A cheap Visa funded from stablecoins, with a country list that isn't published

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

KOSH Global is a Visa payment card you load with USDT or USDC and then spend like an ordinary card, online or in a shop, with Apple Pay and Google Pay on top. That sounds simple, and the price is genuinely low: $8 a year for the virtual card, no monthly fee, and 0% on USD payments. But the picture has holes. The card’s own pages do not publish which countries are supported, they disagree with each other on the foreign-exchange fee, and the company behind it, Piers Technology Inc, names no licence and no issuing bank. I scored it 6.5 out of 10, and I want to walk you through exactly where that number comes from, because a 6.5 here is not “bad” and not “risky” either. It is “good on the things you can measure, thin on the things you have to trust”.

The conditions described on this page are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict: 6.5 out of 10

Here is the score card, criterion by criterion, with the reasoning behind each mark.

That last row is the reason the total isn’t lower. For the person this card is actually built for, the everyday mechanics are close to ideal: a $8 virtual Visa that most websites will accept, topped up from a stablecoin balance in a couple of minutes, with mobile wallets for the shops that want a tap. If that is your use case, the score is high. If your question is “can I rely on this in my country, and who is behind it”, the score is low, and no fee table can fix that.

The card also suits one specific reader very well: someone who wants a cheap virtual Visa funded with stablecoins and little else. It suits them badly if they want a metal card in the post, a lounge, a bank that answers the phone, or certainty about where they can use it.

Will they give you the card?

Yes in some places, and I cannot tell you where, because the card does not say. Availability depends on your country of residence. In practice the mechanism is simple: the card option appears in the Cards section of the app only if “the card is available in your region”. There is no published country list. If your region is unsupported, the route offered is an early-access list you can join through in-app chat.

There is one interesting wrinkle. A physical card “can be shipped to some regions where the card isn’t supported”, and India is given as an example of exactly that. So a region can be unsupported for spending and still supported for the plastic in the post, which is not the same as being able to use it.

What the card does state plainly is the exclusion: users located in, or transacting with, jurisdictions under “comprehensive sanctions or embargoes” are barred. No country is named. The marketing page adds “available in select jurisdictions”, and that Visa merchants in 180+ countries accept it. Those are distinct claims about different things, and it is worth holding them apart: being accepted by merchants is not the same as being able to obtain the card.

My advice, given that no list exists to check: find out before you commit. If the card does not appear in your app, no amount of reading about fees will change that, and the early-access list is the only documented route onward.

How to get it

The path is short. Create a KOSH account, pass the identity checks, order the virtual card in the Cards section, and order a physical one if you want it.

The identity check is the part that deserves a sentence of explanation, because it is where the card follows the ordinary pattern for regulated services rather than skipping it. You need a government-issued ID plus a selfie or liveness check, and the verification partner is Sumsub. The marketing page also mentions a recent bank statement. The help article on verification does not mention proof of address. The terms set the minimum age at 18.

There is a single KYC level for the personal card: ID plus selfie, with approval typically in 5 to 10 minutes. If you completed KYC in 2025 or earlier, it has to be redone. The article on rejection reasons is separate, and I did not read it, so I will not pretend to know why a specific application fails. Businesses go through a KYB process instead.

What you end up with is a Visa, available as a virtual or a physical card; the marketing page says the metal card is “shipped worldwide”. The card currency is USD. Physical delivery is express, up to 10 business days with tracking, at $80, and no country list is given for shipping either. A replacement cost is not stated. You activate the card in the Cards section.

For a reader in the general position, the honest summary is: this is not a hard application, but it is a real one, and the answer you get depends on a region check the card does not publish.

Fees and what a day of spending actually costs

This is the strongest part of the card, with one caveat I will come back to twice: the card’s own two pages disagree on the foreign-exchange fee.

Now let me put three ordinary payments through it, because a fee table on its own does not tell you what a week costs.

