Spending from your own wallet, with strings attached

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

OrbitX pitches itself differently from most crypto cards. Instead of asking you to hand your coins to a platform and then load a prepaid balance, it links a Visa card to a self-custody wallet you control, holding USDT or USDC as collateral and liquidating the stablecoin at the point of sale. In practice that promise runs into a stack of costs, an unfinished product in places, and a public record so thin that the only consumer ratings I could find were two App Store reviews averaging 2.5 out of 5. This review walks through who OrbitX is built for, what it costs, where the gaps are, and what the alternatives look like.

Conditions on the card are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict

OrbitX scores 5.7 out of 10 in my book. That puts it in the middle of the field: it is not a turkey, but it is not a card I would push to a friend without a long conversation about the trade-offs.

The split tells the story. The everyday-use side looks strong: a Visa card (virtual for now, physical “coming soon”), Apple Pay and Google Pay, ATM access, two named tiers. The cost side is weaker: a $12 to $30 annual fee, a $100 to $350 card price, a 1.50% foreign-exchange mark-up on corporate cards, and ATM charges described as “Base ATM charges + 2% + $2” with no clean tier mapping. Top-up options are limited: only USDT or USDC as collateral, with no networks named. And reliability is the worry: the company behind it, OrbitX Network Group Pte. Ltd in Singapore, openly says it is “not a bank or regulated financial institution,” the issuer is a third party called “Third National,” and the only public user feedback I could find is two App Store ratings averaging 2.5 out of 5, one of them reporting a transfer that showed as failed in the app even though the sender side had completed.

This card suits people who already hold USDT or USDC in their own wallet, want to spend that stablecoin balance without first depositing to a custodian, and accept that the consumer terms are international and may not include their country. It does not suit people looking for the cheapest way to spend crypto, anyone who needs a metal or plastic card today rather than later, or US consumers hoping for a US-style consumer framework.

The intended reader, I think, is the self-custody holder who already keeps USDT or USDC in a wallet they control and wants to spend that balance without first selling on an exchange and moving money to a bank. If that is not you, the headline cost numbers and the still-arriving physical card will put you off.

Who they will give the card to

OrbitX runs two sets of terms. There is an international product issued under International Consumer Terms, and a separate US product under US terms. For the international card, the application requires you to attest that you are “not a United States citizen” and not on the OFAC sanctions list. The card-issuer side, Third National, is the party that does the actual onboarding under Visa’s licence, and the user-facing brand, OrbitX, sits in front of it as a programme manager.

There is no published list of supported countries. That is the single most important practical fact on this front, because it means you cannot tell from the website whether your country is in. You find out at sign-up, when the app or onboarding flow either accepts or rejects your documents. For a card aimed at users who “have trouble getting an ordinary bank card,” that opacity is a real friction point. The reader who skims past it is the reader who later finds their country is not on the list and has done the KYC for nothing.

The other thing to notice is the language. The international card is built for non-US users, and the company behind it is a Singapore entity. The company itself states it is “not a bank or regulated financial institution,” which is a phrase worth reading twice. It is not the same as saying OrbitX is unregulated, because the issuer Third National holds the Visa licence, but it does mean the brand in front of you is not the entity that runs your account or holds your money. If something goes wrong, you are dealing with the issuer and the brand, not with a bank you can walk into.

How to get the card

Sign-up is through the iOS app OrbitXPay, which carries an 18+ age rating in the App Store. The app release notes reference a KYC process and resubmissions, so identity checks exist, but the card’s public pages do not list the documents you will need or what proof of address is accepted. That is a small but real gap: a reader who only has, say, a national ID card and a recent utility bill has no way to check before starting whether those will pass.

Once KYC is past, what you actually get today is a virtual Visa card. The fee page lists a Neo tier (Visa Platinum) and a Lux tier (Visa Signature), and it shows plastic at $100 for Neo and metal at $350 for Lux, but the app itself says physical cards are “coming soon.” So the practical experience right now is: sign up, pass KYC, get a virtual card, and wait for the plastic or metal.

Delivery, when the physical card does start shipping, is “1 to 4 weeks depending on user location,” which is a wide range. The cost of a replacement card, if you lose it, is not stated.

