It’s funny that you would mention custodial argument here, given that for the longest time you were preaching how you only take custody of Euros, “But for Bitcoin? We refuse to take custody”:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-we-refused-build-custodial-bitcoin-wallet-prashanth-chandrashekar-luorcOnly to start custodying Bitcoin for debit cards after half a year. One can only wonder what has changed? Perhaps, you realised that a EUR debit card into which you manually sell Bitcoin is no different than just owning a Revolut card and selling Bitcoin into the bank?
And that’s the essence of the misrepresentation Bringin is drawing here. It’s not that we’re custodial and they are not. Our tools work with ANY self-custodial wallet, meanwhile they just have their own wallet implementation alongside other products. You can literally use Bringin’s self-custodial wallet with our tools.
What Bringin refers to as “a custodial webapp” is just a card balance that people choose to hold in Bitcoin in order to authorize card payments. As mentioned above, after seeing their customers’ feedback and the success of the wavecard, they decided to copy that particular functionality, too.
Now, when it comes to actual differences:
- We do not charge monthly/yearly subscriptions for using our cards. Bringin charges €37.69 yearly, whereas we only take one-time fee for a card creation: €2.99 in BTC for a virtual card, and €29.99 for a physical card. These cards stay active for 1000 days.
- Our wavecard has NWC auto-topups allowing you to spend Bitcoin from your self-custodial Lightning node fully automatically. You just set a single transaction threshold, which becomes your custodial balance limit, and whenever you pay with the card - the equivalent amount of BTC is pulled from your own connected wallet. Wouldn’t be surprised if they soon copy this card feature, too.
- According to their own ambiguous terms, Bringin charges between 1 - 3.5% in service fees for some conversions. We have a simple 1% fee for ALL conversions.
- Bringin charges for EUR withdrawals. We don’t.
- We interviewed some users who have tried both apps, and we get constant feedback that our UX is much better. Of course, that is subjective - you can be the judge. Their new app is definitely an improvement.
