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American Express To Offer Their First Crypto Rewards Credit Card

American Express is rolling out it’s first-ever crypto rewards credit card as part of a partnership with Abra, according to a joint announcement at this week’s crypto conference Consensus in Austin.

The announcement is a move in the footsteps of other major credit card providers, most notably Visa and Mastercard, but is still a major call-out in crypto integration into the current credit card landscape. There are over 60M AmEx holders according to figures from earlier this year – and now the network will bring access to direct cryptocurrency rewards for spending for the first time ever with a partner card with Abra.

American Express And Abra Team Up

The ‘Abra Crypto Card’ was unveiled at the annual Consensus event in Austin, Texas today, and will offer crypto rewards for any purchase category and amount, according to the formal press release. Abra offers a platform token, ‘Crypto Perx’ (CPRX) that is expected to be alongside a variety (but thus far undisclosed) of top tokens as options for earning rewards. It was a big day for the team at Abra, who paired the American Express announcement with news that their app would support custody and gallery views of NFTs.

American Express’ president of Global Network Services Mohammed Badi stated that Abra brings “deep expertise in both crypto and traditional financial services” that makes them a fitting partner for the endeavor.

‘Crypto Perx,’ (CPRX) is the native platform ERC-20 token for Abra; the token saw strong positive price reaction to the news around Abra’s new credit card on the AmEx network. | Source: CPRX-USD on TradingView.com

Related Reading | Solana To Support DeFi, NFT, And GameFi In South Korea With A $100M Fund

Join The Club

Visa and Mastercard are two of the most commonly-recognized names in the credit card business, but don’t sleep on American Express, who is only behind Citibank, Chase, and the two aforementioned top dogs when it comes to card issuance. AmEx has carved out a long-time niche of serving top dollar customers and offering commensurate rewards.

The Abra card is expected to bring those rewards along with it too, with rewards from the slate of the AmEx network, including “Amex Offers (for shopping, travel, dining, services, entertainment, etc.), presale ticket access, Global Dining benefits, and purchase protections,” according to the press release.

Abra joins a growing list of crypto-native card issuers with crypto rewards, including the likes of BlockFi, Gemini, Nexo and others. Even companies that aren’t crypto-first, such as Venmo and SoFi, are offering crypto reward cards.

Related Reading | Head To Head: Bitcoin, Ethereum Profitability For Investors

Featured image from Pixabay, Charts from TradingView.com
The writer of this content is not associated or affiliated with any of the parties mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.

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Abra CEO Predicts Ethereum Could Reach $40,000 – But Some Fintech Analysts Don’t Agree

Bill Barhydt, the CEO and inventor of the well-known cryptocurrency wallet service Abra, outlined why he believes Ethereum is a much better investment than Bitcoin.

He has also set a price prediction of $40k for ETH, indicating his confidence in its future development.

He also noted that Ethereum is utilized for a variety of reasons, such as DeFi, stablecoins, NFTs, and even games.

Furthermore, it has the “network effect,” which means that the value of cryptocurrencies is likely to rise as the number of customers grows, making it an even greater utility.

Ethereum Positive Use Cases

Its central argument is that the use of Ethereum is what makes it so valuable.

Bitcoin’s network effects, according to Bill, are changing it into a reserve asset that is trustless, immutable, and cannot be manipulated; it is hard money.

In terms of flexibility, dependability, and value rise, Ethereum network effects are much more practical in terms of short-term exponential development.

Furthermore, while Bitcoin’s quantity is fixed, because of the burning of Ethereum, Bitcoin has become deflationary, meaning its supply is actually diminishing over time.

ETH total market cap at $309.68 billion on the daily chart | Source: TradingView.com

Related Article | Ripple Welcomes More Than 4,000 Artists Into Its New NFT Platform

Ethereum Seen To Unseat Bitcoin As Top Crypto

With that in mind, Ethereum is extremely likely to dethrone Bitcoin over the next 10 years, some analysts said.

Ethereum, which has long been Bitcoin’s primary large-scale rival, has several technological challenges that it would need to solve to gain market domination.

That’s precisely what Ethereum’s developers hope to achieve with their upcoming upgrade to the underlying blockchain, dubbed “Ethereum 2.0.”

The upcoming changes will include the implementation of a processing technique known as “sharding.”

Related Article | Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak ‘Feels’ Bitcoin Will Be Worth $100,000

Currently, all data added to the blockchain version must be verified by all participating nodes. But by incorporating sharding into the mix, Ethereum 2.0 can significantly improve the efficiency of its resource usage.

The new system will accomplish this by dividing data verification tasks among groups of nodes, with each node responsible for only verifying the data it receives.

This enables the entire blockchain to use parallel processing, potentially increasing overall capacity by a greater magnitude.

Ethereum is transitioning from proof-of-work (PoW) to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus. It has been planned as a vital part of the strategy to scale Ethereum through upgrades.

Negative Outlook For ETH

ETH is priced at roughly $2,577.25 early Monday, which is 0.39% lower than the previous day as a result of rapid volatility rates.

The crypto posted a low of $2,493 and a high of $2,602 due to timely changes in crypto-assets and revenues in the global cryptocurrency market.

After all that discussion, Barhydt concluded:

“I suppose you are talking about potentially between $30k and $40k Ethereum.”

Meanwhile, Finder.com said that a group of fintech professionals are more pessimistic in their outlook than Abra’s chief executive.

Previous predictions by the panel had put the price of ETH at $51,798 by 2030. That figure has been reduced to $26,338.

Coingecko reports that Ethereum is trading at $2,518, as of this writing.

Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com