Exchange spread

An exchange spread is the gap between the price you’re quoted to buy and the price you’d get to sell at the same moment. When a card converts your crypto to fiat to pay a merchant, the rate it uses is slightly worse than the true market mid-price — and that difference is a cost you pay without ever seeing a line item.

Why it matters: the spread is the fee that hides behind “no fees.” A card can advertise 0% conversion and still earn a margin by quoting you a worse rate, so the spread sits on top of any FX fee and isn’t always disclosed as a percentage. The only honest way to read a “fee-free” claim is to compare the rate you actually got against the market rate that day.

For example: Coinbase is candid that “a spread applies” on conversions and historically charged 2.49% to spend non-USDC crypto, on top of any other cost. Gnosis Pay avoids the conversion spread entirely on home-currency spend — you pay 1:1 from EURe, GBPe or USDCe stablecoins with no markup — though cross-currency purchases still carry Visa’s own wholesale network spread of roughly 0.3% to 0.9%.