MW Buy now, pay maybe? This new crypto card brings 'the casino to the checkout line'

By Genna Contino

The gamification of spending is "normalizing an addictive behavior in our society," one finance expert said

The new crypto card Tuyo functions like a prepaid debit card, but it reimburses users' payments at random.

Financial products have been increasingly adding gamelike features that create competition or instant gratification to keep users hooked - and the latest example is a prepaid debit card with a "buy-now-pay-maybe" feature.

While the better-known buy-now-pay-later products allow consumers to make purchases in installments, fintech company Tuyo's cryptocurrency card pays users back for certain purchases. Built around stablecoins - digital currencies tied to another asset, typically the U.S. dollar - users of the card are rolling the dice on whether their balance gets charged every time they tap the card at checkout.

The card is the latest example of the ubiquitous gamification of how Americans spend and invest their money. More than a quarter of Americans say they have active accounts on online sportsbooks where they can make intricate parlay bets on a game's outcome. Meanwhile, prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket let people bet beyond sports - to just about anything. The popular brokerage site Robinhood (HOOD) has hosted giveaways in which deposits count as entries. Step, a banking app for teens and young adults, has a feature that lets users earn up to $200 a month for playing games and answering surveys.

Consumer advocates argue Tuyo's buy-now-pay-maybe model targets people who already engage in risky financial behaviors, such as sports betting. While a user can't spend beyond the amount loaded on the card, critics say receiving a notification that they've been reimbursed immediately after a purchase can mimic the feeling of gambling and alter spending behavior. The buy-now-pay-maybe feature is also expected to draw more consumers into the world of stablecoins, experts say, after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was sharply downsized by the crypto-friendly Trump administration.

Read more: $668,603,360,342 - that's how much people have legally bet on sports since the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling

"It introduces the casino to the checkout line," said Adam Rust, the Consumer Federation of America's director of financial services. "Gamifying spending is just one more place where fintech innovation is adding risk rather than helping people towards financial health."

Tuyo did not respond to MarketWatch's request for comment. The company's CEO and co-founder, Jorge Izquierdo, has responded to critics on X by saying "this is not gambling" and "there's no debt. You can only spend what you have."

Why buy-now-pay-maybe is raising alarm bells

Izquierdo is correct that the card functions more like a debit card than a credit card. It won't let you spend more than you've pre-loaded. However, consumer advocates argue the card could encourage people to make purchases they otherwise would have skipped because there's a chance it could be free - but the precise odds of reimbursement are hidden behind a black box.

It may feel like the house always wins when you're gambling in Las Vegas, but slot machines are at least required by law to pay out a portion of all money wagered over time. With Tuyo, no payouts are guaranteed. Its terms of service say the "conditions under which BNPM may apply are determined by Tuyo in its sole and absolute discretion and may vary from user to user, transaction to transaction, and over time."

Read more: Tokenization is coming to Wall Street as J.P. Morgan takes another step toward making Treasurys move like crypto

The terms also note that users should not make a transaction relying on the buy-now-pay-maybe feature, but critics aren't convinced everyone will follow the fine print. Dan Sudit, a Salt Lake City-based wealth adviser and partner of Crewe Advisors, said he's already seen users discuss how they've changed their spending habits because of Tuyo. He pointed to a since-deleted Reddit (RDDT) user, who said their boyfriend is "buying the same product 10 times on Amazon (AMZN) hoping one of them is free, so nine of them, he returns, and one of them, he gets for free."

"You can imagine how companies are going to quickly blacklist, for lack of a better phrase, those sorts of consumers for trying to engage in that behavior," Sudit said.

Looking beyond its buy-now-pay-maybe feature, Tuyo's reliance on stablecoin presents its own risk. While a federal law signed in 2025 requires stablecoins to be backed by safe, liquid assets, there's still the risk of them "depegging," or falling below their linked value (like USDC did after the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank).

From the archives (July 2025): The stablecoin law is here - It doesn't mean your dollar-backed crypto is 100% safe

Carla Sanchez-Adams, a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, noted the significance of Tuyo's debut under the Trump administration. Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order allowing for crypto investments in 401(k) plans and pushed for crypto to be considered an asset in mortgage underwriting.

'Normalizing addictive behavior in our society'

In an economy where the dream of homeownership is out of reach for many and student-loan debt has mounted to a whopping $1.83 trillion, consumers are more vulnerable to products with built-in risk, Rust said.

It's "financial nihilism," he said. "People think that the odds are stacked against them, so they take unnecessary risks."

These unnecessary risks are becoming increasingly normalized, Sudit said, particularly among young adults. Sports-betting and prediction markets have become water-cooler conversation topics, and adding a product like Tuyo into the mix is like taking a "field of dry brush and putting gasoline all over it."

While fintech companies pitch these platforms as cutting-edge, Sudit argues the hype is a distraction from the underlying danger.

"I think that irrational exuberance that we saw in the dot com era ... is just window dressing to cloak what, to me, is normalizing an addictive behavior in our society," he said.

Read next: MrBeast's finance app for kids is backed by a bank that's faced regulatory scrutiny and a fintech partner's failure

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-Genna Contino

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May 19, 2026 11:09 ET (15:09 GMT)

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