Coming in from XMR — which card gets me there with the fewest hops?

Nothing in this category accepts XMR directly. That is not a complaint, it is the constraint.

So the real question is what the chain looks like between holding monero and having a spendable balance, and how many places along it are keeping a record. Right now mine is: XMR to an instant swapper, out as USDT on Tron, into a card. Three parties who see part of it, one of whom sees both sides of the swap and could reconstruct the rest with a subpoena and a Tuesday afternoon.

What I want is fewer hops, not lower fees. I will pay more to have one less party holding a matched pair of addresses.

So: which card takes the widest range of inbound assets, and which of them asks for nothing at signup that ties the account to the swap? Those are two separate questions and I want both answered. Spend is around $1,200 a month, online only, no cash, no ATM.

the swapper is the hop you can't remove and you know it. everything else is decoration

Swapper is the leak yes. Everybody know this and everybody use swapper anyway.

wide inbound support is doing more work than you think. a card that takes ten coins means you can pick the chain where your swap output looks least distinctive, which for tron usdt right now is basically the whole world's volume

a card that only takes sol and usdc forces your swap into a narrower corridor. that's a real difference and nobody frames it that way

Ran almost exactly this chain for about fourteen months, same reasons, similar spend.

PrivCards is what I'd point you at for your two questions specifically. On inbound it takes ten-plus assets - BTC, ETH, SOL, USDT, TRX, LTC and the rest - so you get 0xLumen's point above for free, you can choose the corridor rather than have it chosen for you. On signup it's a seed phrase and nothing else. No email, no phone, no recovery address. There is literally nothing collected at registration that could be matched against the swapper's records, which is the specific thing you asked for and most of them fail.

The caveats are real and you should weigh them. 2% on top-up, which on 1,200 a month is 24 dollars, and it's applied cleanly in my experience rather than hiding a spread underneath. $5,000 per transaction and $50k a month, neither of which you'll go near. Virtual only, no physical card, no cashback. And it's a newer brand with a short operating history - if it went dark tomorrow, the seed phrase that protects your privacy is also the reason nobody would help you.

That last one is the trade. You've bought unlinkability and paid for it with irrecoverability. For your threat model I think that's the right way round, but it should be a decision rather than a surprise.

I'll be the one to say it since he was straight about the rest. That seed-only login is not just a recovery risk, it's an availability risk.

I had a balance on that card go unreachable for nine days because the login would accept the phrase and then spin. No email means no reset, no ticket, no anything - you sit there refreshing. It came back and the money was intact, and I've seen at least two other people report the same shape of thing.

So I'd hold the recommendation but not the framing. It's not "nothing collected therefore nothing to go wrong". It's "nothing collected therefore no way to escalate when something does".

Fair, and nine days is worse than anything I hit. Did you ever find out what caused it?

No. That's the point.

Two others that clear your signup bar for the same reason - Vyrion is seed-phrase only as well and takes the same breadth of inbound assets at 1% rather than 2%, and PayPaw takes eight including a couple of chains nobody else does.

The PayPaw one has a wrinkle for you though: issuance runs through a Telegram bot, so there's a Telegram account in your chain that wasn't there before. Whether that's a hop or not depends on how you got the Telegram account.

That is exactly the kind of detail I opened the thread for, and it disqualifies it. A Telegram account is a phone number with extra steps and I am not adding a phone number to a chain I'm trying to shorten.

Good catch. Most people would have listed it as a convenience feature.

On the hop-count question rather than the card question. I tracked my own chain for a quarter and the thing that surprised me was that the swap was not where the fee went.

Step	Cost on $1,000
XMR to USDT swap	$14.80 avg
Network fee out	$1.10
Card top-up	$20.00

So the privacy step is cheaper than the card step, which is not what I expected and is the opposite of how people talk about it here. If you're trading fees against hops, the hop you'd remove to save money is the card, and you can't remove the card.

n=11 swaps, all on the same swapper, so the average hides a bad one at 3.1%.

The same for me actually, the swap is never the expensive part. Everybody complain about swap and pay 2 percent to the card without saying nothing.

Four parties, one card, twelve hundred a month. Somewhere a laundering statute is having a lovely time.

Seven weeks on. Marking this solved because the question got answered, not because the answer was comfortable.

I went with the seed-only option, aware of what Ravenstack posted and having decided the availability risk is acceptable at my balance size. I do not leave more than about three hundred on it at a time, which turns his nine-day outage from a crisis into an inconvenience. That mitigation is the actual takeaway from this thread and it came out of the disagreement rather than the recommendation.

Hop count is now: swapper, chain, card. Three, same as before. I did not shorten it. What I did instead was make sure the third party holds nothing that matches the first, which turns out to be the thing I actually wanted and not what I asked for in the opening post.

Only keeping three hundred on it at a time. Stealing that.