[DEAD] BlockCard (Ternio/Unbanked) Review – The Best and Worst Crypto Card in Existence!

5/25/2023 Update: The plug has been pulled on Unbanked. You could see this coming a mile away. Ever since the US card stopped working, usage of the card took a deep nosedive. Last update I said $3k as the 24-hour volume but then it went lower, even to $67 24-hour volume (image). This was one of the worst-managed cards but as the title says it was one of the best crypto cards in existence (hell, you could even say it was one of the best cards ever). Maybe I will write about that someday.

Click here for an image of the official email sent by Unbanked. Click here to see a web version of their full announcement.

5/5/2023 Update: As of May 1st, the BlockCard of US customers is no longer working. Unbanked cites Metropolitian’s (issuer of BlockCard) exit from the crypto market. This is not surprising since the StormX card, issued by Metropolitan with Unbanked as a white-label partner, was put on hold due to the same reason. Furthermore, the Litecoin card, also issued by Metropolitan with Unbanked as a white-label partner, has stopped working for US customers (twitter). Ironically, Unbanked has been….unbanked. The volume of BlockCard has plunged to less than $3k per day. In other words, in the entire world, the amount of purchases made with BlockCard in 24 hours is less than $3,000

Also, see the “BlockCard Removes 0.008 Floor Price. Game Over” post from 2022.

2/25/2022 Update: On 02/22/2022 TERN was swapped with UNBNK 1:1. Depositing TERN to Unbanked Dashboard will automatically convert TERN to UNBNK. With the change of token name, there is a new UNBNK: USDD order book. I have updated the order book links in this post so they point to a new order book Old order book can be found here.

2/16/2022 Update: This article continues to get traction so I think it is worth updating on the current state of the card. At this point, often you will notice that the order book gets drained of 0.008 price within a few minutes, sometimes less than 30 seconds (and maybe this article is to be blamed for that). Regardless, the point is unless you don’t mind starting at order book all day and/or can run scripts to monitor price (or better yet use the card), this card is likely not for you. If you choose to get it, I suggest testing the waters with a small amount as there are various issues with the card/price, e.g. order book sometimes freezes which makes you and everyone else think the price is higher than it currently is.

There is so much to talk about and so much to unpack but let me start by making a very hyperbolic statement – Blockcard is the best and worst crypto card out there. While I am at it, let me make yet another very bold statement – almost every review of this card is factually incorrect at best and intentionally misleading at worst. So, here is the most authentic review of Blockcard you could find anywhere on the whole world wide web.

And if you are new to the blog (or crypto cards in general) check out my reviews of crypto cards, like CDC, CoinZoom, Fold, and Coinbase debit card. I was covering them more or less in increasing order of plays. Be warned that I mostly approach these reviews from a cashback point of view (as opposed to “we gonna moon boys” nonsense).

The Card

Unbanked, formerly known as Ternio, offers 6 tiers of cards ranging from 1% to 6% in cashback for staking their native token, TERN. All 6 of the cards are identical in design.

The highest cashback you get is 6% and that requires staking of 145k TERN. Although 145k may sound like a lot but because TERN is currently worth a mere $0.008, you can meet the requirement for a 6% card by spending less than $1200.

You do not get interest for staking TERN nor is there other benefit for holding higher tier cards.

The staking period of mere 30 days is more than no staking period of CoinZoom cards but still significantly shorter than 6 months of CDC cards.

One of the great things about this product is that you instantly see how much reward you will earn on a transaction. The reward status initially shows as “pending settlement” then it changes to “settled”. Once the reward has settled, you can transfer it to your card in 30 days or transfer it out into an exchange.

The Fees!

I have tabulated the important fees below:

Item	Fee
Card Activation Fee	$10
Card Replacement (Lost or Stolen)	$10
PIN Based Purchase Fee	$1
Foreign PIN Based Purchase Fee	$2
Domestic ATM fee	$3
Foreign ATM Fee	$3.5
International ATM Decline Fee	$0.5
Balance Inquiry Fee	$0.5

If you aren’t able to put $750 worth of “non-cash transactions” in a month, you will be charged $5 fee. The fee is deducted from your TERN balance. In other words, the fee is charged at whatever is the current spending rate. For example, if TERN is at 0.007, you will be charged 5/0.007 = 714.2 TERN.

Buying TERN and Exchanges that List TERN

You can buy TERN directly from Unbanked/Ternio. You can do this by sending one of the supported cryptos listed below. I would recommend sending XLM as the fee is nominal and the transfer speed is near instant.

Alternatively, you can first deposit money into their bank account and then buy TERN directly from Unbanked. This bank account can be opened in over 200 countries and territories and is FDIC insured regardless of where it was opened from. The bank account does not have basic features like check deposit, direct deposit, bill pay, debit card, or any interest. If you choose to go this route, note that you will only be able to buy TERN once the fund has fully settled into your account which can take about 5 days or more.

