Visa Cracks Down on Crossmint Memecoin Rewards Loophole

Visa has announced that it will no longer treat purchases of Crossmint memecoins as digital-media transactions, which had allowed some cardholders to receive ordinary rewards. The change is aimed at bringing these purchases under Visa's cryptocurrency categories rather than the digital-media category used by the affected checkouts.

The reported grace period for shifting those payments into the card network's cryptocurrency categories is expected to end during the week of September 21, 2026, according to The Block. This change concerns merchant category coding, which card networks use to identify the nature of a transaction.

Visa's direction to processors would cease using MCC 5815 for these purchases and instead apply the relevant cryptocurrency rules. The reporting does not establish how individual issuers will treat every transaction after the coding change.