A coffee in your own country, paid in the local currency on the physical card. The purchase is not in USD, so the FX fee applies. At the help-centre rate that is 0.5% of the amount; at the marketing-page rate it is 1.5%. On a $4 coffee, the difference between the two published figures is roughly two cents. Trivial. On a month of foreign purchases it is not, and the same ambiguity applies.

A $60 subscription in USD, virtual card, paid online. Authorization is free, the transaction is in USD, so the rate is 0%. You pay exactly $60. This is the case the card is cheapest for, and if this is most of your spending, the fee picture is close to as good as it gets for a card funded from crypto.

A $200 withdrawal from an ATM abroad, physical card. The card’s own fee is $1 plus 1%, plus the FX fee that applies, plus whatever the ATM operator adds on top; the card mentions that last part as a possibility, not a promise. Add the 0.5% or 1.5% FX and you are at roughly $203 to $206 before the operator’s own charge. Note also that virtual cards cannot be used at ATMs at all, so this scenario needs the plastic.

The FX figure deserves one more warning. You are reading two numbers from the same company, and they differ threefold. I cannot tell you which is live. Treat 1.5% as the prudent planning number until you see what your own account is charged, and check after your first foreign purchase.

There is also a single tier, the KOSH Everyday Card, in virtual or physical form. No Visa Concierge, no lounge access, no premium tier to upgrade into. Whether you want a metal card is a separate question from whether you want a metal card that costs $80 a year.

How to top it up

Top-up is the part KOSH does most clearly. The card draws on the KOSH wallet, and you fund it with USDT and USDC. The deposit is free. There is no minimum and no maximum, which the card puts as “no strict minimum or maximum”. The balance updates 5 to 10 minutes after the on-chain confirmation.

One gap is easy to trip over: the article does not specify which networks to use. That is not a cosmetic omission. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, and a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. The card does not say who pays network fees either — on-chain gas is normally charged by the blockchain rather than the card provider, but I am not going to fill that silence with an assumption. Ask support, in writing, before your first transfer.

There is a second route for money that is already fiat: a virtual USD account, with ACH or wire transfers to a KOSH USD account that settles as a stablecoin. The card does not state fees on this route.

Getting money back out works in one direction only, in practice. You can move the card balance back to the KOSH wallet in the same stablecoin you used to top up, and only for funds you added yourself — welcome bonuses, referral rewards and cashback are excluded. The fee for that is not stated, and neither is what happens to a remaining balance if you close the account. The account can be closed in the dashboard or through support.

So the loop is: stablecoin in, spend, and your own money back to the wallet in the same coin. Anything the card gives you as a reward stays put.

Paying with it every day

Everyday use is where this card scores highest, and I want to be specific about why. It is a Visa, virtual or physical, in USD. Apple Pay is supported where Apple Pay is available in your country. Google Pay is supported according to the marketing page, which describes adding it “in two taps”, but the help centre article does not cover it — so treat the two-tap claim as a marketing statement rather than something documented.

Inside the app you can freeze and unfreeze the card, set spending limits, and lock the card to categories or merchants. The card does not publish which merchant categories are blocked; the merchant-category blocking that many issuers apply, for example to gambling, is a policy choice by the issuer and varies from one to another, and KOSH’s list is not stated. If gambling or another category matters to you, ask.

Rewards are advertised as 10% reward points on eligible purchases, 5% cashback on hotel bookings, and $5 per referral, with the marketing page itself noting these “may vary and are subject to program terms”. There is a catch worth flagging: the help-centre fee article lists the 10% reward points as “coming soon”. So the headline number on the marketing page may describe something that is not yet live in your account. The other two items carry no such caveat in what I read.

Both iOS and Android apps exist; I did not read store ratings.

Disputes work the way they do on any card, with two details you should know in advance. You contact the merchant first, then send your evidence to KOSH through in-app chat or email, and KOSH files through its card partner over the Visa network. Each dispute request costs $30. Investigations typically take 30 to 90 days.

