It makes very little sense to spend your bitcoin or etherum via the coinbase card. You are effectively paying 1.49% net of rewards to spend your coin this way.
The 2.49% is what Coinbase charges for automated trades. As you said, you can save money by pre-trading whatever coin through Coinbase pro to USDC and spending that.
Does it mean coinbase card can't use in ATM?
They have, or at least had, a UK version.
I wonder how long the 4% rate on XLM will last for. It seems like a really good deal, given that 4% flat cashback is pretty much unheard of in the credit card market. Competitors like the Crypto.com card require you to stake $5k of their token to get 3% back. I'd definitely grab one if they come to Canada and have some kind of CAD stablecoin/balance.
From what was whispered at after a discussion panel, some of it is being backed by the Stellar Foundation. Coinbase is looking to do "promos" the same way Discover (and other) credit cards do with their extra cash back categories. So they do their regular cashback and make money on the regular CC interchange fees and for this promo Stellar kicks in the rest. Supposedly eventually it will change. But nobody would confirm it.
[Side note to the above, for all the smaller businesses complaining about the higher fees that they may have to pay during higher cashback promos, for the most part people do spend more money during them. Humans are simple creatures, give us 2% cash back and we spend "X" and leave the store / restaurant, give us 5% cash back and we buy the entire place.]
They also don't participate with Google pay and it's probably cheaper and more stable to just transfer the money beforehand to a regular bank account.
Small point but that is not up to Coinbase. Metabank makes that choice.
I have been using mine for a few weeks now, cashback (well cryptoback) is working. Did a few autotrades for purchases and some USDC.
Would like to have better rates then what Coinbase gives for selling some coins, but such is life.
But as I said before. Probably not a long term use card. I hoard most of my crypto....
-Dave