The AQUA card programme stopped issuing and stopped working. Here is what it means for you.

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

If you are reading this because you have been looking for a card that works when ordinary bank cards do not, or because you were one of the people who signed up for the AQUA card when it was in beta, I want to be straight with you about where this programme stands before anything else. The AQUA card, sold under the name Dolphin Card, was suspended worldwide on 4 December 2025 because of a problem with its card provider, and as of the checks behind this review there is no sign of it coming back. That is not a rumour and not a temporary wobble. It is a closed programme. There is no application to fill in, no card to order, and no way to be issued one now. So the honest question is not “is this a good card” but “what does this mean for the money you have tied up in it, and what do you use instead.”

I am going to walk you through what I checked, in plain terms: how the programme ended, what it actually was while it lasted, what happens to money that is still sitting on the card, what can go wrong along the way, and which alternatives are genuinely open to you today. I will keep the good news and the bad news in proportion, because a review that only lists warnings is not useful either.

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

What the AQUA card was, and why it stopped

Let me start with the basics, because a lot of the confusion around this card comes from the name. AQUA was a crypto wallet app. Inside that app there was a marketplace, and one of the things you could get there was a payment card called the Dolphin Card. It was a virtual Visa card, denominated in US dollars, that you could reload from crypto and then spend like an ordinary card online. So when you read “AQUA card,” you are reading about a feature of a wallet app, not a bank account and not a standalone card company. That distinction matters a great deal for what happened next.

The card launched in beta on 21 May 2025. At the time the announcement said the beta was for users outside the United States and Canada, with the note that some merchants would not be supported in certain countries, and that cards for the US and Canada were hoped for “in the coming months.” The sign-up was deliberately light: during the beta it needed only a JAN3 account with an email verification code. No identity documents were mentioned. In practice, a third-party review from 24 October 2025 described sign-up as requiring only an email address with no identity verification, which matches the official account of the beta. That light-touch design is part of why the card appealed to people who could not easily get a normal bank card, but it is also something that later became a problem to think about.

Here is the timeline that ended the programme. On 4 December 2025 every Dolphin Card was suspended globally, effective immediately, because of a problem with the card provider. The provider was not named. Other Aqua wallet services were not affected; it was the card programme specifically that stopped. Around that time the team said it was negotiating refunds and looking for alternative providers. No replacement provider and no relaunch were found in 2026 searches. In short: the card existed from May to December 2025, and then it stopped.

One more thing you may have read, and I want to flag because it is unofficial. A third-party review described the card as issued in the United States and US-dollar denominated, and reported that a Spotify payment attempted from Argentina was declined because the card’s country and the user’s country did not match. That is not an official statement from AQUA. It is one reviewer’s account. But it lines up with how card payments work in general, which I explain further down, and it is the kind of friction a virtual card from one country hits almost everywhere else. I mention it because it tells you something important: this was never a card that was designed to work smoothly in every country you might travel to or buy from. It was a beta product with borders.

The score, and who this card does and does not suit

Now the number. I scored the AQUA card 2.4 out of 10. That is a very low score, and I want to explain exactly why so you can judge whether it matches your situation rather than taking my word for it.

Here is the score broken down, criterion by criterion, with the mark and a short reason:

A few words on each. Who can get it scores zero because you cannot get it at all. The programme closed; that is not a judgement about eligibility, it is a fact about the current state of the world. Cost sits in the middle at 5 out of 10, which sounds odd for a closed product, and I will explain it in the cost section: the honest reason is that the fees were never clearly published, so I neither reward it for cheapness nor punish it for expense, and a middle mark reflects that nothing was revealed. Top-up options get a 4 because it could be loaded with BTC, L-BTC or Liquid USDt, but all of that funnelled through one network, which is a narrow door rather than a wide one. Reliability is where the card really fails, at 1 out of 10, and the reasoning is not subtle: the programme shut down, the money came back in a form most people did not ask for, money that was on its way back from merchants is simply gone, and the actual card issuer was never named. Everyday use is a 2 because the card was virtual only, and even the phone-wallet features that were promised were not working when it launched.

So who is this card for? Honestly, its natural audience now is only one group: existing cardholders who need to recover whatever balance is left. If you are not already inside this programme, there is no version of “is AQUA right for me” that ends in a yes, because there is nothing to join. And if you were a holder, the question is not whether the card was good, it is how to get your remaining money out cleanly. I will deal with that next.

