What 3% Back in Crypto Would Be Worth: A 10-Year Study
The setup: 3% back in crypto on everyday spending
Let me set this up simply. Say you put about $2,500 a month, so $30,000 a year, on a card for normal everyday stuff: groceries, gas, dining, the bills you are allowed to charge. A crypto rewards card paying 3% hands you around $900 a year, except it pays you in Bitcoin instead of cash. Three percent is a fair middle number for these cards. The Gemini card reaches about 4% in some categories, the Coinbase One Card runs 2% to 4%, and Crypto.com goes from 1.5% up to 6% depending on the tier. Here is the honest baseline to keep in your head: if you just took that 3% in cash, over the eleven years from 2016 through 2026 you would collect about $9,900, and every dollar of it is guaranteed and spendable. The whole question is what happens if you take it in Bitcoin and hold instead.
The 10-year backtest
So here is the exercise I ran. Every year, your $900 in rewards buys Bitcoin at roughly that year’s average price, and you never sell, so I value every coin at today’s price of about $62,500 as I write this in July 2026. Bitcoin went from around $660 in 2016 to a peak above $124,000 in 2025 before it pulled back, and that run does almost all of the work.
| Year | Approx. avg BTC price | BTC bought with $900 | Worth today (~$62,500) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | ~$600 | 1.500 | $93,800 |
| 2017 | ~$4,000 | 0.225 | $14,100 |
| 2018 | ~$7,000 | 0.129 | $8,000 |
| 2019 | ~$7,400 | 0.122 | $7,600 |
| 2020 | ~$11,000 | 0.082 | $5,100 |
| 2021 | ~$47,000 | 0.019 | $1,200 |
| 2022 | ~$28,000 | 0.032 | $2,000 |
| 2023 | ~$29,000 | 0.031 | $1,900 |
| 2024 | ~$66,000 | 0.014 | $850 |
| 2025 | ~$95,000 | 0.009 | $590 |
| 2026 (YTD) | ~$70,000 | 0.013 | $800 |
| Total | ~$136,000 |
Add it all up and the same $9,900 of rewards, held in Bitcoin, comes to roughly $136,000. That is about fourteen times the cash version, so on the surface it is a blowout win for crypto. The trouble is what is buried inside that number, and that is where I want to slow down. The prices above are approximate yearly averages, but the shape of the result is the point.
Where the money really comes from
Look at which years carry the total. That single year, 2016, is about $93,800 of it, so nearly 70% of the whole thing. Stretch it to 2016 through 2018 and you are at roughly $116,000, about 85%, all from years when Bitcoin traded under $15,000. Now here is the part that pops the balloon: crypto rewards cards did not exist yet. Gemini, Coinbase, and Crypto.com did not launch their cards until around 2021, so the gains that make this look magical are mostly a fantasy. You could not have earned them on a card nobody had invented. What the backtest really shows is a bet that Bitcoin repeats a once-in-history run off a tiny base, and it cannot climb from $62,500 the way it climbed from $600. As a sanity check, if that same $900 a year had only matched the S&P 500 at about 12% a year, you would have around $18,000 today. Still good, still real, and a lot more repeatable than $136,000.
The downside is real too
Crypto rewards do not only go up, and I want to be straight about that. Take the rewards you would have earned last year, in 2025, when Bitcoin averaged around $95,000. That $900 bought about 0.009 of a coin, worth roughly $590 today, which means your crypto rewards from last year are worth about a third less than the $900 in cash you could have pocketed instead. Bitcoin dropped from those 2024 and 2025 highs above $100,000 down to about $62,500 in 2026, so anyone sitting on recent rewards is underwater on them right now. That is the piece the big number hides. Cash back locks in its value the second you earn it, while a crypto reward is a live bet that might be worth a lot more later, or noticeably less, by the time you go to use it. You will also owe tax on the gains when you sell, and holding for the upside means you are not spending the rewards, which is the whole point for most people earning them.
So is a crypto card worth it?
So where do I land? A crypto card only makes sense if you already believe in crypto, you plan to hold for years, and you can watch your rewards fall 50% or more without panicking, because Bitcoin has done exactly that more than once. If what you want is value you can count on, a flat 2% cash card or a good transferable-points card wins, since a dollar of those rewards is still a dollar next year. If you do want crypto exposure through your spending, get a no-fee crypto card like the free Gemini or the Crypto.com Midnight Blue, so you are not paying a subscription or locking up tokens just to chase a bigger number.
Now here is my own read, and I want to be clear that it is an opinion, not a promise. As I write this, Bitcoin is sitting low by its own recent standards, well off the highs it set in 2024 and 2025. History has been pretty consistent on one thing: after drops like this, Bitcoin has eventually pushed back to new highs, and I would bet it does that again over the long run. So if you are already earning crypto rewards, I think this is a fine time to be holding them rather than cashing out at a low. Just size the bet like a bet, keep it to money you are fine leaving alone, and run your real numbers against actual cards in our rewards calculator first. If you want the background on how these cards work, read how crypto credit cards work, and for the steadier version of this same idea, see what investing your cash back in the S&P 500 would be worth.
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