I ordered the DogeCard a little less than two weeks ago. While I haven’t received it yet, I’m already disappointed in what I see - and glad I didn’t load any cash onto it.
I was excited to have a prepaid card I could load with cash and earn crypto. I like Doge, but mostly at this point just because it’s widely accepted and has low fees. So I can cheaply send it to BlockTrades to get Hive, or can send it to my cold wallet to swap for something I can stake, etc.
The card claims to accrue rewards in Doge at a rate of 1.5% of each purchase. So I figured I’d load it with enough cash to run my day-to-day and send the reward balance to my cold wallet once a month to be managed and/or dispersed.
But as I was digging through the app for the DogeCard, I noticed it only provides a receive address on the Doge side of things - I couldn’t see a way to send the accumulated Doge - so I dug in and found this:
(Make note of the second paragraph.)
…which to me says, not my crypto. Hell, probably not even crypto. Probably a cash rewards system that banks on Doge going down so they can disintegrate your rewards pool at the whim of everyone’s favorite shitcoin. The app likely tracks and holds onto a record of your “accumulation,” but never actually buys or sends any Doge. They just calculate the value of your rewards based on the price of Doge when you try to cash out…at least, I see no reason why they’d do it any differently if they’re not letting you send it out to your own wallet.
I checked out Reddit, just wondering if there were any posts complaining about this already, but everything seemed shockingly positive. Probably because this card’s target demographic is people who don’t understand crypto, who will think by participating they’re getting started with crypto.
I also checked the comments to see if there was anything beneath the surface, but most had none.
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But if you have to sell it to use it, it is not a currency…maybe a speculative asset, but if that’s what you’re after you’d be better off going to Robinhood to buy your pReTeNd cRyPtO - at least there you can speculate on a variety of things - but if you can’t use it as currency via full access to all private wallet features, as far as I’m concerned it’s a sham put together to fleece rubes.
To be fair, I don’t really think its that bullshitty, but in my opinion it is still trash. As you can see in the image above, taken from the DogeCard app’s help section, the Doge side of things is handled by ZeroHash. So I took a quick look into this element:
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These screenshots are from their site. It appears the company they’re using to support the crypto side of their card supports trading, sending etc., so why are these features intentionally omitted from this card? For a coin that is popularly thought of as the peoples’ crypto, it seems this card may be the creation of somebody with less than honorable intentions. Why else would they intentionally withhold services that are easily accessible and could only stand to benefit the end user? Perhaps one of their intentions is to collect the rounding error any time someone cashes out their rewards? Not sure, but it appears to me to be dubious at best.
am I just being a persnickety old crankpot? Should this not piss me off? Should it not strike me as suspicious that the cRyPtO has to be sold in order to be utilized? This just sounds like Robinhood on a smaller scale.
are there any crypto rewards cards that offer legitimate crypto rewards?
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