If you already have the card: getting your remaining balance

Let me put the most practical part of this review first for anyone who actually had the card. After the suspension was announced on 4 December 2025, the arrangement for remaining balances was this: they would be refunded in USDT on Liquid. You did not get your money back in the currency you loaded, and you did not get it back as ordinary dollars in a bank account. You got a request: there was a secure request form on the AQUA website, and you asked to be refunded to either your AQUA wallet or any wallet capable of holding Liquid. Processing begins once Aqua receives its funds from the provider, and you would get email confirmations as things moved along.

There are a few things about that arrangement that you should understand clearly, because they will shape whether this is smooth for you. First, the refund is denominated in USDT on the Liquid network. If you do not already use Liquid, that is a network you will need to get familiar with, and a token you will need a wallet for. Second, the timeline is not instant. It starts once Aqua receives funds from the provider, not the day you submit the form. Third, and this is the part that stings: any money that was pending, meaning a refund you were expecting from a merchant for a purchase you had already made, will not return to the card. That money is not coming back to you through this programme. It is gone from the card’s perspective.

Beyond the refund itself, some things about how the card worked still matter for understanding your position. While it was live, the maximum was $4,000 USD per month. You could top it up with BTC, L-BTC or Liquid USDt through the Card Management page in the app, and the original beta post recommended making a small test load first because the balance could take a moment to update. Neither the top-up fee nor the top-up minimum was ever stated. A third-party review added that on-chain BTC top-ups needed miner fees and three to four network confirmations before the balance was credited, that any BTC balance was converted automatically into dollars, and that the card was nameless. Those are unofficial details, but they are consistent with the official picture. For a cardholder recovering funds, the only numbers that really apply now are the $4,000 monthly cap that applied while it was live, and the fact that refunds were routed through the request form.

There is one more piece of the puzzle that I want to be honest about, because it is the sort of thing people only find out too late. Nothing about support was ever clearly stated. The beta post named no support channel and pointed instead to the terms of service for the list of countries. And the chargeback process, if there was one, was not stated. So if your situation has any dispute in it, I cannot promise you a route through the card company, because the card company does not clearly exist as a named, reachable entity. The JAN3 team said user funds were safe, and I take that at face value as a statement they made, but “safe” and “returned to you already” are different things, and for pending merchant refunds they are not the same at all.

My practical advice, offered as a reviewer and not as advice on the law or on tax: if you still have a balance, use that request form now rather than assuming it will wait for you, keep every email confirmation they send you, and if you are not comfortable holding USDT on Liquid, move it to something you understand as soon as it lands. I am not going to tell you what to do with the money itself or how it should be taxed, because that is a conversation for you and a qualified professional in your own country, not for a review page.

What can go wrong: the risks, plainly

Because this card did not survive, the risks section reads a little differently from a review of a live product. Instead of “here is what to watch out for while you use it,” it is “here is exactly how the failure played out and what is left exposed.” The point is that you learn from this one, not that you can use the card.

The first and largest risk was the one that ended everything: a single card-provider problem took the whole programme down. All Dolphin Cards were suspended globally on 2025-12-04, with the provider unnamed. The JAN3 CEO had said on 2025-11-30 that partners had told him all cards were suspended and that alternative providers would be sought. Nothing came of it, at least nothing I could find in 2026. The lesson for you, if you ever consider another crypto card, is that your money can be sitting on someone else’s plumbing. The card network routes messages and sets rules, the issuer actually holds the card programme, and the crypto brand is often only a front-end or programme manager marketing it. When the plumbing fails, the front-end does not get to decide.

The second risk is that the money came back in a shape that was not what you put in. You loaded crypto and you got back USDT on Liquid. That is a real shift for anyone who was holding, say, dollars or euros. It also means the refund route itself has friction, because it depends on Aqua receiving funds from a provider before processing even begins.

The third risk is the pending merchant refunds, which simply will not come back to the card. If you had a purchase in flight when the suspension happened, that money is gone from the card. There is no chargeback process stated to recover it through the card. That is a hard, concrete loss, and I would not want you to learn about it only after the fact.