What can go wrong

Nothing dramatic has surfaced. That is worth saying plainly, and so is the reason. I found no official incidents, and I found no user reports or news coverage either: searching for reviews turned up no Trustpilot page for KOSH and no Reddit threads, only an unrelated site on the same name. Comparison sites show no reviews. A product with no reviews is not a product with a clean record; it is a product nobody has written about yet. The product was reported as launched on June 12, 2026.

The company behind it is Piers Technology Inc, which describes itself as “a financial technology company, not a bank or a money services business”, and says services are provided via “licensed partners”. The issuer is “the regulated financial institution selected for the Card Program” — not named. No licences are named. The terms are governed by Delaware law, with arbitration in New York. A third-party listing says the product was formerly CopperX.

Two structural risks sit underneath that. First, the card is custodial: it is collateralised by the balance held on KOSH. Control of that balance belongs to the provider, not to you, which means the usual counterparty and hack risk of holding funds with a custodian applies here. If something goes wrong at that level, there is no seed phrase of yours to restore from. Set against that, the card does give you real controls in the app — freeze, spending limits, category and merchant locks — and has help articles on lost or stolen cards and on suspicious activity. Two-factor authentication is not stated, and neither is any safeguarding or segregation arrangement for your balance. That second omission matters: funds held by an e-money institution are usually segregated or insured and are not the same as a bank deposit.

A third, quieter risk is structural rather than company-specific: card programmes do get switched off. Visa and Mastercard do not issue these cards themselves; they license issuers and can suspend a programme. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX in November 2022 and the FTX card was wound down by its issuer; WaveCrest, which supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018 and all its Visa programmes closed. A closure typically means a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw remaining balances. That is the shape of the risk to hold in mind, not a prediction about this card.

Mechanically, there are smaller frictions worth expecting. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards, because the six- or eight-digit issuer number at the start of a card number tells the merchant which institution and country issued it, and a mismatch with your billing address can invite extra scrutiny. Address verification, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address you type against the issuer’s records, is mostly a US, Canada and UK thing and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines. A declined authorization can leave a hold on your funds for several days.

Support lives at the help centre support.koshmoney.com, plus in-app chat and an email address. Languages and hours are not stated. The help centre I saw was in English, and I did not see a Russian version.

One last asymmetry, in your favour and against you at once: 3-D Secure can shift liability for a fraudulent online payment from the merchant to your bank, or to you. And on the tax side, note only that digital assets are generally treated as property in the US, so each payment funded from crypto can be a separate taxable disposal; I am not going to advise you on your obligations, and you should check locally.

What to take instead

There is no single obvious substitute, so I will compare the three I looked at against the same yardstick. KOSH scores 6.5. The scores below are from the same scale.

Reading across the rows is more useful than any single line. The International Visa Card beats KOSH on the headline score, and it beats it on one thing that matters a lot: it publishes who is excluded. That is the exact information KOSH does not give you. It charges more, though — $9 or $19 a month against KOSH’s $8 a year — and its 2% FX fee is worse than either of KOSH’s two published rates.

UNi Card is the one to watch if currency conversion is your main worry. It states no foreign transaction fee, converts at live rates, and claims no hidden exchange fees, and it is multicurrency. Against that, its availability and funding route are simply not stated, so you are trading a known cost for an unknown eligibility.

Whop Cards is the weakest of the four on paper, and its structure is different: it spends from a Whop balance, where a pending balance is usable as soon as a payment arrives and standard withdrawals use settled funds. Backed by stablecoin collateral from a linked wallet, though the coins and networks are not stated. Its 5% cashback at select merchants is currently Uber, with more planned, and the payout currency and conditions are not stated. Its US-state coverage is narrow, and its excluded-country list includes most of the countries above.

Two observations you can take away. First, every card in this table blocks or restricts some countries, and sanctions screening is routine in this industry rather than a mark against any one provider. Second, none of them names its issuing bank as prominently as you might like. That is normal for the sector, and it is the reason I score the whole category the way I do.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend this card to one person in particular: someone who needs a virtual Visa, expects to pay mostly in dollars online, is comfortable topping up from USDT or USDC, and has checked that the card actually appears in their app. For that person it is close to ideal at $8 a year with no monthly fee.