The KYC levels, in the sense of whether the card has a higher tier that lifts limits, are also not stated. The App Store listing claims there are “no spending limits,” which is a vendor marketing line and not something to take as confirmed; I treat it as such until the card’s own pages or terms say otherwise.

What it really costs

Two things to keep separate here: the cost of the card itself, and the cost of using it.

The card has a one-off price and an annual fee. Neo costs $100 for the plastic and $12 per year; Lux costs $350 for the metal and $30 per year. Both annual fees are paid annually only, so there is no monthly drip, but the card price is the bigger upfront shock, especially for Lux.

Using the card has three fee lines I could pin down, plus a few I could not. The clearest is for corporate cards: a 1.50% foreign-exchange mark-up on non-USD spend, a 0.50% deposit fee, and a $0.20 transaction fee. The consumer foreign-exchange fee is not stated on the public pages I could see, which is awkward, because the card is USD-based: collateral is measured in USD, and non-USD transactions are converted by the card association. If you are spending in euros, pounds, or any non-USD currency, expect a conversion spread on top of the network’s own rate; the size of that spread is the missing number.

ATM withdrawals are billed as “Base ATM charges + 2% + $2.” That is a confusing way to put it, and the fee page does not cleanly map “Base” to a Neo or Lux tier, so the reader is left reading “somewhere between whatever the ATM operator charges, plus two percent, plus two dollars.” For a $200 ATM withdrawal, that is $6 plus the operator’s fee, before any FX spread.

Daily and monthly limits are not stated on the card’s own pages. The App Store’s marketing text says there are no spending limits, but I would not treat that as a contractual commitment. Cashback or rewards, similarly, are not stated. There is no mention of a points programme or a refund on spend.

Two or three everyday payments to picture it. Buying a $5 coffee in USD with a USD-denominated collateral balance: no foreign exchange, the card association handles authorisation, no consumer FX fee stated. Paying a $40 restaurant bill in euros on holiday: 1.50% corporate FX shown on the fee page, consumer FX not stated, so I would budget at least 1.5% and probably more. Taking $200 out of an ATM abroad: 2% plus $2 from OrbitX, plus whatever the local ATM operator charges, plus the FX spread if the cash is in a non-USD currency. None of those numbers are ruinous on their own, but they stack, and a cardholder who uses the card heavily in non-USD contexts will feel it.

A quick way to read the table: the headline numbers ($12, $30, $100, $350) are honest and the consumer FX gap is the one to ask about before you commit.

How to top it up

Topping up OrbitX is not the same as topping up a prepaid card. There is no fiat deposit button. The model is collateral in your own wallet: you hold USDT or USDC in a self-custody wallet that OrbitX can see, that stablecoin is recorded as collateral against your card, and at the point of sale the stablecoin is liquidated to pay the merchant. The app shows a “Cash Account” and a “Card Account,” which is the closest the user gets to a “load the card” action.

The networks on which the stablecoin transfer should arrive are not stated. That is a significant omission, because picking the wrong network on a stablecoin transfer is the classic way to lose a deposit. USDC exists on dozens of chains; USDT exists on several too; sending USDT over a chain the card does not support, or USDC over a chain Circle no longer supports, can mean the funds arrive at an address the system does not credit, with no automatic recovery. The fee page and the help pages I could see do not name Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Base, Polygon, or any other network as the supported one for this product. The reader’s safe assumption is “I need to confirm in the app which network to send on, before I send anything.”

What happens to unspent collateral is partly addressed. OrbitX’s terms say “Any unencumbered Collateral balances shall remain freely accessible,” which is the right direction: collateral that has not been used to back a payment should be retrievable. The exact process for getting it back to your wallet is not described in the public pages, so again you are dependent on the app showing the right button at the right time.

A related point: card payments are settled by liquidating the stablecoin. The crypto-to-fiat conversion fee for that liquidation is not stated. Network fees on the underlying transfer (gas, bandwidth) are paid by you, the user, to the blockchain, not to OrbitX; that is normal for the category, but it is a real cost on chains where gas is high.