The fourth risk is opacity about who was actually behind the card. The card was issued and operated by JAN3 via AQUA, but the card issuer was not named. Nothing was stated about security arrangements beyond the fact that the card was managed inside the AQUA app Marketplace and that the CEO said user funds were safe. That is a thin layer of published detail to lean on when something goes wrong, and something did.

Let me also put the general shape of this risk in context, because it is not unusual in this category. Custodial platforms have a real history of failure: Mt. Gox (roughly $350 million reported stolen between 2011 and 2014), Coincheck (roughly $400 million in 2018), and the Ronin Network ($625 million in 2022). Holding funds with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk. Separately, card programmes do close. In November 2022 Visa said it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX,” and the FTX US debit card programme was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. And in the broader category, closures typically follow a pattern: a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. I do not have a confirmed example of the exact dates for this specific closure beyond the 4 December 2025 suspension itself, but the pattern is what I would tell you to expect if you ever see another “programme ending” notice. The specific thing to learn from AQUA is that the pattern can arrive with very little warning, as it did here.

What to take instead

The card is closed, so the practical question is what to do if you want a crypto-funded payment card that actually works. There are several options with published, live information, and I have gathered four of them. None is a promise of safety, and none is legal or tax advice. I am giving you the facts about each so you can compare them against your own situation, especially your country and your banking situation, because that is where most of these cards differ.

TokenPocket

TokenPocket scores 5.8 out of 10 in my set. It offers a Mastercard or Visa debit card: Visa debit for a list of European countries and territories, for example Germany, France, Spain and Switzerland, and Mastercard debit for Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and the UK, among others. The Americas were described as planned for a later period. The card runs on Arbitrum, and Fiat24 cards are virtual, with balances in EUR24 and USD24. On cost: an NFT creation fee is partly covered by TokenPocket and the user pays a small portion, the amount not stated, and apart from that the card is described as charging no additional fees. On transaction costs: a 1% fee is charged when depositing cryptocurrency into the card, which is described as refunded later through rewards and reduced transaction fees, and a foreign-exchange fee is not stated, with extra fees sometimes arising from inter-institution settlement. Crypto deposits come from the TokenPocket wallet, with specific coins and networks not listed in the FAQ. There is no cashback stated. For you, the appeal is a real debit-card product across many countries with a published fee structure; the catch is that the 1% deposit fee and the virtual-only format are things to weigh.

MetaMask

MetaMask scores 7.1 out of 10, the highest of the group, and it is the one I would look at first if you are in a covered country. It is open for sign-up in 45 listed countries and territories, with examples such as Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain and Uruguay, while other regions join a waitlist. Proof of residency is required, and the site is clear that ineligible regions limit sign-ups but not spending. The citizenship rule is not stated, and US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ. The card is Mastercard. A virtual card is issued first and instantly, and a Metal card can be pre-ordered in the app after the virtual card is approved, with one card per user; the issuer is Monovate and the card provider is Crypto Life. The card currency is not stated. On cost, the virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee, while Metal is $199 per year. On fees, there is a minimal fee per transaction, the amount not stated on the pages I read, no additional MetaMask fees, and no foreign transaction fee, with the Mastercard rate used. Crucially, it spends directly from your connected wallet rather than from a pre-loaded balance, across the networks Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, using tokens such as mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT; wallets that are Solana-only cannot withdraw credit. Rewards are the richest here: cashback paid in mUSD into the Money Account, at 1% on Virtual, and for Metal a headline 3% that a footnote limits to the first $10,000 spent and then 1%, plus an $FLY bonus of 5X on Virtual and 7X on Metal via the Blackbird dining app. For you, the direct-from-wallet model means your crypto is not parked with a card issuer, which addresses exactly the counterparty risk that hurt AQUA holders. The trade-offs are the closed sign-ups in the US and UK, the residency proof, and the $199 if you want the metal card.

