Cash advance

A cash advance is when you pull cash from a credit card rather than buying something with it — at an ATM, say. Card networks treat it as more expensive and riskier than a purchase, so it carries its own pricing: a higher APR, an upfront fee, and usually no rewards.

Why it matters: the trap on crypto cards is that buying cryptocurrency is frequently coded as a cash advance, not a purchase. That flips a friendly-sounding rewards card into an expensive way to do the one thing its branding invites. Interest on a cash advance often starts the moment you take it — with no grace period — and the fee is typically the greater of a flat amount or a percentage, so even a small crypto buy can sting. Before you put a coin purchase on any credit card, it’s worth checking how the card classifies it; the answer is often buried in the fine print, and getting it wrong is costly.

For example: buying crypto on the Coinbase One Card is typically coded as a cash advance — it carries the 32.24% cash-advance APR plus a fee of $10 or 5% of the advance (whichever is greater), and earns no Bitcoin back (as of June 2026). So a crypto-brand credit card effectively penalises using it to buy crypto, and none of that spend counts toward cashback.