta, growing only by referral1 of 8

Summary

Four months into beta, Moto's CEO says rich members care less about cashback and more about not feeling taken advantage of, and the company is dropping crypto from its pitch to go after Amex Black.

Moto co-founder and CEO Shimon Newman says the onchain credit card company uses a simple test for who counts as truly wealthy: do you regularly spend more than $10,000 per month. Moto is about four months into an extended beta, and Newman says it has a strong group of very wealthy members, all brought in through word of mouth and referrals with no paid marketing.

What the wealthy actually want

Newman says Moto first thought about spending tiers and was fine with members who spend 3 to 4 k, but the beta brought in very wealthy people he did not know personally. He compares the $10,000 threshold with Amex's average spending, which he puts at $2,000 per month. Interest on deposits and cashback, he says, appeal to the aspirationally wealthy, while the needs of the truly wealthy are very different.

One question kept coming up in interviews: why am I paying an FX fee. Newman says wealthy members "don't mind spending a lot of money, but they don't wanna feel taken advantage of," so Moto subsidizes FX through a zero FX program it built with Rain and Visa. He says onchain FX cannot fix the problem, because a card on a US issuer BIN settles in US dollars, and names Ether.Fi as the only neobank he knows of with native euro to euro payments in the EU.

“They don't mind spending a lot of money, but they don't wanna feel taken advantage of. Right?...It just kept on coming up. Like, why am I paying an FX fee? Right? And so...Moto, we subsidize the FX because it's just... It's... It is an expectation of of our clientele.”
Shimon Newman

Beyond crypto, still on Solana

The new Moto website, designed by Properly Studios, does not show crypto anywhere, as the company aims to go head to head with Atlas and Amex Black. Newman says crypto whales tried Moto first and then onboarded non-crypto people with money through referrals. Moto still runs on Solana infrastructure to monetize float in ways traditional payments cannot.

Real credit, cashback from yield

Newman says Moto extends real credit: it borrows from the onchain facility Credit Coop and prefunds members' transactions. Interest earned on deposits goes mainly back into cashback, because people prefer the instant gratification of cashback. He says Moto is not trying to be a full neobank but the ultimate place to spend.

Staying out of the cashback war

Newman describes a hyperfragmentation of fintech as barriers to entry have gone to zero. He says Cast, Ether.Fi, Plasma and Peanut, which offers 101% cash back, are in a contest over "who can burn VC money," noting that Cast just raised 80 mil. He would never outsource smart contract development, pointing to AI-assisted bad actors and this year's exploits.

Newman says Moto's real value is getting very rich people to trust it with their spending data in 2026, and it is building its own data pipeline. Card preorders for existing members are coming soon, with open membership applications to follow, and he says Moto will leave beta a lot sooner than people think.

Moto, Rain, Visa Inc, and Cast come up most.

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