Visa tells banks not to award cash back or loyalty points on memecoin purchases

Visa has told banks to stop treating memecoin purchases as ordinary retail spend, after transactions routed through Crossmint were coded in a way that allowed cardholders to earn standard rewards and cash back. For PSPs and acquiring teams, the point is not the memecoin itself; it is the transaction classification, because that is what decides whether an issuer sees a card swipe as crypto, digital goods, or plain vanilla commerce.

1. People were able to buy tokens with Visa and Mastercard cards through Apple Pay or Google Pay without additional identity checks, according to the source text. When the payment went through Crossmint, the purchase was processed under merchant category code 5815, which is meant for digital goods such as e-books, streaming video, and music.
2. Because those transactions were not marked as crypto purchases, standard rewards and cash back were being credited. Visa said this setup violates its network rules and expects the mismatches to be fixed this week.
3. Crossmint said it used that classification based on a February 2025 statement from staff in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s corporate finance division, which described memecoins as collectibles rather than securities. Crossmint also said the 5815 classification was agreed with partners during onboarding.
4. For GENIUS and DEGEN, purchase via Apple Pay and Google Pay has already been turned off at Crossmint. The tokens are still available on Fomo and Robinhood Wallet, and Visa expects rewards to stop once the transactions are handled as standard crypto payments.
5. Visa’s internal rules require crypto purchases to use merchant category codes 6012 or 6051. JPMorgan Chase’s Chase card loyalty program treats crypto transactions as cash advances and does not award points; Chase has also disputed one Visa card transaction on the basis that it was misclassified and therefore should not have earned rewards. The New York Attorney General’s office said it is also looking into the issue.

Visa analysts said last year that dollar-pegged stablecoins could reshape the $40 trillion global credit market, and in October the company said it would add support for four new stablecoins. For high-risk operators, the pattern is familiar: if the label on the transaction is wrong, the economics and the risk treatment both go sideways.