The SORA card programme is closed: what cardholders do now

Updated October 2026

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The SORA card programme shut its doors on Friday 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT, ending new card issuance and stopping card functions inside the app. If you are reading this because you were considering SORA as a way to spend crypto, the short answer is that there is no new card to apply for. If you already hold one, your money and your next steps are the subject of this review. I went through the official notices, the fee pages, the app store listings and the alternatives a current cardholder might consider instead, and I will walk you through what I found, why the score sits where it does, and what you should check first.

The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict: 2.2 out of 10, and the score is almost entirely about closure

The SORA card lands at 2.2 out of 10, and the breakdown shows why. The “who can get it” criterion sits at zero, because there is no one to issue cards to any more, and the “reliability and complaints” criterion sits at one, because the programme is in an orderly wind-down with a known issuer (Unlimit EU Ltd) that has already suspended some accounts and is reviewing balances. Cost scored five because the published fees were, on paper, low for the category: card issuance, virtual and physical, was free, the monthly fee was zero, and the only recurring charge was an optional €39-per-year membership that kicked in only after the first year. International card payments were €0.90 + 1.1%, and ATM withdrawals were €1.20 + 3% domestically or €1.75 + 3% abroad, which is broadly in line with the category. Top-up options scored two because the card only took fiat (either XOR-converted-to-EUR or a SEPA transfer) and did not support direct crypto loading. Everyday use scored three because both a physical and a digital card existed, ATM access worked, and Apple Pay and Google Pay were promised for a “Phase 2” that never came.

The most relevant point for a reader arriving at this page is the situation for existing cardholders withdrawing their balance after closure. If that is you, the next two sections are written for you; if it is not, the alternatives section at the end is where to look.

Score breakdown

What happened to the programme

I want to lay out the timeline as I understand it, because it is the spine of the review and almost every later question depends on it. According to the official notice dated 10 January 2026, the SORA card programme, the iOS and Android apps and the in-app card functions all stop after Friday 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT. The notice also said that any balances held in the linked GateHub wallets had to be moved out before that cutoff, and that SORA Wallet itself continues to operate as a separate product. There is no public statement on the pages I read giving a reason for the closure, so this detail remains officially not stated.

The card was previously open to residents of the European Economic Area (EEA) who passed KYC, with eligibility decided by residence rather than nationality. The published rule excluded residents of Russia, Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with a longer list at the card’s /blacklist page. For anyone wondering about crypto cards in that region, the SORA setup was not unusual in its geographic limits; what was unusual, at the end, was that the issuer rather than the user got to decide when the relationship ended.

The card itself was a physical and digital debit card on an unspecified network. The app store listings show an iOS app called “SORA” (the listing at apps.apple.com/us/app/sora-dae/id1457566711) and an Android package (play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.soramitsu.sora); I did not pull star ratings because the apps are no longer the same product they were. SORA Biome, a Bulgarian company, ran the site and the apps, while the card was actually issued by Unlimit EU Ltd, an electronic money institution licensed by the Central Bank of Cyprus under licence number 115.1.3.7. That distinction between the brand you see and the regulated entity behind it is the single most important thing to keep in mind when reading this review, because Unlimit is the party that holds the funds, and Unlimit is the party you will deal with if there is a problem.

On the cost side, the standard fees dated 17 September 2024 were: first card issuance €0 (both virtual and physical), monthly fee €0, and an optional client membership of €39 per year that started charging “after 1 year” — in other words, you had to opt in and you got the first year free. International card payments cost €0.90 + 1.1%, while domestic payments were free for the first ten online and ten in-person transactions per month. The crypto conversion path went through XOR and a partner, with a spread that was not disclosed on the pages I read. Top-up itself was free. SEPA outgoing and SEPA Instant outgoing transfers were €0.50 each. Apple Pay and Google Pay were promised for “Phase 2” of the programme and never arrived. There is one product, no tiers beyond the optional membership, and the card currency was not named on the public pages, although the rule “withdrawals in currency other than card currency are charged as international” implies a single base currency in the background.