KAST

KAST scores 6.1 out of 10 and is the most elaborate of the three, with the clearest published fee schedule. On who can use it: residence is checked against a list at sign-up, and if your country is not listed it is not available there, though the country list itself is not published and a restricted-locations list is referenced without naming countries. Citizenship and ID matter too: if you live in a supported country but hold an ID from a restricted region you may still fail KYC, dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass, only the account holder’s own ID is accepted, a VPN does not bypass this, and you can create an account in an unsupported country but KYC stays locked. The card is virtual and physical, up to 10 cards per user, in tiers: Visa Platinum Standard, Visa Infinite metal for Premium, and Visa Infinite gold plated for Private, with other designs including Pengu, Solana and Bitcoin. The account balance is in dollars, with stablecoin deposits converted 1:1 at a 0% spread. On cost, annual membership is Standard 0 USD, Premium 1,000 USD per year, and Private 10,000 USD per year, billed annually upfront with no monthly option. An extra virtual card is 2 USD, the Standard physical card is 0 USD plus 40 USD delivery, there is a 1 USD per month inactivity fee after 12 months, and renewal or reactivation fees exist with amounts not stated. On fees: stablecoin top-up 0%, card spend in dollars 0%, transaction fee 0%, Apple and Google Pay 0%, non-dollar foreign-exchange fees 0.5% to 1.75% depending on your residence country, transaction country and card programme, non-dollar transactions under 25 USD cost 0.10 USD, a declined transaction for insufficient balance costs 0.50 USD, and non-stablecoin tokens may be auto-converted at a fee shown in the app. Funding is by stablecoins USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD, with USDT and USDC on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and Tron, and no bank account needed; note the terms say acceptable tokens are currently USDT and USDC, which conflicts with the PYUSD and RLUSD listings. Spending comes from your own balance and is deducted per purchase, not as credit. Rewards are dollar cashback at 1.5% on the first 2,000 USD per month for Standard, 2% on the first 10,000 for Premium, and 3% on the first 40,000 for Private, plus KAST Points of none, +1% and +2% of eligible spend, paid in dollars when a transaction is authorised. For you, KAST is transparent about nearly everything, which is a genuine contrast with the AQUA card’s silence, but the membership structure is expensive if you want the top tiers and the eligibility rules are the strictest of the three.

A side-by-side look

Here is the same information arranged so you can compare the live options at a glance:

The comparison itself is the useful part. MetaMask’s direct-from-wallet design and its free virtual card stand out. KAST stands out for published fees and generous cashback caps, if you qualify and can afford the tier. TokenPocket stands out for the breadth of countries and a simple published fee. What none of them can promise you is that the issuer behind the card will never have a problem, because that is the exact risk that ended AQUA.

A little background: how crypto cards work

Because the failure above will make more sense once you know how these things are put together, here is the short version of the mechanics, drawn from how the category generally works rather than from AQUA specifically.

Every payment card number starts with an issuer identification number, a BIN or IIN of six or eight digits, that says which institution issued the card; the rest is an account identifier and a check digit. Merchants can look up that BIN to see which institution and which country issued the card, and they may apply extra scrutiny if the issuer country differs from your billing address. That is exactly why a card issued in one country can look “foreign” to a shop in another, and it is the likely explanation for the declined Spotify payment mentioned earlier, where the card’s country and the user’s country did not match. It is also why some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs: the lookup reveals the card type and issuer country.

A payment card involves several parties. The card network, Visa or Mastercard, routes the messages and sets the rules. The issuer is a bank or e-money institution licensed to issue under the network’s licence, and it actually holds the card programme. The crypto brand is often only a programme manager or a front-end that markets the card. In an electronic money institution context in the EU, such an institution can issue e-money, payment cards and wallets but cannot lend, and may offer services across the EU and EEA from a licence granted in one member state. Crucially, Visa and Mastercard themselves do not issue crypto cards to consumers; they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. Everything about AQUA sits inside that structure, which is why a provider problem could stop the card overnight.

There are two broad money models. A prepaid card draws on a stored balance; a standard debit card asks your bank to withdraw funds from a linked account at purchase time. Many crypto cards behave like prepaid cards: crypto is converted and loaded as a fiat balance, and in that “pre-loaded balance” model you convert or top up a fiat or stablecoin balance first, and the card spends only that balance, so it cannot overdraw. That was the AQUA model. The alternative, which MetaMask uses, is to spend directly from your connected wallet at the moment of payment. The distinction is not cosmetic. With a pre-loaded balance your money has already moved onto the card’s rails, so if the provider has a problem, your money is exactly what is stuck. With a wallet-linked card, the funds stay in your own wallet until the moment of payment. That is a structural difference in where the risk sits.

