Crypto.com Secures 100K Card Reservations Before Entering US, Europe

Sead Fadilpašić
Last updated: | 3 min read

Crypto.com aims to become the only cryptocurrency card available globally this year. Their mainnet launch scheduled for 2019. The CRO token to be listed on more exchanges.

Source: Crypto.com, Twitter

After US-headquartered major crypto company Coinbase announced its new Visa debit card for their UK clients this week, another provider or Visa card for payments with cryptocurrencies, Crypto.com, claims it already has more than 100,000 card reservations in the US and Europe.

“We are going to launch in the US soon, and Europe will follow shortly after. It’s going to be the only cryptocurrency card available globally this year. We think that we have a product that’s very competitive even against major banks. Currently, we have over 100,000 card reservations. That global rollout is a big part of our strategy to increase the size of the platform,” Kris Marszalek, co-founder and CEO of the Hong Kong-headquartered payments and cryptocurrency platform, told Cryptonews.com.

The MCO Visa Card, which is paired with their wallet and is accepted by all retailers that work with Visa, is available in Singapore since October 2018. Back then, the company planned to issue 100,000 “cryptocurrency Visa prepaid cards” over the next two months. However, Marszalek declined to comment on their results in more detail, only saying that all their services have 400,000 users in total. It includes wallet users, trading, credit services, and crypto payments.

Meanwhile, Coinbase plans to support customers in unspecified other European countries in the coming months, however, there is no timeline on the new card’s launch in the US. Also, Singapore-based digital wallet and payment card company TenX launched their card in January this year and now their roadmap includes expansion in the Asia-Pacific region in 2019, only.

Trading, mainnet and partnerships

Kris Marszalek

Meanwhile, according to the CEO, crypto trading transaction volume on their platform “went up by 25x” in the first quarter this year.

“We’ve released new perks and tighter pricing, and deployed a new trading engine designed to give you the best prices when trading through our app,” Marszalek said, adding that they expect that the next time “the market turns” is probably next year. Also, they’re are working on “some new strategies” that would address their users’ suggestions that they would like to see “more aggressive portfolio.”

The company has also deployed their so-called Chain testnet on March 20th, and the mainnet itself is planned for next year, although there is no date set at this point.

“We’ll start processing transactions with our merchants very soon even though the mainnet is not live yet. Even though it’s off-chain, the entire infrastructure will very closely mimic what will happen on-chain when the mainnet is live. The testnet is open-source, so we get a lot of feedback from the community,” Marszalek said.

Additionally, the company is looking for partnerships in three specific categories: traditional payments, which means integrating local payment networks in different regions to offer better services; consumer flywheels, which includes companies that will help them reach millions of users; and technology partnerships.

“We keep the approach that we don’t want to invent everything in house,” the CEO said. “Each of these categories we’ve had some good traction so we’ll be announcing those soon.”

CRO coming to new exchanges

The CRO token, which serves to enable interoperability between cryptocurrencies and fiat payments, is one of the two coins that power the project. The other is MCO, used in the ecosystem in order to earn rewards on purchases and staking, and to pay for referrals. In other words, MCO is the app’s utility token, while CRO will be the native settlement system.

In March, CRO was listed on cryptocurrency exchange Upbit, and it has seen distinct upwards movement in the past week with a total increase of a whopping 80%. However, since it is significantly younger than its MCO counterpart, it is also listed on fewer exchanges, but that is also set to change.

“Our MCO token is listed on more than 30 exchanges and CRO on just five or six, so this is an ongoing process, and we expect to list on every major exchange to provide maximum liquidity to the token. There’s definitely more listings that are going to happen soon. If anyone wants to guess where CRO is going to trade, they can check where MCO is already trading – that’s a good proxy,” Marszalek said.

CRO price chart: