The cashback is real, but it is paid for with your coins and your time

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Based card is a Visa debit card that spends a crypto balance. You load it with stablecoins or a handful of other assets, it converts what you pay into dollars, and it behaves like an ordinary payment card for the things that sell with a card reader. On the face of it that is a clean idea, and the price list is unusually friendly: no signup fee, no annual fee, no top-up fee on USDT or USDC, and a foreign-exchange markup that falls to zero on the top tier. What you pay for with that friendliness is lockup. The two tiers with any real reward require you to lock $BASED — 10,000 units on HYPE, 100,000 on Based Gold — for 21 days, with a three-day cooldown before you can unstake, and every benefit stops the moment you start unstaking. If you were not already holding and willing to freeze that token, the card’s headline numbers are not for you.

My score for the card is 6.9 out of 10. That is not a dismissal. It is a card that does one thing clearly and charges for the reward rather than the payment. The people it suits are people who already hold BASED, or who are comfortable buying it and tying it up, and who want the reward rate rather than the lowest possible cost of spending. The people it does not suit are people who simply want a card that spends crypto cheaply, because for them the two lower tiers either charge a markup on every non-dollar payment or lock up a large position in a single token.

The details below are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict

Two things pull in opposite directions here. The cost side is genuinely good for a crypto card: a 0% FX markup tier exists, and deposits in the two largest stablecoins are free. The reliability side is thin. The card’s public pages do not name the issuing institution or the licences behind it, the Trustpilot profile is unclaimed with exactly one review on it, and the card is built around a token most buyers will have to buy first. That combination — a clean price list and a thin public record — is the honest summary.

The card is best described as a spending tool for someone who already holds BASED. It is not a bank account, it is not a credit card, and nothing in its documentation suggests it should be treated as a place to keep money you cannot afford to have tied up for a month.

Will they give you the card

Yes for most of the world, no for a substantial and specific list.

The card is offered worldwide except a published restricted-country list that takes effect on 1 August 2026. The countries named include the Russian Federation, Belarus, Ukraine, the United States, Canada, Australia, China, India, Singapore, Iran and Turkey, among others — roughly 74 countries in total. Availability turns on where you live, and the card’s own words are to see whether you can apply from your country of residence. It is residence, not citizenship, that the availability check is built around, though as a general rule in this industry nationality and country of birth get screened separately and can matter on their own.

That distinction is worth holding onto if you are in a mixed situation. Someone living in one country with a passport from another should not assume the residence rule settles the question; screening is a separate step and can go either way.

One timing detail to keep in view: the restricted list is dated 1 August 2026. If you applied before that date under older terms, the terms you were accepted under are not necessarily the terms that apply now.

How to get it

The route is the app. You apply inside the Based app, and you complete identity verification there before anything is issued.

What you need for that verification:

• A passport or a national ID card. Driver’s licences and voter ID cards are not accepted.
• To be at least 18 years old.
• To be resident in a country where the card is offered.
• Patience: screening typically takes up to three days.

If the compliance team wants more, it asks through [email protected]. The card’s public pages do not say what proof of address is required, if any — that is a gap rather than an answer, and it is worth asking before you start. They also do not publish the reasons a verification can be refused, which is unusual and leaves you without a clear picture of what to fix if it fails.

There is one level of verification, not several, and the three-day figure applies to it. Cards come in three forms depending on the tier you are on: a virtual card issued instantly after approval, a physical plastic card on the HYPE tier, and a 20-gram metal card on Based Gold. The card currency is USD, which is the source of the foreign-exchange markup discussed below — spending in another currency costs more, by an amount that depends on your tier.

Physical cards ship separately from the app, by DHL according to the card page. Delivery is $50 in HYPE for the HYPE tier and free on Gold. The pages do not state which countries are shipped to beyond the availability list, and they do not give a delivery time.

Fees

The headline is that there is no signup fee and no annual fee. Everything else on this card is either a percentage at the moment of payment, a one-off shipping charge, or a lockup.

Here is the full price list as the card publishes it:

Three payments show what these numbers do in practice.

Coffee abroad, on HYPE. Say you buy something for the equivalent of $20 in a country that is not the United States. The 1.5% markup on HYPE adds 30 cents. You needed to load the balance with stablecoins first, which the card charges nothing for. If you are on Orange instead of HYPE, you pay a 2.5% markup on that $20 purchase — small, but it repeats on every foreign purchase and every coffee is a foreign purchase if you travel.

A subscription billed in dollars. Say you pay $10 for a streaming service while your balance is in dollars. There is no FX markup at all, because the payment matches the card’s currency. You keep the whole $10 of value and only give up whatever the coin you loaded with did between the moment you deposited it and the moment it was converted.

A cash withdrawal. Here the card’s documentation is silent and one user report says ATM withdrawals are not enabled. That report is unofficial — it comes from a Trustpilot reviewer in May 2026, not from the card — and it is the kind of thing that can change. If cash is part of why you want a card, treat it as an open question and check in the app before you rely on it. It is also the difference between a card and an ATM card, and it is the one thing that would most change my recommendation.

On limits: the card publishes no general spending limits. What it does publish are reward caps — the $20 and $100 monthly cashback ceilings in the table above. Those caps are the reason the percentages are worth less than they look to someone who spends heavily.

Top up

This is the part the card does best. Six assets are accepted and there are no top-up fees on the two that matter most.

The card’s own sentence on fees is blunt: no, there are no top-up fees for USDT and USDC. Stablecoin deposits carry no added fee. What is not stated is the minimum deposit, who pays the network fee on the way in, and whether you can add fiat directly. Those are three real questions with no published answer, and the first two decide whether a small top-up is worth making.

The network fee point deserves a word of caution rather than alarm. On-chain network fees — gas, or bandwidth on networks that use it — are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider. So “no top-up fees” means the card takes nothing, not that sending is free. And a transfer sent on a network the card does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee attached. Blockchain transfers do not reverse. Check the network on the deposit screen against the network the card expects before you confirm anything, every time.

Withdrawal — getting value back off the card rather than onto it — is not stated at all. That is not the same as unavailable, but you should not plan around it until you have seen it work.

Paying with it every day

Day to day, the card behaves more like a stored-value card than a bank card. You load a balance and the card spends that balance, so it cannot overdraw. Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported according to the documentation and are added from a receipt screen. That matters more than it sounds: adding the number to a phone wallet is the difference between a card you use and a card you photograph.

Against that, one Trustpilot reviewer in May 2026 said Apple Pay was not supported, which contradicts the docs. The documentation is the better source of the two, but the fact that a user wrote that in May 2026 is worth knowing when the two disagree.

How the reward works is also unusual and deserves reading twice. Cashback is paid in $BASED at the start of each month, not credited to the card balance. HYPE pays 2% up to $20 a month; Gold pays 4% up to $100 a month. On top of that, Gold adds rebates on AI subscriptions up to $100 a month and entertainment up to $20 a month, plus four airport lounge visits a year; HYPE’s AI subscription rebate goes up to $10 a month. The rewards are promotional and can change, and all benefits end when unstaking begins. That last clause is the one to internalise: unstaking is not a neutral act, it switches off the cashback, and the 21-day lockup plus a 3-day unstake cooldown means your money is unavailable for a while on both ends.

The card is applied for and used through the Based app. Store ratings were not part of what I checked, so I cannot tell you how people rate the app itself.

Two things a payment card user always wants to know are not addressed in the pages: which merchant categories are blocked, and how disputes and chargebacks are handled for a card whose balance came from crypto. You are spending from a converted balance rather than drawing on a bank account, which is exactly the situation where the usual consumer protections are least predictable. Prepaid-card coverage varies by jurisdiction and should not be assumed. If a large purchase matters to you, ask before you make it.

What can go wrong

Four risks, in rough order of how much they should bother you.

Lockup risk. This is the one specific to Based. 10,000 or 100,000 $BASED is tied up for 21 days from redemption, then a further three-day cooldown before you unstake. Benefits stop when you begin unstaking. If you enter the HYPE tier to get the 1.5% markup and the 2% cashback, you are taking on the price risk of a single token in order to save half a percent on foreign spend. If $BASED falls while it is locked, the economics of the tier can invert entirely.

Counterparty risk. The card is presented as being operated by SHA2 LABS PTE. LTD., Singapore — that comes from the starting data, and the site footer says only “Based”. The issuing institution and its licences are not named on the pages I read. That is not proof of anything wrong; it is a real difference between this card and one where you can look up the issuer and its authorisation in a register. As general background for this category: a card is a payment service issued under a licence held by a bank or e-money institution, while the crypto brand is often just the programme manager and front end. In the EU, an electronic money institution can issue e-money and payment cards but cannot lend, and it must safeguard customer funds by segregating them or insuring them — such funds are not bank deposits and are not covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. Being unable to name the entity that holds your balance means you cannot answer the question that matters if something goes wrong.

Availability risk. The restricted-country list effective 1 August 2026 covers roughly 74 countries. Cards of this kind do get suspended: Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down, and WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Closures typically follow a pattern — notice, then spending and loading stop, then a request to withdraw remaining balances.

Fee and conversion risk. The FX markup on non-USD spend is 2.5% or 1.5% depending on tier, and how crypto is converted at the point of sale is not separately stated. On top of that, blockchain transfers are irreversible, and 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, which cuts both ways for someone relying on one.

Two smaller ones. The staking-based tier design means the security model is not fully described: the custody arrangement, whether two-factor authentication is available, and how a card freeze works are not stated in the pages I read. And support is thin — there is an FAQ, an X account and a Telegram, and the Trustpilot reviewer titled their review “Mediocre support”.

On the trust side, one Trustpilot review cannot tell you much, and I want to be clear about that. The profile is unclaimed, the rating is 3.4, and the single review dates from 24 May 2026. Its complaints were that cashback requires staking and is capped, that Apple Pay was missing, and that ATM withdrawals are not enabled — the reviewer put the capped cashback at roughly $800 or $8,000 depending on how much they spend. Those are one person’s experience, not a pattern, and one of the three is contradicted by the documentation. No official service incidents came up. The absence of complaints from almost nobody is not the same as a good record.

What to take instead

Three other cards came up in the same review, and they fail this card in different ways. Two things are worth noting before the table: for all three, the card pages do not state who is eligible, and none of them has a review score above 7.1.

Gemini is the odd one out because it is a credit card. You do not load it with crypto; you pay it off in dollars and collect rewards in crypto. That inverts the whole proposition — if you want to spend crypto directly rather than earn crypto by spending dollars, it is not a substitute. Its rewards are the richest on this list, at 4% on gas, EV and transit for the first $300 a month, 3% on dining, 2% on groceries and 1% elsewhere, paid instantly in Bitcoin or in 50-plus other cryptos, plus referral payments of $50 crypto each and $250 per five referrals up to 50 a year. The score of 4.9 is the lowest of the four.

Lava scores highest at 7.1 and is the closest competitor. It quotes no annual fees, no FX fees and no FX spread, and no exchange fees or spread on bitcoin buying and selling. You can spend at 150 million merchants in over 150 countries, deposit in local currency or stablecoins, and earn up to 5% back in bitcoin on every purchase. What I could not establish is the network, whether the card is physical or virtual, the eligibility rules, and the conditions attached to that 5% — which on this card is the single most important number on the page.

GoMining Card at 6.6 is virtual now with a physical card “coming soon”, funded with BTC, USDT, GOMINING and other coins. Opening a card grants a free 1 TH miner. Its cashback, “up to 5%”, is paid in mining power whose rate rises with your VIP level — so the reward is equipment, not spendable money, and its value depends on a token and a mining market. That is a different product from the one Based offers, and a different risk.

None of these fills the same hole perfectly, and that is the honest conclusion of the comparison: Based is the only one of the four that combines a prepaid crypto balance, a genuine 0% FX tier and cashback in a crypto token, and it is also the one that requires you to commit that token to get them.

Who I would recommend it to

Three groups, and I would steer everyone else toward something simpler.

Someone who already holds BASED and plans to hold it anyway. If the 10,000 or 100,000 units were going to sit there regardless, the lockup costs you nothing in opportunity terms and you get a lower FX markup, cashback in a token you already want, and on Gold a 0% markup and lounge access. That is a good deal for the right person, and it is the person Based appears to be built for.

Someone who wants to spend crypto abroad without a markup. Gold’s 0% FX tier is genuinely the cleanest number in this category, and for a person travelling and paying in many currencies it removes a cost most cards charge. The catch is the 100,000 $BASED lockup, and it is a real one — this is not a casual recommendation.

Someone who wants the reward and accepts token risk. The 2% and 4% cashback, the AI and entertainment rebates, the lounge visits — these are attractive, and all of them stop the moment you unstake. Worth it if you believe in $BASED and treat the lockup as a position you want anyway.

Who I would not recommend it to: anyone who needs cash from an ATM, anyone who needs a card they can trust to be there in five years, anyone who cannot identify the entity holding their balance, and anyone who wants the lowest possible cost of spending without tying up a sixth-figure balance in one token. For that last group, a plain low-fee card funded from a conventional account is cheaper and simpler, and the honest comparison is not close.

