What Seven Years Building Crypto.com's Card Program Taught Cashi's Founder

Why the door opened

Esther Wong points to payment companies like Visa and Mastercard starting to accept stablecoins such as USDC for settlement. In her account, the lower collateral that follows is "unlocking the business for companies that could never afford exchange-scale capital."

Lessons from Crypto.com

At crypto.com, Wong says the card program expanded locally in the US, Europe, the UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Bahrain, with entities and licenses on the ground rather than cross-border issuance, which allowed direct acquisition instead of reverse solicitation. She says the company issued millions of cards in the first few years because adoption was so great.

Custodial and dollar-based

Having run a non-custodial wallet for a few years, Wong says many people outside crypto do not know what non-custodial means, so Cashi chose a custodial model where users do not worry about losing their keys. "They don't know what coins they're buying. They don't know what chains they need to use," she says.

Rewards follow the same logic. Cashi pays back in US dollar value with no expiry, no points and no native token, because users do not want to track a reward token's price performance.

Build the edge, rent the rest

Wong says Cashi negotiated its own account and is building its own infrastructure with the back-end processor so it can control the experience. For yield products from partners, she ranks security and compliance ahead of yield and says she is not going for the super high yield product.

Crews and what comes next

Cashi has four crews onboarded in Chile, Nigeria, Pakistan and Spain, with about 30 crew member applications in review, under a revenue-share affiliate model. The product is prelaunch, and Wong expects to launch in a few weeks, with agent-assisted payments as her next focus.