Paying with it every day

Once the card is in your phone, the everyday experience is built around mobile wallets. Apple Pay and Google Pay terms are published, which is the practical signal that tokenisation into those wallets works, and both replace the card number with a device-specific number so the actual PAN never leaves the Secure Element. Online, the card runs on the standard 3-D Secure rails under the Visa Secure brand, so you should expect a one-time code or biometric step on bigger purchases, and a frictionless approval on smaller, low-risk ones.

In-store, OrbitX runs the card through the standard Visa rails. There is no magnetic-stripe fallback in countries that have moved to chip-and-PIN only, but the card supports PIN. ATM access is part of the package, with the fee line described in the cost section.

Two restrictions worth knowing. First, the prohibited-merchant list includes “cash-like transactions,” which on most card programmes is a category that catches cryptocurrency purchases, wire transfers, and remittance, alongside betting. The card also says it may deny “internet gambling.” That last one is partly an issuer-policy thing: the underlying card association’s MCC for gambling (7995) is blocked by many issuers at the programme level, and the specific block list varies by issuer. The reader who needs the card for online betting should not plan on it.

Second, what you do not get is rewards. There is no stated cashback, points, or sign-up bonus on the card’s pages. That puts OrbitX behind a growing number of crypto cards that do pay a small percentage back, and it is one of the reasons the cost score sits where it does.

The app is called OrbitXPay on iOS. As of 21 October 2026 the App Store rating was 2.5 out of 5 from 2 ratings, which is too small a sample to draw a strong conclusion from. Google Play was not found. The complaint worth flagging is one user report that a bank transfer showed as failed inside the app even though the sender side had completed, and that support replied from what looked like a non-official email address. I have no way to verify the second half of that, but the first half is the kind of incident that would freeze a cardholder’s account in real life: the app says the money is gone, the bank says the money is gone, and no one is replying. That is a known failure mode for early-stage crypto products, and it is the one to read the support section with.

The dispute process is the standard one. You have 60 days from the date a charge posts to dispute it. The card’s terms give you 10 business days to respond to a “Notice of Dispute” from the issuer, and unresolved disputes after 30 days may go to arbitration. That arbitration clause is worth reading, because it usually means you cannot take the dispute to a public court; the arbitration is binding and usually confidential.

What can go wrong

A few risks sit on top of the cost and topping-up story, and they are not symmetrical.

The company. OrbitX Network Group Pte. Ltd is registered in Singapore at 3 Fraser Street, #04-23A Duo Tower, UEN 202448623M. The card’s own pages say it is “not a bank or regulated financial institution.” The card is issued by a separate entity called “Third National” under a Visa licence. That two-layer structure is normal for the category, but it shifts where your counterparty sits. If you have a complaint about a fee or a frozen account, the answer is the issuer; if you have a complaint about the app or the wallet experience, the answer is OrbitX. In practice, brand and issuer tend to talk past each other on edge cases.

Liquidation. The card’s collateral model means that, if a payment is not settled within one calendar day, or if the value of the collateral falls below the charges, the position can be liquidated. “Liquidated” here is the everyday English word: the stablecoin is sold to cover what you owe. For a cardholder who treats the card like a debit card, the risk is small. For a cardholder who ignores a payment for a day or two, or who is using a volatile token as collateral, the risk is real. The card’s terms specifically say OrbitX and the issuer do not hold custody of the collateral, which is true: it is in your wallet. But the practical effect of that is that the liquidation, when it triggers, happens against your funds, not against a balance the platform can reverse.

Freeze and two-factor authentication. Freeze and 2FA on the card are not stated. Most modern cards offer an in-app freeze toggle and a 2FA code on sign-in, and I would assume those exist until proven otherwise, but the card’s own pages do not say so. If those features are central to how you decide to use a card, this is the section to ask the support team about before you load anything.

Support. The only public contact I could find is [email protected]. The contact form languages and the support hours are not stated, and there is no Trustpilot page, no major review site presence, and only the two App Store reviews. That thin support layer is itself a risk: if your account is locked, you are emailing a small team in a Singapore time zone and hoping.

Programme closure. A broader category risk: card programmes get shut down. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX in November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa card issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. When that happens, the typical sequence is a notice period, then a stop on new loads, then a stop on spending, then a window to withdraw remaining balances. There is no public sign that OrbitX is in any such process today; the point is that no crypto card carries an absolute guarantee that it will be there in five years, and a self-custody model that keeps funds in your own wallet until the moment of payment is structurally better placed to absorb that.

