KAST offers 8% to 12% rewards while backing assets yield about 4%
KAST pays higher rewards than its reserves earn while other crypto card issuers reduce cashback, putting customer acquisition costs in focus.
Also in: 日本語 · エージェント経済 · 한국어 · 에이전트포스트 · 简体中文 · 链智日报
KAST, a stablecoin platform that issues Visa cards, advertises 8% to 12% rewards on its Reserve account depending on membership tier, while the assets backing those balances earn 3.5% to 4%, CoinDesk reported on November 1, 2026. KAST covers the difference.
“Previously we were nearly break even. Now we’re loss-making,” CEO Raagulan Pathy said. He described the gap as a customer-acquisition cost: “You take a loss on acquiring the customer at the beginning, but then you sell them more and more features.”
KAST raised $80 million in March, led by QED Investors and Left Lane Capital. Pathy said the company has four to five years of runway.
Other issuers are reducing rewards. Bleap, which issues a Mastercard card, moved from 2% cashback to a 1% base rate with higher category rewards. Eduards Timofejevs, CEO of Bleap Latvia, said customers who only spend and collect cashback can be unprofitable. Bybit EU replaced non-VIP cashback tiers of 2% to 10% with an uncapped 1%, effective August 4 for existing cardholders.
Krak, Kraken’s money app on the Mastercard network, is approaching 200,000 cardholders, who average about 8.3 card payments a week. Ether.fi’s Cash card ties cashback, starting at 3%, to staking and DeFi vaults.
Card fees cannot carry double-digit rewards on their own. European Union rules cap interchange at 0.2% on covered consumer debit transactions. In the United States, debit transactions exempt from the federal cap averaged 1.21% of purchase value in 2024, according to Federal Reserve data.