In July of 2020, my wife and I converted all of our net worth into cryptocurrency, mostly bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) . We called this “going full crypto ” and even began a podcast documenting our journey. We decided to convert all of our money into cryptocurrency because we saw it as a generational opportunity to drastically increase our net worth.
When we made the decision to go full crypto, we had to figure out how to obtain the same financial services we would get from a bank — from within the world of cryptocurrency. This is where Crypto.com comes in.
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Crypto.com provides financial services
We consider Crypto.com to be our “crypto bank,” as it offer us the same financial services that we would get at a regular Canadian financial institution. It provides us with three things.
- The ability to spend our cryptocurrency
- The ability to invest in cryptocurrencies and passive income streams
- The ability to take on debt
The entire Crypto.com ecosystem revolves around their core cryptocurrency, called CRO (CRYPTO: CRO). By investing in CRO, you can unlock higher tiers of services from Crypto.com. This includes better interest rates for their savings accounts, more cash back from spending with a card and lower rates when borrowing money. So most of my portfolio is in bitcoin (about 90%) and around 5% is in CRO.
I own CRO because it unlocks a level of service from Crypto.com that makes it easy for me to go full crypto.
Spending cryptocurrency from Crypto.com
I obtained a Crypto.com Visa debit card because it allows me to spend the money I keep on Crypto.com. The card doesn’t allow me to directly spend my cryptocurrency. Instead, the card needs to be loaded with fiat currency, in my case, Canadian dollars. Through the app, I am able to instantly sell my cryptocurrency for CAD and load it onto the card for spending. The entire selling and loading process takes 1-2 minutes, after which the funds are available for spending. The Crypto.com card is most like a debit card because unlike a credit card, I actually need to have money loaded into the account in order to spend.
The card can be used internationally at most Visa terminals. After traveling in the United States, El Salvador, the U.K., and India, I’ve only not been able to use the card a handful of times. In Canada, I use the card to pay my cellphone bill, internet bill, and to buy daily coffee. The only thing I can’t pay for with the card is my rent. This is why I take 50% of my salary in CAD (and the other 50% in BTC), as I need monthly cash flow in CAD to pay bills that the Crypto.com Visa card cannot handle.
Passive income on Crypto.com
Crypto.com has a savings account called “Crypto Earn.” Through this earning account, I can earn up to 8.5% APY on my bitcoin holdings and up to 14% on any fiat currencies. These rates are several times higher than anything you can find at a traditional financial institution. However, in order to obtain these rates, I need to lock up the funds for 3 months at a time. This means that I cannot touch, or withdraw the funds during the lockup period. As long as I don’t lock up anything I won’t need within three months, I am OK with parting with the access to my funds in exchange for the rates that it is giving me.
There is a “flexible” savings account which lets you deposit and withdraw money as you please. My rates for this account are 2% for BTC and 8% for stablecoins. This is where I park funds that I might need in the short term. My philosophy is to always let my money work for me. Every earn term pays out weekly in the asset I have deposited, and is available for me to move or spend.
Using cryptocurrency as collateral to take on debt
For me, having access to debt is about optionality. I prefer to have the ability to instantly take on debt, rather than not having that option at all — the ability to secure an arbitrary amount of credit on demand is important to us. Crypto.com lets us lock up our bitcoin as collateral and take out as much as 50% of the value in a stablecoin like USDT (CRYPTO: USDT).
This process of taking out a loan requires no paperwork, no signatures, and no credit checks. I pay between 2% and 6% for the debt that I take on, and may pay it back at my leisure without penalty. This sort of flexible debt arrangement is ideal, especially when compared to taking on debt at the bank wherein they refuse to recognize my bitcoin as valid collateral.
The future of banking
After using these services for more than a year, I am comfortable saying that companies that provide services like Crypto.com are building the banks of the future. When my wife and I began our go full crypto experiment, we didn’t know whether or not we would be able to pull it off. We were concerned that we wouldn’t be able to operate and pay our bills, given that so much of the world relies on traditional banking infrastructure. With only a couple of exceptions, we are happy to discover that we can in fact live with 100% of our money in cryptocurrency.
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Keegan Francis owns bitcoin. The Motley Fool owns and recommends Bitcoin and Visa. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