I also want to flag the tax side plainly, without advising you on it. Digital assets are generally treated as property for tax purposes, so exchanging them for goods, services or dollars generally produces a taxable gain or loss. For personal holdings the result is a capital gain or loss, short-term if held a year or less, measured in local fiat currency at the fair market value on the date of the transaction. Every card payment funded from crypto may therefore be a separate disposal. If that matters to you, talk to a professional — I am not going to tell you what you owe.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Based card?

It is a Visa debit card that spends a crypto balance. You deposit assets such as USDT, USDC or BASED, the card converts what you pay into dollars, and the money comes out of the stored balance rather than a bank account. It exists in three tiers — Based Orange, HYPE and Based Gold — differing in card material, foreign-exchange markup, cashback and how much $BASED you must lock up.

How does the Based card work day to day?

You load a balance, then spend from it like a stored-value card. Because it draws on a pre-loaded balance rather than a bank account, it cannot overdraw. Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported according to the documentation and are added from the receipt screen. The card currency is USD, so any payment in another currency carries a tier-dependent markup: 2.5% on Orange, 1.5% on HYPE, none on Gold.

Is Based a bank?

No, and its pages do not present it as one. The card is operated by SHA2 LABS PTE. LTD., Singapore, per the starting data, while the site footer says only “Based”. The issuing institution and its licences are not named in the public pages. A card is normally issued under a licence held by a bank or e-money institution, so if knowing who holds your balance matters to you, ask before you fund it.

Who owns Based, and where is it based?

The card is a product of Based, which the starting data puts under SHA2 LABS PTE. LTD., a company registered in Singapore. The site footer carries only the name “Based”, with no company details, and no issuer or licence is named on the pages reviewed. That absence is the single most useful thing to raise with their support before you commit money.

Which countries can get the Based card?

Worldwide except a published restricted list effective 1 August 2026 covering about 74 countries, including the Russian Federation, Belarus, Ukraine, the United States, Canada, Australia, China, India, Singapore, Iran and Turkey. Admission turns on your country of residence — the card’s instruction is to see whether you can apply from your country of residence. Nationality and country of birth are screened separately, so a residence rule does not by itself settle the question.

How do I apply, and does it need KYC?

You apply inside the Based app and complete identity verification there, which takes typically up to three days. You need a passport or national ID card — driver’s licences and voter IDs are not accepted — you must be at least 18, and resident where the card is offered. If more documents are needed, the compliance contact is [email protected]. Proof of address is not stated, and the reasons a check can be refused are not published either.

What does the Based card cost to hold and to use?

There is no signup fee and no annual fee. The card comes as a free virtual card, a $50 plastic card on HYPE, or a free 20-gram metal card on Gold. Spending costs come from the foreign-exchange markup on non-USD payments — 2.5%, 1.5% or 0% by tier — and network fees on the blockchain when you deposit. USDT and USDC deposits carry no added fee from the card. No general spending limits are published.

How do I top up the Based card?

You deposit USDT, USDC, XSGD, SOL, HYPE or BASED, over the networks the documentation lists: Solana, Arbitrum, Polygon and Hyperliquid. The card also auto-converts at the point of sale, so you can hold a token and pay without converting in advance. There are no top-up fees for USDT or USDC. Minimum amounts, who pays the network fee, and direct fiat top-ups are not stated on the public pages.

Is Based card safe, and can I use Apple Pay?

The documentation lists Apple Pay and Google Pay as supported. One Trustpilot reviewer in May 2026 said Apple Pay was not supported, which conflicts with the documentation — the docs are the better source, but the disagreement is worth knowing about. The card’s Trustpilot rating is 3.4 on a single review with an unclaimed profile, which tells you very little either way. Custody arrangements, two-factor authentication and card freeze are not described in the pages reviewed.

Is the Based card worth it, and what about the staking?

It is worth it if you already hold $BASED and want to keep holding it. HYPE requires 10,000 $BASED locked for 21 days from redemption with a 3-day unstake cooldown, paying 1.5% FX and 2% cashback capped at $20 a month. Gold requires 100,000 $BASED, pays 0% FX and 4% capped at $100, and adds lounge visits. Benefits end the moment unstaking begins, and $BASED price risk sits underneath both.

Content created by the «cryptocardfacts» team