Then there is the choice between custodial and self-custody. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key or seed phrase; with a custodial wallet the provider holds the credentials, so you 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 and spend its funds. Transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen private key has no built-in recovery, because the network cannot freeze or return the funds. With a self-custody-linked card, the funds stay in your wallet until the moment of payment, but you bear sole responsibility for key loss, phishing, and clipboard-hijacking malware that swaps copied addresses. Neither model is free of risk. They just put the risk in different places, and it is worth knowing which one you are in before you deposit anything.

Verification is the other area people ask about. Know-your-customer rules require regulated businesses to verify customers and assess risk as part of anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing law, including ongoing transaction monitoring and suspicious-activity reporting. 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 whether the customer is a politically exposed person. 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. In the US the customer identification programme requires name, date of birth, address and an identification number. Nationality is recorded and screened separately from residence, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy are often applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as country of address. Prepaid and debit cards are generally available to adults aged 18 and over, and some issuers set higher limits. This is all context, not a route around anything: the rules apply whether a card is virtual, offshore, or crypto-funded, and nothing in this review is a suggestion about how to get around an identity check.

Regulation works in layers, and it is useful to know that a card is usually governed by more than one regime. In the EU, MiCA, the markets-in-crypto-assets regulation, took legal effect in June 2023, with rules on asset-referenced and e-money tokens applying from 30 June 2024 and the remaining provisions, including crypto-asset service provider rules, from 30 December 2024. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. The 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, and ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised providers that users can check. A card itself is a payment service regulated separately, so a crypto card often depends on two licences. Electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds by segregating them or insuring them, but such funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by deposit guarantee schemes. In the US, FinCEN guidance treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters, while ordinary users buying goods are not.

Stablecoins and networks are the last piece. A stablecoin aims to hold a stable value against a fiat currency, but as the BIS noted, “despite the name, stablecoins are not necessarily stable.” Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC are dollar-pegged, and together the BIS put about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation as of July 2025. USDC is redeemable 1:1 for dollars and fully backed by cash and equivalents, mostly in a government money market fund, with monthly reserve attestations. Stablecoins exist on many networks: USDC is natively supported on 38 networks as of 16 September 2026, and USDT has been issued on Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon and Avalanche among others. But stablecoins can depeg: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022 and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023. Networks charge their own fees: on Ethereum, gas is paid only in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT but no ETH cannot send it; on Tron, fees are paid through bandwidth and energy resources, often by burning TRX; and Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024. Transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address of a different network, can be lost. This is why the choice of network on any crypto card matters, and it is a large part of why AQUA’s single-network, USDT-on-Liquid refund could feel unfamiliar if you were not already using Liquid. And a final reassurance that is not one: stablecoins are not censorship-proof, because Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity.

I want to say plainly that I am not giving tax or legal advice here, only what the cards say about themselves. One factual note that belongs in this category, not in this card specifically: 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, measured in local fiat currency at the fair market value on the date of the transaction. How that applies to you depends on your country and your situation, so treat it as a prompt to talk to a professional, not as an instruction.

Who I would recommend this to, and who I would not

Let me be direct, because a review that hedges is not much use.

I would not recommend the AQUA card to anyone looking for a card to get right now, because there is no card to get. It is closed. That is the whole of the recommendation against it, and it does not need softening.

I would recommend it to almost nobody as a product to choose. There is no scenario I can construct in which, today, choosing AQUA over MetaMask, KAST or TokenPocket is the sensible move, because AQUA is not a choice that currently exists.

The one group this page is genuinely for is existing cardholders who need to recover their remaining balance. If that is you, the advice is to use the request form, watch for the email confirmations, and move the USDT on Liquid somewhere you understand as soon as it arrives. Everything else in this review, the alternatives, the background, the FAQ, is context for choosing what to use next time.

There is also a lesson worth taking, and it is not about AQUA specifically. If you are someone who has trouble getting an ordinary bank card, and the light-touch sign-up was part of what appealed to you, I understand that. But notice that AQUA’s beta required only a JAN3 account with an email code and no identity documents, and the card was still shut down within months by a problem at a layer it did not name. A card that asks less of you at the start is not obviously a card that carries less risk, and when the time comes to get your money back, the ease of signing up does not make the exit any smoother. If you are choosing among the live options, weigh how each one holds your money, how clearly it publishes its fees, and how plainly it names the institution responsible for the card. Those are the things that would have protected you here.

