Buying a joke coin on Robinhood Wallet now looks a lot like buying a movie. Reported test purchases through payments firm Crossmint posted on Visa and Mastercard as digital media, not as crypto.
One code decides who earns credit card rewards. Chase says the wrong one was used, and it has taken the case to Visa.
Why the Robinhood Memecoin Code Matters
Visa’s rulebook is such that crypto buys must use merchant category code (MCC) 6012 or 6051. They must also carry a quasi-cash flag, which strips most reward points.
Reported tests of dogwifhat (WIF) buys came back as 5815 instead. That code covers books, films and music sold online. Points and cashback posted as normal.
Chase’s own rewards agreement rules out cash-like spending and names cryptocurrency. The bank said the points should never have landed.
Crossmint answers with securities law, not card law. Its help pages limit the product to memecoins it treats as collectibles born from internet memes. Stablecoins and payment tokens stay barred.
That defense has real backing. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) staff called meme coins akin to collectibles in 2025. A March interpretive release then named WIF as an example, next to CryptoPunks. Visa’s manual grants no such exception.
Cutting friction is the entire pitch.
“Apple Pay is something that every iOS user uses in their everyday lives. The experience of buying a memecoin is no different from purchasing your morning coffee” said fomo CEO Se Yong Park.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is reviewing the setup. Her office knows payment rails. It took $45 million from Block in July over Cash App fraud controls. In April it sued Coinbase and Gemini over prediction markets.
WIF traded near $0.19 on Wednesday, down 2% in a day, worth about $197 million in total. Dogwifhat price levels barely moved on the dispute.
The $20 Million Loss That Was Not
A viral post claimed one wallet fat fingered $20 million into Artificial Inu (AI) and lost $19.8 million in seconds. The token is a Robinhood Chain meme coin paired against tokenized NVDA.
That figure came from a price tracker, not the chain. The tracker read one hop of a multi-pool route as a finished trade. Traders who rebuilt the route put the real spend near $650,000, a trace BeInCrypto could not independently confirm.
Robinhood’s tokenized stocks and meme coins push sits under both stories. Easy checkout produced one. Thin liquidity produced the other.
Visa can recode the merchant, warn it, fine it or claw back fees. Each of those endings kills the rewards.