Phemex CEO Says Crypto Cards Should Be Built Like Trading Infrastructure, Not Loyalty Programs
TREE NEWS reports: Crypto card transaction volumes have grown from roughly $100 million per month in early 2023 to more than $1.5 billion by late 2025. For most of that period, issuers competed on cashback tiers, travel perks and lifestyle incentives. Phemex is now arguing that model is reaching its limits, positioning its newly launched Phemex Card as trading infrastructure rather than a consumer rewards product.
A Category Outgrowing Its Perks
The rapid ascent of crypto card volumes reflects a broader shift: digital assets are increasingly used as a spending medium rather than a purely speculative instrument. Yet the dominant competitive axis — who offers the best percentage back on dining or streaming — has little to do with what serious users actually need. For active traders, the binding constraints are settlement speed, collateral efficiency and the ability to keep capital productive while it is nominally available for spending.
That is the gap Phemex is targeting. By framing the card as infrastructure, the exchange is implicitly acknowledging that the real product is not the plastic but the plumbing: how balances are margined, how authorizations are cleared, and how a card interacts with an existing trading account and risk engine.
Why Infrastructure Framing Matters
- Capital efficiency: If card spending can draw against collateral already posted for trading, users avoid the drag of parking idle stablecoins in a separate spending wallet.
- Settlement risk: Card networks authorize transactions in milliseconds but crypto settlement can take minutes or longer. Bridging that gap requires either a credit facility or deep liquidity — both of which exchanges are better positioned to provide than standalone card startups.
- Compliance surface: Cards sit at the intersection of payments regulation, KYC/AML obligations and, increasingly, stablecoin rules. Exchanges already carry much of that infrastructure.
The strategic logic mirrors what happened in brokerage: the winners were not the firms with the flashiest perks but those that made moving money between products frictionless. If crypto cards follow the same path, standalone rewards programs will struggle to compete with exchange-native offerings that treat spending as one more function of a unified account.
The Competitive Landscape
Phemex is not alone in this repositioning. Several exchanges and fintechs have been quietly rebuilding card products around account-level integration, while stablecoin issuers push to make their tokens the default settlement rail for card transactions. The result is a category increasingly defined by balance-sheet strength, licensing footprint and liquidity depth — advantages that favor larger, regulated players over perk-driven challengers.
At the same time, the growth numbers invite scrutiny. A fifteen-fold increase in monthly volume in under three years raises questions about how much of that activity is genuine consumer spending versus incentive farming, and how durable the economics are once cashback budgets tighten.
What to Watch
The next phase of competition will likely be decided on three fronts: whether exchange-native cards can offer materially better capital efficiency than standalone products; how regulators treat card programs that extend credit against crypto collateral; and whether stablecoin settlement rails become the default behind the scenes. If Phemex’s thesis is right, the card of 2026 will look less like a rewards program and more like an order type — a way to deploy capital that is already on the books.
