Update 1/15/20: Also available on the Google Play store. Hat tip to reader Burton
Metal Pay is a payments app that is similar to Venmo. Currently you can send funds using your Metal Pay balance, using a linked bank account or with cryptocurrency it is only available on iOS. The real catch with Metal Pay is that for every transaction where you send money you’ll earn up to 5% back in cryptocurrency (metal or $MTL), there are no fees to send cash or cryptocurrency. You’ll notice that we said up to 5% and that’s because they cap the amount paid out each day to about 7,200 MTL, as they start reaching that threshold the amount paid out decreases so that it never hits 0. You can also use Metal Pay as a cryptocurrency wallet and buy and sell 16 different types of cryptocurrency as well.
Like most financial tech companies, Metal Pay uses Plaid when connecting to your bank account (used by Mint and other big players).
Sign Up Bonus
No longer offered
Normally you can get a $6 bonus when you use a referral link, but Metal Pay has agreed to give our readers a sign up bonus of $10 when using this link (we do not get any commission, we are passing the full bonus onto you). This code is limited to 1,000 redemptions and expires on May 3rd. Once it hits 1,000 redemptions it will say that the promotion is no longer valid.
Our Verdict
Unfortunately there is no debit or credit card angle here, but it could be useful if you’re a fan of Cryptocurrency and use these types of payment apps. Personally I’ll be giving this one a miss
F.A.Q’s
Note the first two questions are ones we asked Metal Pay directly.
What stops two parties just sending money to each other over and over again?
This is great questions that we get asked a lot. Basically, we are monitoring for this “payment cycling” or “payment spinning” with algorithms.  We don’t want people cycling payments to each other and taking all the rewards. We reserve the right to drop someone’s ability to earn lower and lower until they eventually hit zero if we detect abnormal behavior like payment cycling.
What’s the monetization plan for metal pay?Â
We have a “Discover” section of the app that we plan to use first and foremost to educate people about our product and cryptocurrency. But, this section will also serve as a marketplace for other businesses (crypto or not) who want to reward or interact with our user base, which they can do for a fee. There is a small fee for selling or buying cryptocurrency (1%).
