Nexo Card Launches in Argentina With 13% Yield Tied to Spend, $450 in Rewards

Nexo has gone live with the Nexo Card in Argentina and installed Andres Ondarra as General Manager for the country, structuring the product around a dual debit/credit interface, first-purchase incentives worth up to $450 and yield of up to 13% on qualifying balances. The launch targets one of Latin America’s highest per-capita rates of digital asset adoption, positioning card spend as the entry point for a broader lending and yield stack rather than a standalone payments product.

Card mechanics: switch between spend and borrow

The core design lets users toggle between two modes from a single interface: a debit mode that draws down held digital assets directly, and a credit mode that borrows against those same assets as collateral without triggering a sale. For traders and long-term holders, that structure matters because it decouples day-to-day spending liquidity from the tax and cost-basis implications of an outright disposal — a mechanic Nexo has used across other markets to keep crypto-collateralized credit lines active without forcing users out of their positions.

New Argentine users get 10% cashback on their first purchase, with additional cashback and milestone rewards that can reach $450 across the first three months. Nexo also advertises yield of up to 13% for users maintaining qualifying balances — a figure that positions the card as much as a deposit-gathering tool as a payments rail, encouraging users to keep assets parked on-platform rather than moving them to self-custody or external wallets between spending events.

Leadership hire signals a build-out, not a pilot

Pairing the card launch with a named General Manager appointment is the more structurally significant part of the announcement. Andres Ondarra’s mandate covers Nexo Argentina specifically, which the company frames as the “next phase” of its local expansion — language that implies further product or partnership announcements are likely rather than a one-off card rollout.

Argentina has become a recurring target market for crypto-native lenders and neobanks given its history of currency instability and comparatively high dollar-stablecoin usage among retail savers. A dedicated GM role suggests Nexo is treating the market as a standalone P&L rather than a satellite of its broader Latin American operations, which typically precedes localized product tiers, peso on/off-ramp integrations, or merchant partnerships rather than a simple card SKU addition.

What it means for competitive positioning

The card-plus-yield-plus-credit-line bundle mirrors the model Nexo has run in other jurisdictions, where cashback and interest are used to lock in balances that then collateralize the credit mode, creating a closed loop between deposits, spend and borrowing. For on-chain researchers tracking stablecoin and asset flows into centralized lending platforms, a successful Argentina rollout would be a data point on whether yield-bearing card products can pull idle self-custodied holdings back onto platform balance sheets in inflation-sensitive markets.

No specific figures on Argentine user counts, deposit targets or card issuance volumes were disclosed alongside the launch, and Nexo has not published a timeline for additional markets or products tied to Ondarra’s appointment.