Sanctions. The international card’s terms require you to attest that you are not a US citizen and not on an OFAC sanctions list. If you are sanctioned, the application will fail, and using the card while sanctioned is a criminal offence in most jurisdictions. I mention this only because the question comes up: do not try to get around it.

What to take instead

Three cards come up as realistic alternatives to OrbitX, and they make the trade-offs in OrbitX’s design easier to see.

Sponge is a virtual-only card on the same self-custody model. Sponge scores 4.9 out of 10. It is described on its homepage as a credit card issued by Rain, a Visa Principal Member, accepted wherever Visa is accepted. The card is created by createSpongeCard and funded by USDC collateral moved from the Sponge wallet, with the SDK mentioning Base or Solana as optional chains. Country support, fees and rewards are not stated on Sponge’s public pages, so the reader who goes that way is buying into a less complete product and accepting the same kind of “ask the support team” friction. The Sponge score reflects that: it is cheaper to think about, but it is not the answer to most of OrbitX’s gaps.

Nexo is the established name in this category. Nexo scores 6.3 out of 10. It is available to residents and citizens of “selected European countries, including the EEA and the United Kingdom,” with no country list on the page and a list of excluded jurisdictions that is also not named. The card is virtual and physical, issued by DiPocket UAB. There is no monthly, annual, or inactivity fee. The virtual card needs at least $50 in the account to activate. The physical card is shipped free but requires a balance above $5,000 in digital assets and a Gold tier. Foreign-exchange fees are 0.2% on weekdays in the EEA, UK and Switzerland, 2% in the rest of the world, and 0.7% and 2.5% on weekends. There is no stated crypto conversion fee; the card spends stablecoins, crypto and FiatX assets (EURx, USDx, GBPx) in Debit Mode. Cashback is paid in NEXO tokens or Bitcoin, by tier (Platinum 2%/0.5%, Gold 1%/0.3%, Silver 0.7%/0.2%, Base 0.5%/0.1%), and only on purchases in Credit Mode with more than $5,000 in digital assets held in the account. The non-EEA, non-UK footprint is the gap; one unofficial news report from Cointelegraph in 2025 described a Bulgarian police raid on Nexo’s Sofia office over alleged Russia-sanctions and AML violations, with no official Nexo statement on Russians found. Treat that as unofficial and unconfirmed, but it is the kind of regulatory pressure that the self-custody model of OrbitX is partly built to avoid.

Xplace is the higher-score alternative at 7.7 out of 10. Country list is not stated, with the usual “services are not available in all jurisdictions” line; the card is accepted in 160-plus countries wherever Visa is. Both virtual and physical cards are available, with Silver live and Gold and Platinum “coming soon,” and physical-card delivery of 7 to 14 business days. The card has Cash mode (spends a stablecoin balance) and Credit mode (borrows against holdings, with no origination fee). The annual fee runs from free at Basic to $99 at Silver, $249 at Gold and $999 at Platinum. The Platinum tier advertises “0% FX,” with FX for other tiers and the conversion fee not stated. Funding is on Solana, with cbBTC, wETH, SOL, JitoSOL, USDC, USDT and xStocks as deposit assets. Credit-mode cashback runs from 0.5% at Basic to 2% at Platinum, paid in USDC to the wallet at settlement; Cash-mode cashback is not stated. The credit-mode cashback, the free Basic tier, and the named network make Xplace the easier product to read.

The honest read of that table is that Xplace is the cleaner product today, Nexo is the more proven name with a narrower geographic footprint, Sponge is a niche virtual-only option, and OrbitX is in the middle on cost and below average on transparency.

Who I would recommend this to

I would recommend the OrbitX card to a specific kind of reader, and I would steer most other readers elsewhere.

The reader I would point at it. Someone who already holds USDT or USDC in a self-custodial wallet they trust, who wants to spend that stablecoin balance without selling to fiat first and depositing to a card, who can tolerate a still-arriving physical card and a virtual card in the meantime, and who is not a US citizen (for the international product) and not on a sanctions list. That reader is paying for a self-custody model that is genuinely different from a custodial card: their collateral stays in their wallet until the moment of payment, and the issuer and brand do not hold custody of it. The 2% + $2 ATM line, the 1.50% corporate FX and the unstated consumer FX are real costs, but they are not unreasonable in the category, and the card’s everyday marks (Apple Pay, Google Pay, ATM access) are present.