KYC required a selfie, an identity document and proof of address, with no published processing time and no mention of tiered verification levels. Support channels listed on the site included soracard.com/support, soracard.com/contact, [email protected], and Discord, Telegram, X and Reddit; the site itself was published in English and Spanish, with no Russian option, and the support hours were not stated.

If you already have the card

If you are one of the people who picked up a SORA card before the wind-down, the practical questions are: where is your money, can you still get to it, and who do you contact. I will walk through what the official channels say and what they do not.

The most important fact is that after 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT the app gives no access to balances. The only route the public notice names is Unlimit support, at [email protected]. SORA itself cannot submit release requests on a user’s behalf, which means the brand layer is, for practical purposes, out of the picture; the regulated issuer is the only party that can move things along. The notice also acknowledges that some accounts have already been suspended by Unlimit, and that those accounts may show a balance in the interface while still being inaccessible until Unlimit completes a review. If your account is in that state, the path forward is the same: an email to [email protected], with patience built in.

A second group of users had balances in GateHub wallets linked to the card. Those balances had to be moved before the 30 January 2026 cutoff; after that point, SORA has no way to retrieve them on your behalf. The SORA Wallet product itself continues to operate, but the card side of it does not. If you still hold funds in SORA Wallet and were treating it as a card balance, the move is to either convert inside the wallet or send the funds to an exchange or self-custody wallet you control, and to do it before any further date-specific restrictions kick in.

On the fee side, while the card was operating, ATM withdrawals inside the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway cost €1.20 + 3%, and international ATM withdrawals cost €1.75 + 3%. One free balance inquiry per month was allowed, and any subsequent inquiries incurred whatever the page behind it said — the public fee page did not list that number. The fee page also pointed to a section on limits at /fees#4 that was not present when I checked, so the daily and monthly spend caps are not stated on the pages I read; that is a gap in the public information, not a gap in the programme. There is no published closure fee or replacement cost, and dispute and chargeback procedures were not stated on the pages I read either, which is one of the weaker points of the documentation.

A quick checklist for someone in this position:

• Email [email protected] if your balance is locked or your account is suspended, and keep a record of the thread.
• Move any remaining funds out of GateHub-linked wallets if you have not already; after 30 January 2026 this is no longer possible through the SORA app.
• Treat any balance that still shows in the app as informational only, not as available funds.
• If your SORA Wallet is a separate self-custody wallet, that product is unaffected and you can manage it as you would any other non-custodial wallet.

What can go wrong

The risks here are not the abstract risks of the crypto card category, although I will come to those; they are the specific risks a SORA cardholder faces right now.

The first is account suspension by Unlimit. The official incident is a notice of termination of SORA Card services on 10 January 2026, with Unlimit having already suspended some accounts before that announcement. The user is told to contact [email protected] for balance release, and SORA itself cannot make that request on the user’s behalf. No cause is given for the suspensions, and there is no public appeals process; the issuer’s review is the only mechanism.

The second is the gap between what the app shows and what the user can actually access. The notice specifically warns that suspended accounts may show a balance but stay inaccessible until Unlimit completes its review. For a user relying on those funds, that means liquidity is not guaranteed, even when the number on the screen is non-zero.

The third is the segregation of customer funds. Unlimit EU Ltd is an electronic money institution (EMI), not a bank. EMIs in the EU are required to safeguard customer funds by holding them in segregated accounts or insuring them, and those funds are not bank deposits and are not covered by the Cyprus Deposit Insurance scheme. If Unlimit were to fail, the route to recovery would be the EMI safeguarding regime, not deposit guarantee. This is true of EMIs in general, not just Unlimit, but it matters more when the issuer is in a wind-down and not issuing new business.

The fourth is the loss of the GateHub-linked balances after the cutoff. Cryptocurrency transfers are typically irreversible, and once a window has closed, support generally cannot pull funds back. It is not stated whether Unlimit or SORA has any recovery path for late users, and the language in the official notice (“had to be emptied before cutoff”) implies the answer is no.