Frequently asked questions

What was the AQUA card?

The AQUA card, sold as the Dolphin Card, was a virtual Visa card denominated in US dollars that you loaded with crypto and spent online. It was a feature inside the AQUA wallet app’s marketplace, not a separate bank. You could reload it with BTC, L-BTC or Liquid USDt, up to $4,000 USD per month, and it was virtual only, with no physical card. It launched in beta on 21 May 2025 and was suspended worldwide on 4 December 2025.

Is the AQUA card still available?

No. Every Dolphin Card was suspended globally on 4 December 2025, effective immediately, because of a problem with the card provider, who was not named. The team said it was negotiating refunds and looking for alternative providers, but no replacement provider and no relaunch were found in 2026 searches. Other Aqua wallet services were not affected, only the card programme. So there is nothing to apply for today.

Is AQUA a bank, and who owns it?

AQUA is a crypto wallet app, not a bank. The card was issued and operated by JAN3 via AQUA, but the actual card issuer was never named. That gap is one of the reasons I scored reliability so low: when the programme failed, there was no clearly named, reachable card institution behind it. AQUA is a product and a company in the crypto space, not a regulated bank holding your deposits.

What happened to money that was still on the card?

After the suspension, remaining balances were refunded in USDT on the Liquid network. You requested this through a secure form on the AQUA website, choosing either your AQUA wallet or any wallet able to hold Liquid. Processing started once Aqua received funds from its provider, with email confirmations along the way. So the money came back, but in a token and on a network rather than as the dollars you loaded, which matters if you are not already familiar with Liquid.

Will I get back refunds from merchants I was waiting on?

No. Any money that was pending from a merchant, meaning a refund you were expecting for a purchase already made, will not return to the card after the suspension. There is no chargeback process stated to recover it through the card. This is the most concrete loss for a holder, because unlike your card balance, that money has no route back to you through this programme.

Does the AQUA card require KYC?

During its beta, the card needed only a JAN3 account with an email verification code, and no identity documents were mentioned. A third-party review from 24 October 2025 described sign-up as requiring only an email address with no identity verification, which is unofficial but consistent with the official account. This light-touch design appealed to people who could not easily get a normal bank card, but it did not protect holders when the programme shut down.

What do I use instead if I still want a crypto card?

The main live options I reviewed are MetaMask, scoring 7.1 out of 10, which is Mastercard and spends directly from your connected wallet with a free virtual card; KAST, scoring 6.1 out of 10, which has a very clear published fee schedule and tiered cashback; and TokenPocket, scoring 5.8 out of 10, a Visa or Mastercard debit across many countries. All of them have their own eligibility rules and fees, and none removes the risk that a card provider or issuer can have a problem of its own.

Is my money safe with a crypto card in general?

No card can promise you safety, and I would distrust any that does. Holding funds with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk, and there is a real history of it: Mt. Gox, Coincheck and the Ronin Network all failed for very large sums. Card programmes also close without warning, as AQUA did and as the FTX card did after Visa terminated its agreements in November 2022. The safer structural choice, where available, is a card that spends directly from your own wallet, because your crypto does not sit on the card provider’s rails.

What did the AQUA card cost, and were there hidden fees?

The card’s fees were not disclosed. The issuance fee and any monthly servicing fee were never published in the beta material, and a third-party review from 24 October 2025 did not mention an issuance or monthly fee either, which is not the same as a published statement that there is none. The maximum was $4,000 USD per month. Neither the top-up fee nor the top-up minimum was ever stated. My cost score of 5 out of 10 reflects that nothing was revealed, rather than that it was cheap or expensive.

How do I delete or close my AQUA account, and get support?

Support was not clearly stated for this programme. The beta post named no support channel and pointed to the terms of service for the list of countries, and there is no clear support route. If you are a holder with a balance, the documented path is the refund request form on the website. For account questions, going through the Aqua app and the terms of service is the sensible starting point, though I cannot promise you a named contact, because the card issuer behind the programme was never identified.

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