The reader I would not. Anyone who needs a plastic or metal card today rather than in a few months, anyone who wants cashback or rewards (the card does not state any), anyone who wants a published list of supported countries before they start KYC, and anyone who lives in a country where the consumer FX mark-up is likely to dominate their spend. The lack of a stated consumer FX is, in my book, the single biggest gap on the cost side. The lack of a country list is the single biggest gap on the access side. Both can be fixed by emailing support, but neither is fixed on the page.

One last thing to be clear about. A self-custody card still has an issuer, and the issuer is the entity you will deal with if a charge goes wrong, if a refund fails, or if the account is frozen. The brand in front of you is not your bank. OrbitX’s own terms say so. That is fine, as long as the reader knows it before they load anything.

Frequently asked questions

What is the OrbitX card?

The OrbitX card is a Visa payment card linked to a self-custody wallet in which the cardholder holds USDT or USDC. The stablecoin is treated as collateral and is liquidated at the point of sale to pay the merchant. The card runs in a Neo tier (Visa Platinum) and a Lux tier (Visa Signature) and supports Apple Pay and Google Pay.

How does the OrbitX card work?

You hold USDT or USDC in your own wallet, the card reads that balance as collateral, and at the moment a payment is made the stablecoin is sold to pay the merchant through the Visa network. If a payment is not settled within one calendar day, or if the collateral value falls below the charges, the position can be liquidated. OrbitX and the issuer do not hold custody of the collateral.

Is OrbitX a bank?

No. The card’s own pages describe OrbitX as “not a bank or regulated financial institution.” The card is issued by a separate entity called Third National under a Visa licence, and OrbitX Network Group Pte. Ltd in Singapore operates the brand and the app in front of it.

Who owns OrbitX?

OrbitX Network Group Pte. Ltd is the company behind the brand, registered in Singapore at 3 Fraser Street, #04-23A Duo Tower, UEN 202448623M. The card is issued by a separate entity called Third National under a Visa licence.

Is the OrbitX card available in my country?

The card’s public pages do not publish a country list. The international product is for non-US users, and the US product is for US consumers. Whether your country is supported is determined at sign-up when the app accepts or rejects your documents. The card-issuer side, Third National, runs the actual onboarding under its Visa licence.

How do I get the OrbitX card?

Sign up through the iOS app OrbitXPay, complete the KYC process, and a virtual Visa card is issued. Plastic and metal cards are listed on the fee page at $100 (Neo) and $350 (Lux), but the app says physical cards are “coming soon.” Delivery, when it starts, is “1 to 4 weeks depending on user location.”

Does the OrbitX card require KYC?

Yes. The app release notes reference a KYC process and resubmissions. The card’s public pages do not list the documents required, what proof of address is accepted, or whether there are different KYC levels. The app carries an 18+ age rating in the App Store.

How do I top up the OrbitX card?

The model is collateral, not top-up. You hold USDT or USDC in a self-custody wallet that the card can see, and that stablecoin is treated as collateral. At the point of sale the stablecoin is liquidated. The card’s pages do not name the supported networks, so the network to send on must be confirmed in the app before any transfer is made.

How much does the OrbitX card cost?

The Neo tier is $100 for a plastic card and $12 per year, the Lux tier is $350 for a metal card and $30 per year. ATM withdrawals are billed as “Base ATM charges + 2% + $2.” For corporate cards the foreign-exchange mark-up is 1.50% on non-USD spend, with a 0.50% deposit fee and a $0.20 transaction fee. The consumer foreign-exchange fee is not stated on the card’s public pages.

Is the OrbitX card safe?

The card’s collateral is in your own wallet, not on the platform, which removes the custodian-hack risk that has hit exchanges in the past. The trade-off is that the card’s own pages do not publish 2FA, freeze or app-based limits, the support contact is a single email address, and the public user feedback is two App Store ratings averaging 2.5 out of 5. Card programmes in this category have been shut down before, and a self-custody model is the better structure for absorbing that, but it is not a guarantee.

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