You can find TERN on a few minor exchanges so the opinion of buying it elsewhere also exists. For example, can find it on ProBits, BitMart, and Lobstr but the volume is often too low and the spread can be a little too high.

In the above screenshots, you can see TERN has a mere 1.78k 24-hour volume on BitMart while a filthy low 102.77 24-hour volume on ProBit. You can also see that the spread on buy vs sell is 5.6% on BitMart while it is 18.6% on ProBit.

LOBSTR: Use referral code VXXLZKXEM – you and I get 5 XLM after you make your fist XLM purchase https://lobstr.co/authorization/signup/

ProBit: Use Referral Link https://www.probit.com/r/17147061

BitMart: add referral code ce4mnT when you register https://www.bitmart.com/register/en

Occasionally the numbers are much better so can be worth keeping an eye out on these exchanges.

Selling TERN

You cannot exchange TERN into USD within the BlockCard website/platform. At the moment there are three ways of selling TERN:

1. ATM
2. using the card
3. using an exchange

As mentioned earlier there is a $3 ATM fee and you can only withdraw up to $500 per day through ATM. This means at the very minimum you are paying a 0.6% fee to exchange TERN for paper cash. However, you will likely be hit with another fee by an ATM operator. Suppose you pay an additional $3 to the ATM operator then you are paying a 1.2% in fee for cashing out $500 worth of TERN.

An alternative way of cashing out TERN is to simply use the card. For example, you can use the card to buy whatever it is you need or to buy cash equivalent items which you later convert into cash. The latter of which may not acquire cashback and may result in a shutdown. There is a daily $5,000 daily spending limit.

The third alternative is to withdraw TERN to exchange. This process takes 24 hours and once again the spread might be too high and the order book might be too thin for it to be worthwhile.

The Spend Orderbook

The price you spend TERN at when swiping the BlockCard is dictated by this order book. This orderbook is very important so let me break it down bit by bit.

On the top of the above-linked order book page, you will see the 24-hour volume. This is supposedly the amount of money all users have collectively spent using the BlockCard in the last 24 hours. In the screenshot below, you can see that the 24-hour volume is a mere 35.9k dollars.

Then you can find the price chart. In the screenshot below, I am displaying a zoomed-out chart that shows that the price of TERN was frequently around 0.008.

Finally, there is a tabulated chart that shows the order book. The “buy offer” on the left shows exactly how much money needs to be spent before the price falls to the next level. At the time when these screenshots were captured the price of TERN was 0.0086, there was $445 left to be spent before the price could fall from 0.0086 to 0.0084. Then after when $2445 is spent, the price falls from 0.0084 to 0.0082. This order book almost always accurately predicts when a price can fall. It is worth mentioning that the depth of the order book can vary from time to time.

Now, we don’t know what causes the price to go up or when the price will go up. So, this order book should be used as a guide for how much you can spend in an instant before the price slips further. Again, remember this is the amount allocated to the entire community. For example, at the time when these screenshots were captured, a total of $445 needs to be spent by the whole community for the price to potentially dip to 0.0084.

The numbers you see under “sell offer” (red column on right) is practically irreverent.

Is the Price Real?

The price you spend TERN when swiping the BlockCard is dictated by this order book but if you look closely at the order book, you will start to have questions. The natural question arises – how real is this price? Why has TERN from July 23rd till October 12 hit oscillated between 0.007 to 0.008 over and over again? Why wasn’t 0.0081 or 0.009 possible? Why was TERN’s price fixed at 0.014 from April 15 – May 27 of 2021, especially when BTC dropped in price by half during that period?

The Crazy Thing at 0.008

Ternio (now Unbanked) vows to never sell TERN for less than 0.008. However, your selling/swiping price of TERN can fall below 0.008. This leads to some weird dynamics that result in Blockcard being an awful card when TERN is below 0.008.

For example, suppose TERN spending price is 0.007 and you buy TERN from Unbanked (which you will do at 0.008), you will instantly lose 14.28% should you spend at that very moment. Similarly, If the spending price of TERN is at 0.006 and you instantly buy TERN and swipe the card, you will lose 33%.

Overall when TERN falls below 0.008, the card is logically unusable and thus the worst crypto card in existence.

Successful Future?

TERN might be a shitcoin but Ternio as a company is interesting. They recently renamed it to Unbanked, which isn’t a terrible domain name to have.

BlockCard was the first crypto-based debit card but at this point, I don’t know if I should continue to be impressed that a startup was the first to do so or amazed at the fact that they failed to capitalize on it.

They are the white-label partner of the Litecoin card [1] [2] which is an impressive achievement but the Litecoin card is terrible in the sense that it has no rewards whatsoever yet it still maintains the garbage fees of Blockcard.

