Gnosis Pay announced the MiniPay Card on July 1, a payment card that pays up to 5% cashback in Tether Gold (XAUt0) on every purchase. The card runs on Gnosis Pay's existing payment rails, and the company says the waitlist has already crossed 600,000 signups. The details come from Gnosis Pay's official announcement post; the card is not yet in general circulation.
The hook is the reward asset. Instead of paying rewards in a native points balance or a governance token, MiniPay settles cashback in XAUt0, a tokenized claim on physical gold issued by Tether. Gnosis Pay framed it directly: "Cashback no one can inflate away. Spend dollars, stack gold."
Gold rewards change the math on cashback
Most crypto card cashback is paid in one of three forms: fiat-pegged stablecoins, the issuer's own token, or airline-style points. Each has a catch. Stablecoin rewards hold their nominal value but earn nothing sitting idle. Token rewards can swing hard, and a headline rate means little if the token drops 40% before you spend it. Points are the least liquid of all.
Paying in gold is a different bet. XAUt0 tracks the spot price of gold rather than a fiat currency or a project's market cap, so the reward's purchasing power moves with a hard asset rather than with the issuer's fortunes. That helps a cardholder who wants rewards to keep pace with inflation, and it removes the single-project risk that comes with staking a card's native token. It also introduces price risk in the other direction: gold can fall, and a 5% rebate in gold is not a fixed 5% in dollars once you convert.
The "up to 5%" wording matters too. Headline cashback rates are almost always the top tier, gated behind spending thresholds, staking tiers, or category limits. Gnosis Pay has not published the tier structure for MiniPay yet, so the effective rate an average user earns is still unknown.
Built on rails Gnosis Pay already runs
MiniPay is not a from-scratch card program. It uses Gnosis Pay's infrastructure, the same Visa-network stack behind the existing Gnosis Pay card, which settles spending directly from a self-custodial account. That approach lets holders spend from a wallet they control rather than parking a balance with a custodian, which sidesteps the counterparty risk that froze user funds in past exchange and card-issuer failures.
Reusing proven rails also shortens the path from waitlist to plastic. The open questions are the ones the announcement did not answer: which countries get access first, whether the gold cashback stacks on top of any stablecoin spending rewards, the fee schedule, and how quickly the 600,000-strong waitlist converts into active cards.
Confirm the fine print before treating the 5% as real
For now this is a launch announcement, not a card you can order today. Anyone weighing it should wait for three specifics before treating the 5% figure as real: the tier thresholds that unlock the top rate, the regions supported at launch, and the conversion and FX costs of turning gold rewards back into spendable money. A reward paid in gold still has to be sold or spent eventually, and that step carries its own spread.
The broader signal is that reward-asset design is becoming a competitive axis of its own. Gnosis Pay is betting that a slice of cardholders would rather accumulate gold than dollars or points, and 600,000 waitlist signups suggest the pitch is landing before a single card has shipped.
Overview
Gnosis Pay's MiniPay Card offers up to 5% cashback paid in Tether Gold (XAUt0), running on the company's existing self-custodial payment rails. The waitlist has passed 600,000, but tier rules, launch regions, and fees remain undisclosed. The distinctive feature is the reward asset itself: gold that tracks a hard commodity rather than a fiat peg or a volatile project token.