I would not push it on someone whose income arrives in a local currency they will need to spend locally, because that is where the FX figure bites and where the two published rates disagree. I would not push it on someone who plans to travel and withdraw cash, since the ATM maths gets worse quickly at $1 plus 1% plus FX plus the operator’s own fee. And I would be careful with anyone who wants to know exactly what stands behind the balance: no issuer is named, no licence is named, the product is months old, and nobody has posted a review.

My own decision rule would be this. Test it small. Put in a modest amount, make one foreign purchase, read what you were actually charged, and check the withdrawal path before you commit anything you would miss. Every one of those steps is cheap, and together they answer the questions this review cannot.

Frequently asked questions

What is the KOSH Global card?

The KOSH Global card is a Visa payment card that you load from the KOSH wallet using USDT or USDC. You can hold it as a virtual card or order a physical one, the card currency is USD, and you spend whatever balance you have put in — it cannot overdraw. It is offered through an app on iOS and Android, with Apple Pay and, per the marketing page, Google Pay.

How does the KOSH Global card work?

You create an account, pass the identity check, and order the virtual card in the Cards section. You deposit USDT or USDC into the KOSH wallet free of charge, with no minimum and no maximum, and the balance updates 5 to 10 minutes after the on-chain confirmation. The card then spends that balance as ordinary Visa payments, in USD, at 0%.

Is KOSH Global a bank?

No. The company behind it, Piers Technology Inc, describes itself as “a financial technology company, not a bank or a money services business”, and says services are provided through licensed partners. The actual issuer is described as “the regulated financial institution selected for the Card Program”, and that institution is not named. No licences are named either.

Who owns KOSH Global?

KOSH Global is operated by Piers Technology Inc. A third-party listing says the product was formerly called CopperX, and another profile says signups currently route through a partner platform ahead of a planned relaunch under the KOSH brand. Both of those are unofficial details from third-party sites, not confirmed by the card itself.

Is the KOSH Global card available in my country?

That is exactly what the card does not publish. Availability depends on your country of residence, and the card option appears in the Cards section only if “the card is available in your region” — no country list is published, and the marketing page says only “available in select jurisdictions”. If your region is unsupported, you can join an early-access list through in-app chat.

Does the KOSH Global card require KYC?

Yes. You need a government-issued ID plus a selfie or liveness check, with Sumsub as the verification partner; the marketing page also mentions a recent bank statement. Approval for the single personal-card level usually takes 5 to 10 minutes. The terms set the minimum age at 18, and any KYC completed in 2025 or earlier has to be resubmitted.

How do I top up the KOSH Global card?

You deposit USDT or USDC into the KOSH wallet, which is free with no strict minimum or maximum, and the card spends from that balance. A separate route exists for fiat: a virtual USD account receiving ACH or wire transfers, settling as a stablecoin, though its fees are not stated. One caution — the article does not name the supported networks, and a wrong-network transfer can be lost.

Is the KOSH Global card free?

Nearly. The virtual card costs $8 a year, the physical card $80 a year, there is no monthly fee, card authorization is free, USD transactions are 0%, and stablecoin deposits and settlement are free. Express shipping for the physical card is $80, ATM withdrawals cost $1 plus 1% plus applicable FX, and each dispute request costs $30.

Is the KOSH Global card safe?

There is no evidence of a problem, and there is also no track record to point at. I found no official incidents, no Trustpilot page, and no Reddit threads; comparison sites show no reviews. The card is custodial, so the balance is held by the provider, and no issuer or licence is named. Treat the controls in the app — freeze, spending limits, category locks — as real, but test small before committing much.

How do I delete or close my KOSH Global account?

You can close the account from the dashboard or through support. What happens to any balance left on the card is not stated, so do not assume it is returned automatically — and note that money can only be moved back to the KOSH wallet in the same stablecoin you used to top up, for funds you added yourself.

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