Lava Card adds Starlink and Discord to its 5% partners
Lava said on 29 September that purchases at Starlink and Discord earn up to 5% back in bitcoin on the Lava Card, and it now publishes the merchant list that earlier announcements only described in prose. The page names 15 merchants and groups them into three categories.
Starlink and Discord are the first partners outside developer tooling
Thirteen of the fifteen sit under AI tools: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Cognition, Cursor, Perplexity, GitLab, Supabase, Vercel, OpenRouter, Factory AI, Maple AI and Hermes Agent. Lava describes eligible spending there as subscriptions, usage bills, seats and credits, which covers most ways a developer account gets billed.
Starlink opens a Connectivity category and Discord a Social one, each with a single merchant. Both are marked new. That changes who the program reaches: until now a cardholder with no AI subscriptions and no cloud bill had nothing in the top tier at all.
The two additions are not equivalent in size. A Starlink account runs a monthly service charge with hardware on top, so a single bill can be worth more than a year of Discord Nitro. A category with one small merchant in it expands the list without moving much spending.
Each merchant offer carries its own dates, regions and eligible purchases
Lava states this directly on the partner page: every merchant offer has separate terms covering dates, regions and which purchases qualify. The page prints "up to 5% back" against all fifteen and does not print a rate for any one of them.
So 5% is a ceiling over a set of independent offers rather than a single program rate, and a cardholder outside a given offer's region earns whatever the ordinary card rate is instead. Availability also varies by region on Lava's own account. Confirming that a specific merchant pays a specific rate in a specific country is not something the published pages support, and the earlier AI merchant announcement had the same gap before the list existed.
Timing works against checking it in advance. Rewards are issued after a purchase settles, usually within 24 hours and sometimes one to three days, so the rate is confirmed after the charge rather than before it. Refunded or reversed purchases earn nothing, and rewards already issued on them are taken back.
The first redemption needs 100,000 sats
Lava sets a minimum of 100,000 sats to redeem rewards. The example rewards on its own page run from 750 sats on a GitLab charge to 1,500 on Discord and Anthropic, with Supabase at 1,250 and Cursor at 1,000.
At that scale the floor is dozens of partner purchases away. Someone paying two AI subscriptions and a Starlink bill each month accumulates for a long stretch before anything can be taken out, and the balance is denominated in bitcoin the whole time. Between earning and redeeming, the amount moves with the price in both directions, which is a different proposition from a cashback balance that sits in dollars.
That makes the merchant list most useful to a cardholder whose partner spending is already concentrated and recurring. Someone adding Discord alone will watch a small sats balance build toward a floor it may take years to reach, and nothing on the page suggests the minimum scales with how much a cardholder spends.
Rates, merchant lists and terms described here reflect Lava's published pages at the time of writing. Other bitcoin-reward cards handle reward minimums differently, and the card list has the current terms side by side.
Sources: Lava Card merchant partners, Lava Card, X announcement.
