Kraken’s Krak Card Launches in US, Ties Cashback to Crypto Holdings

Kraken’s multi-asset debit card is now available to U.S. customers, roughly eight months after it debuted in the U.K. and the European Economic Area, the company said Tuesday.

The Krak Card lets users store money across more than 600 currencies and assets – including crypto – spend any of them at checkout, and earn up to 2% cashback paid in dollars or bitcoin, according to the press release. The card runs on Visa’s network and converts assets into dollars in real time at the point of sale. Customers set a priority order for which holdings get spent first and which stay off limits.

Cashback rates are tiered, based on the total value of assets the customer holds. The reward lands in the account the instant the transaction settles, the release said.

“The Krak Card turns whatever people choose to hold into money they can spend anywhere, and pays the value back as cash, not points,” Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Kraken parent Payward, said in the release.

The card is available as both a physical and virtual product to anyone who downloads the Krak app. Since the December launch in the U.K. and EU, more than 135,000 cards have been issued across those markets, per the company.

Kraken said it plans to expand the card to additional markets in the months ahead and deepen its account features to cover a wider range of financial needs.

The launch lands at a moment when crypto-linked payment cards are proliferating. Bybit recently added tokenized Meta and Tesla shares to its trading platform, pushing the market for tokenized equities past $1.48 billion. Mastercard is testing a single-audit stablecoin compliance tool with Borderless.xyz, signaling growing infrastructure for crypto-to-fiat spending. Kraken’s play ties spending utility directly to asset holdings, with the cashback structure acting as a retention mechanism for larger balances.

The card does not require users to sell crypto before spending – the conversion happens at checkout, which removes a friction point that has limited adoption of earlier-generation crypto debit cards. The real-time settlement also means cashback is not deferred to a statement cycle, a design choice that differentiates it from credit-card rewards models.

For U.S. users, the card enters a competitive field that includes offerings from Coinbase, Gemini, and Block’s Cash App. Kraken’s edge may be the multi-asset storage and priority-spending controls, which let a customer hold both crypto and fiat in one account and decide which gets tapped for each purchase.