A fifth, more general risk worth naming is key custody on the wallet side. SORA Wallet is self-custodial, which means the user keeps the keys, and that is a plus for security against a custodian failure, but it is also a minus for users who lose their seed phrase, fall for phishing, or have clipboard-hijacking malware swap a copied address. None of these are SORA-specific risks, but they are the everyday risks of any self-custody workflow that touches a card.

I did not find a Trustpilot page with reviews for SORA card on 2026-10-20, and I did not find Reddit threads describing user experiences; that is either because they do not exist in significant numbers or because the programme was small enough that the complaints never aggregated into a public record. Either way, the absence of a body of user reports is not the same as a clean record.

What to take instead

A closed programme is not the same as a dead category, and there are cards that take a similar position today. I looked at three: TokenPocket, MetaMask Card and KAST. The scores I list are based on published information, not on my own testing.

TokenPocket (5.8 / 10) offers a Visa or Mastercard debit card depending on where you live, with Visa available in a list of European countries including Germany, France, Spain and Switzerland, and Mastercard available in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and the UK, with the Americas listed as “planned for Q2 2025”. The card runs on Arbitrum; balances are held in EUR24 and USD24; the cards are virtual, with no physical card mentioned. There is a 1% fee on crypto deposits into the TP Card, which the documentation says will later be refunded through rewards or reduced transaction fees. Apart from that, the project says it does not charge additional fees, although the FAQ does not list FX charges or inter-institution settlement costs.

MetaMask Card (7.1 / 10) is a Mastercard issued by Monovate, with Crypto Life as card provider, and is open for sign-ups in 45 listed countries and territories, with other regions on a waitlist. Proof of residency is required, and US and UK sign-ups were temporarily closed at the time the FAQ was read. The virtual card is free, with no annual or maintenance fee, and there is a Metal card for $199 per year. There is a “minimal fee for each transaction”, with the exact amount not stated on the pages read, no foreign transaction fee (Mastercard’s rate applies), and the card spends directly from the connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, with named tokens including mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT. Cashback is paid in mUSD into the Money Account: 1% on Virtual and a headline 3% on Metal, with the 3% capped at the first $10,000 spent and dropping to 1% beyond that. There is also a $FLY bonus of 5X (Virtual) or 7X (Metal) via the Blackbird dining app. One card per user, and Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit.

KAST (6.1 / 10) is a Visa programme with up to ten cards per user, in three tiers: Standard (Visa Platinum, $0 annual), Premium (Visa Infinite metal, $1,000 per year) and Private (Visa Infinite gold plated, $10,000 per year). Country availability is shown at KYC rather than published, and the rules treat citizenship and ID separately from residence: someone living in a supported country but holding a restricted-region ID may still fail KYC, and a dual citizen with a supported-country ID may pass. Stablecoin top-up is at 0%, card spend in USD is at 0%, and the non-USD FX fee ranges from 0.5% to 1.75% depending on residence country, transaction country and card programme. Supported stablecoins include USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD, on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and TRON. Cashback is paid in USD at the time of authorisation: Standard 1.5% on the first $2,000 per month, Premium 2% on the first $10,000, Private 3% on the first $40,000, with KAST Points adding another 1% (Premium) or 2% (Private) of eligible spend.

If I had to rank them for someone who liked what SORA was trying to be — a card that turns a self-custody wallet into spendable fiat — MetaMask Card is the closest fit, because it spends directly from a connected wallet rather than asking the user to top up a balance first. KAST is the right answer for someone who wants tiered membership and a physical metal card. TokenPocket is the right answer for someone already living inside the TokenPocket wallet, although the geographic split between Visa and Mastercard coverage is awkward. None of them is a direct replacement for SORA, because none of them was on the same EEA-resident, fiat-funded model with a SEPA option; they are substitutes, not successors.

Who I would recommend it to

I will keep this short, because the answer is small. I would not recommend the SORA card to anyone who is not already a cardholder, because there is no new card to issue. For a current cardholder, the recommendation is straightforward: move any balance you can still move, email [email protected] about anything you cannot, and treat any number the app shows after 30 January 2026 as informational until Unlimit confirms otherwise. The SORA Wallet product, if you use it, is a separate product and continues to operate; manage its keys as you would any other self-custody wallet.

