Card network

A card network is the system that routes your payment — Visa and Mastercard are the two big ones. The network isn’t your card company; it’s the rails the company plugs into to reach the shop’s bank, set the exchange rate on a foreign purchase, and move the money behind the scenes.

Why it matters: the network you’re on quietly shapes everyday use. Acceptance is the main one — Visa and Mastercard are both near-universal, but a given merchant or region can favour one, and networks like American Express are accepted at fewer places. The network also sets the wholesale exchange rate applied to foreign spend, which sits underneath any foreign-transaction fee your card adds on top. Two crypto cards that look identical can behave differently at the till purely because of the logo in the corner.

For example: most crypto cards run on Visa — ether.fi Cash, Gnosis Pay and the Crypto.com card all do. The Nexo card is the outlier on this site: it’s a Mastercard. As of June 2026. The network is rarely the deciding factor, but it’s the reason your card adds its foreign-transaction fee on top of the network’s own conversion rate, not instead of it.