Coinbase becomes a Visa Principal Member, allowing it to issue bitcoin debit cards for other crypto companies and traditional firms
Michael del Castillo / Forbes :
Context & Ripple Effects
Coinbase has spent years renting its way onto Visa rails: its first bitcoin debit card ran through a partnership with Shift Payments in 2015, with an intermediary holding the actual card-issuing relationship. Becoming a Visa Principal Member cuts that middleman out — Coinbase now holds direct membership and can issue bitcoin debit cards not just for itself but for other crypto companies and traditional firms.
That issuer-of-record position is what made everything downstream possible: the US launch of the Coinbase Card later that year after its European debut, Visa's subsequent program spanning 50+ crypto partners including Coinbase, and eventually the Visa-Coinbase deposit partnership that lets users fund accounts instantly.
First-order effects
- Coinbase stops being a card program tenant and becomes infrastructure: it can now issue bitcoin debit cards on behalf of other crypto companies and traditional firms, monetizing its Visa membership as a service.
- The Shift Payments-style intermediary layer Coinbase previously depended on loses its role in Coinbase's stack, since direct Principal Membership covers what a sponsor partner provided.
Second-order effects
- Crypto startups wanting a branded card no longer need to negotiate their own path into Visa — they can plug into Coinbase's membership, making Coinbase a competitor to the very intermediaries it once used.
- Other exchanges and wallet providers face pressure to secure equivalent direct network access or accept Coinbase as their issuing platform, shifting bargaining power toward whoever holds principal memberships.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, card networks absorb crypto as a funding source rather than a threat — Visa's later reporting of $1B+ spent via crypto-linked cards in half a year shows the rails profiting from adoption they once had no stake in.
- Card issuance consolidates around a handful of crypto firms with direct network membership, structuring the industry into infrastructure holders and renters much like banking-as-a-service.
The trend: Crypto companies are graduating from borrowed card programs to direct Visa membership, converting payment-network access from a dependency into a sellable product line.