For someone reading this who never had a SORA card and was considering a crypto card in the EEA, the alternatives section is the practical part of the page, and the background below is the part that helps you ask better questions of any crypto card, not just SORA.

A short background on crypto cards

A payment card number is not just a number: the first six or eight digits, called the BIN or IIN, identify the issuing institution and its country, and the rest is an account identifier and a check digit. Merchants can look up the BIN, and they sometimes apply extra scrutiny if the issuer country differs from the customer’s billing address, which is one reason a card issued in one country can look “foreign” to a shop in another. A prepaid card draws on a stored balance; a standard debit card asks the cardholder’s bank to pull funds from a linked account at the time of purchase. Many crypto cards behave like prepaid cards: you convert or top up a fiat (or stablecoin-denominated) balance, and the card spends only that balance, so it cannot overdraw. In a “pre-loaded balance” model the user first tops up fiat or stablecoins and the card spends only that, so overdrawing is structurally impossible.

Card payments involve several parties: the card network (Visa or Mastercard) routes messages and sets rules, the issuer (a bank or e-money institution licensed to issue under the network’s licence) holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often only a programme manager or front-end that markets the card. Visa and Mastercard themselves do not issue crypto cards to consumers; they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. In November 2022 Visa said it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX”, and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. In 2018, Visa suspended WaveCrest in Europe, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Programme closures typically give a notice period, stop spending and loading, then ask users to withdraw balances; the SORA wind-down follows that pattern.

An electronic money institution in the EU can issue e-money, payment cards and e-wallets but cannot lend, and may offer services across the EU/EEA from a licence granted in one member state. EMIs must safeguard customer funds by segregating them or insuring them, and those funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by deposit guarantee schemes. The card itself is a payment service, regulated under e-money and payment-services law, while MiCA covers the crypto side (custody, exchange, transfer); a crypto card often depends on two licences. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution (Article 48), and the MiCA transitional period lets providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026 or until they receive or are refused a MiCA authorisation, whichever comes first.

On the wallet side, control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key or seed phrase; with a custodial wallet the provider holds the credentials, and the user must trust the provider completely. A seed phrase, typically 12 to 24 words, is an unencrypted form of the private key, and anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet. Cryptocurrency transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen private key has no built-in recovery. Custodial platforms have a record of failures (Mt. Gox, Coincheck, Ronin Network) that a self-custody-linked card avoids by keeping funds in the user’s own wallet until the moment of payment, at the cost of putting the user on the hook for key loss, phishing and clipboard-hijacking malware.

KYC rules require regulated businesses to verify customers and assess risk as part of anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing law. In the EU, customer due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship and a politically exposed person (PEP) check. If due diligence cannot be completed, EU rules require the institution to refrain from the transaction or relationship and, where necessary, end existing relationships — which is why accounts get closed or frozen pending documents. Nationality is screened separately from residence because sanctions and issuer risk policy are often applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as country of address.

On the network and stablecoin side, ERC-20 is the Ethereum token standard, proposed in November 2015; fees (gas) are paid only in ETH, so a wallet with USDT but no ETH cannot send. Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC are US-dollar-pegged stablecoins, and the BIS put about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in these two in July 2025. Circle lists USDC as natively supported on 38 networks as of 16 September 2026, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon PoS, Avalanche, Arbitrum and Stellar, and stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is no longer a native option. Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity, so stablecoins are not censorship-proof despite the marketing. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, and a deposit sent on a network the card provider does not support, or to an address of another network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee.