They are also a white-label partner of the upcoming StormX’s card. I will try to review this interesting card upon its release but I have briefly talked about it here.

There were rumors about them potentially being an issuer for Celsius card but I don’t think there is much substance to this rumor….big if true though.

Ternio has been an Amazon Advanced APN Technology Partner since February 2019 but it seems like a fairly useless accolade.

In October 2020, Ternio joined the Visa Fast Track program and became Visa’s first crypto enablement partner [1] [2]. Then, in September of 2021, it received “visa ready” certification within the Visa Fast Track program. You can read more about this matter in Unbanked CEO’s interview here.

They also had a Reg A+ fundraising through Republic which supposedly provides more legitimacy to them. Reg A+ is essentially an SEC regulation that allows private companies to raise public money. Their upcoming fundraising is for $25 mil with a valuation of $125 mil. Anyway, their updates on Republic might be worth reading, for example, in this update, it is disclosed that the company went from having 2 mil revenue in 2019 to 9.3 mil revenue in 2020 to projecting 20 mil revenue for 2021.

Missed Promises and What Is Next

Not all is sunshine in the land of crypto. A lot of promises are made and never met. TERN initially sold at 0.1 during its 2018 ICO days (coinmarketcap) and obviously, the price has fallen a lot. The price would have to increase by 10-fold to get back to the same 2018 price.

Initially, TERNIO was supposed to be an advertising company but obviously, they have completely revamped themselves into a card company.

The company has promised metal cards since 2018 yet it is not here yet. International launch (EU and South America) has been touted for over a year yet it is still not here. Supposedly, the EU launch should be happening within the next few months.

The ReTERN program (clever name) where users earn interest on staking their TERN was boasted for ages until it was quietly scrapped a few months ago.

Now the company is looking to launch a mobile app, potentially rename the coin, potentially swap the coin to the Ethereum network, launch a DeFi product with staking, launch a debit card based on the stablecoin, launch yet another debit card with undisclosed benefits, launch credit cards that they have self-proclaimed to be “the best crypto credit card“, etc but time will only tell how much of it actually TERNs into reality.

Why All Reviews Are Wrong?

Literally none of the other reviews of this card is worth your time. First, so many of the reviews incorrectly claim BlockCard doesn’t have any reward system.

Then, a few major reviews will intentionally refer readers/viewers to Global Digital Payments (GD Payments). GD Payment in essence is BlockCard tied with some referral shenanigans that is only meant to benefit a so-called “influencer”. If anyone reviews BlockCard and refers you to GD Payments they aren’t worth your time. GD Pyament’s website states the following:

By registering for an account and subscribing to the GDPayments cryptocurrency referral program with a $10 monthly subscription fee, you can earn unlimited rewards by referring other people to join. The more people that you refer that sign up and deposit funds, the more you earn — and when those individuals refer additional users, you earn even more rewards from their referrals as well! 

So you have to keep referring people to make money. Their website continues:

When you purchase TERN directly from within GDPayments on your account dashboard, it is automatically staked and paid out at 5% per month over twenty months; meaning that for every month after your purchase, 5% of the purchase amount is made available to you.  When you refer other users that also purchase cryptocurrency and commit to the staking, it continues to help your rewards grow, as those users will also remain invested in the program for the duration of their 20-month staking periods for each crypto purchase. 

Who thought this was worth anyone’s time? Why would anyone signup for this crap? And more importantly, why is Ternio involved in this? GDP’s website literally links to a Chinese Seafood Restaurant in NY. Too many questions. All bad answers.

Last but not least, a vast vast majority of reviews of Blockcard will show the price on coinmarketcap (or coingeko), except as I have mentioned before isn’t necessarily the price that you spend TERN at. The actual price you spend at is dictated by the order book that I linked above. If a review doesn’t mention this, then they aren’t worth your time.

Closing Thoughts

Lots of plays here. Some subtly hinted, a few can be figured out instantly, while the rest will require you to do your own work.

When TERN is below 0.008, Blockcard is literally the worst crypto card in existence. However, If you know what you are doing then there are still a few minor plays to be made. Blockcard becomes good when the price of TERN is consistently above 0.008. If you know what you are doing and the price is consistently above 0.008, this card can be practically unbeatable by anything on the market.

I think the golden days of using this card was when TERN acquired a stable price of 0.014 earlier in the year, however, that only lasted for a month or so. For the price to be consistently above the hell hole of 0.008, I suppose enough people need to buy the coin first….something something people who come later are paying for those who came in early….classic crypto stuff.

Having said all of that, I don’t think there is a significant downside in grabbing TERN when it is at 0.008. The price can potentially go up by a lot in which case you would make money in your initial gamble. On the contrary, the price could continue to hover around 0.008 in which case your loss likely will be minimal or you might be able to get out by breaking even.