On the payment side, a merchant category code (MCC) is a four-digit number classifying a business by goods or services, specified in ISO 18245. MCC 7995 covers gambling; many issuers block it on specific cards by policy rather than by law, and the blocked list varies by issuer. 3-D Secure adds an identity check to online card payments; the issuer either approves frictionlessly or challenges the cardholder, for example with a one-time code or biometric. Visa’s brand is Visa Secure, Mastercard’s is Identity Check, and EMV 3-D Secure 2, published in 2016, supports one-time passcodes and app-based authentication aligned with EU strong customer authentication. Address Verification Service (AVS) is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines. Apple Pay replaces the card number with a Device Account Number stored in the Secure Element and never on Apple servers, and each payment uses a one-time dynamic security code; the card issuer can still restrict a tokenised number, for example by blocking it on magnetic-stripe, phone or website use. Declined authorisations may leave a hold on funds for several days, typically up to seven.

On the tax side, the IRS treats digital assets as property, so exchanging them for goods, services, dollars or other digital assets generally produces a taxable gain or loss; gain is measured in local fiat using fair market value on the date of the transaction, so each card payment funded from crypto may be a separate disposal. None of that is tax or legal advice, and it is a reason to keep records, not a reason to do anything specific.

Frequently asked questions

What is the SORA card?

The SORA card was a physical and digital debit card that let users spend a euro balance funded either by converting the XOR token to EUR through a partner or by a SEPA bank transfer. It was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd, an electronic money institution licensed in Cyprus, and was marketed by SORA Biome, a Bulgarian company. The card and its in-app functions stopped on 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT, and no new cards are being issued.

How did the SORA card work?

You held a euro balance inside the SORA app, and the card spent that balance. The balance was loaded either by converting XOR to EUR through the card’s conversion partner or by sending a SEPA transfer from a bank account. There was no direct crypto load: you could not, for example, send USDC to a card address. International card payments cost €0.90 + 1.1%, and there was an optional €39-per-year membership that started charging after the first year.

Is SORA a bank?

No. SORA Biome, the company behind the app and the website, is not a bank. The card itself was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd, an electronic money institution licensed by the Central Bank of Cyprus under licence 115.1.3.7. EMIs can issue e-money and payment cards but cannot lend, and customer funds are safeguarded rather than covered by deposit insurance.

Who owns SORA?

The SORA card programme was run by SORA Biome, a Bulgarian company. The card itself was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd, a Cyprus-licensed electronic money institution. The SORA Wallet product is a separate self-custody wallet and continues to operate; the card side of the ecosystem is the part that has closed.

Is the SORA card available in my country?

No new SORA cards are being issued anywhere. Before the closure, the card was open to residents of the EEA who passed KYC, with eligibility decided by residence rather than nationality, and residents of Russia, Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were excluded.

How do I get a SORA card?

You cannot, as of 30 January 2026. The programme is closed. If you are looking for a similar product, the alternatives section above covers MetaMask Card, KAST and TokenPocket, which is a sensible starting point for someone who liked the SORA model.

Does the SORA card require KYC?

Yes. KYC required a selfie, a government-issued identity document and proof of address. There was no published processing time and no tiered verification structure described on the public pages. EU rules require institutions to verify customer identity, screen for sanctions and assess whether the customer is a politically exposed person, which is why this step exists at all.

How do I get my money back from a closed SORA card?

Email [email protected] with your details, and keep a record of the thread. SORA itself cannot submit a release request on your behalf; the issuer is the only party that can move things along. If your account is one of the suspended accounts, the support email is still the right address, and the review can take time. Any balance that still shows in the app after 30 January 2026 should be treated as informational only, not as available funds.

Can I still use SORA Wallet?

Yes. SORA Wallet is a separate self-custody product and continues to operate. It is unaffected by the card closure, although the GateHub-linked balances that fed the card had to be moved out before the 30 January 2026 cutoff. If you use SORA Wallet, hold your seed phrase the way you would hold any other self-custody credential: offline, in more than one place, and never typed into a website or a chat.

Is the SORA card safe?

Before the closure, the card side of the product relied on Unlimit EU Ltd as the regulated issuer and on SORA Biome as the brand. The crypto side was self-custodial, which means you kept your own keys and bore the responsibility for seed-phrase security. Today, the safety question is about your balance, not the card technology: an unsuspended account with funds still in it is the most straightforward case, a suspended account requires an email to [email protected], and a GateHub balance that was not moved before the cutoff is, in practical terms, the hardest to recover.

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