A good range of coins and cards, but you hand the balance to the company that owes it to you

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Card.fi is a crypto card that behaves, day to day, less like a bank account and more like a foreign prepaid card with a crypto balance behind it. You top up from your own wallet, the card spends that balance, and the rate you get depends on which tier you picked and how careful you are about which network you send on. The marketing is confident: cards to “200+ countries”, 32 coins across 5 networks, Apple Pay and Google Pay, virtual, physical and stainless steel. The terms tell a much quieter story — Hong Kong trading name, an issuing network that is not named alongside any licence, and a balance held as “a sum we owe you”, which is not the same thing as money in a bank.

I came to this card as a reviewer with two questions in mind: what does it cost in practice, and what exactly am I trusting? The answer to the first is manageable if you choose Premium and mostly spend in USD. The answer to the second is the reason this page exists. I gave it 6.6 out of 10.

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

If you have been bounced by ordinary banks, live in a country with thin banking, or hold a pile of stablecoins and want to spend it without selling everything first, this card is genuinely in scope. If you want your money to exist independently of a company’s good behaviour, read the risks section before you sign up for anything.

Score card

The shape of that table matters more than any single number. The top two marks are about reach and about how the card works when you actually use it, and both are genuinely excellent — this is a well-built product. The bottom mark is about whether the company behind it is the sort you would want holding your money, and the low marks in the middle are about arithmetic: $49 to start spending, and 3.5% every time you spend in a currency other than the card’s.

Who they will issue the card to

They send cards to “200+ countries”, and that claim is about as wide as any in this category. That is the single strongest thing about Card.fi: if your country is not under sanctions that would prohibit the service, the stated answer is that you can be served.

That is narrower than it sounds, and it is narrower in the way you would expect from a Hong Kong company with a Hong Kong card programme. The terms bar residents of, or orders from, “a country subject to sanctions that would prohibit the service”. There is no citizenship rule beyond that, and no residence-versus-citizenship distinction spelled out in the pages I could read. So the test you have to run yourself is the sanctions test, not a nationality test. If your country is on a sanctions list that makes the service illegal for them, the answer is no, and no amount of cleverness changes that.

Two things the pages leave open that you will want to ask about before you rely on this:

• Nothing in the public material names the specific countries where the card works in practice, and there is no country list to check against. “200+” is a marketing figure, not a table.
• I could not find what the actual verification step is, if any, in a given country. That said, the issuer may require identity verification before issuing a card or raising limits — so the first application is exactly when you will find out.

Nobody should tell you how to get around an identity check or a sanctions rule, and I am not going to. What I will tell you is that the legitimate path — proving who you are to the issuer when asked — is the only path that survives contact with a card network, because these programmes are revocable at a moment’s notice (more on that further down).

How to get it

There are two product lines and three card types, and the naming gets confusing because both lines come in more than one form.

Virtual Classic and Virtual Premium are the software-only cards. Physical Classic and Physical Premium are the plastic versions. Metal is a separate tier in stainless steel. Every physical order includes a virtual card alongside it, which is genuinely useful: you get the metal or plastic in the post and the virtual card for Apple Pay or one-off online payments on the same day.

The cards are issued “under licence from the relevant card schemes”. Note what is not said: the schemes are not named. You have probably read elsewhere that this is a Visa card or a Mastercard card. The card’s own wording does not say that, so if it matters to you — and it does matter, because acceptance depends on the network — ask support for the scheme and the BIN country before you pay $49.

Delivery: physical Classic and Premium ship within 5–7 business days. Metal ships express. Replacement cost for a lost or stolen card is not stated anywhere I could find, which is a small but real gap: lose a $249 virtual card and there is no published answer about what comes out of your balance.

Minimum age is 18. Which documents you will need is not stated. The issuer may verify identity before issuing the card or raising limits; if verification fails, the card is not issued and the fee is refunded. That refund promise is worth noting — it is the one part of the cost structure with a clearly stated exit before you get the product.

The whole application happens in your Card.fi account on the web, and the cards are managed there afterwards.

Fees: what it really costs

This is where the card is weakest, and where a reader in a hurry will get the wrong answer if they only look at the headline. There is no monthly fee, no annual fee, no inactivity fee and no minimum balance. That is genuinely good. Everything else has a price attached, and the entry price is high.

Some of that table is genuinely opaque and you should treat it as such. The ATM allowance exists as a concept on Premium and Metal and is “larger” than Classic, but no amount is stated and no withdrawal fee is stated. The spending limits are adjectives, not numbers. The minimum top-up is shown in the app or account rather than on the public pages. If you need to move a large sum through this card, get those numbers in writing before you commit.

Three ordinary payments, priced out

Here is what the card really costs in practice. Take a person spending a mix of coins, converted on arrival, and paying with a virtual card. I use the published percentages exactly as they are.

Buying a $40 lunch, card balance already in dollars. No conversion is needed, so there is no FX fee. If you loaded from a stablecoin, your top-up fee already applied: on Classic that is 1.5% + $1.00, on Premium 1%. Cashback is credited at 0.8% on Classic (capped at 10 USDT a month), 1% on Premium, 1.2% or 2% on Metal depending on the tier level you are on. On Classic, a $40 lunch returns about 32 cents of cashback and eats $1.60 of the top-up fee on the load it came from. The economics are marginal at this scale.

A $200 online subscription paid from EUR. This is where the tier choice matters. The terms say the conversion fee is shown to you before each top-up, and the FX fee is 3.5% on Classic or 2.5% on Premium. On Classic, $200 in EUR spending carries up to $7 of FX charge; on Premium, $5. Spread across a month of ordinary spending, that is the difference between a card that quietly adds up and one that does not. It is also worth remembering that the merchant sees the card as foreign — Card.fi does not name the card currency, so I cannot tell you what country the BIN presents as, and that uncertainty itself can cause declines.

A $60 ATM withdrawal, physical Metal card. Metal has a larger ATM allowance than Classic, but the allowance is not published and neither is the fee. What is published is the number that worries me more: a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds that stays for several days. If you are near a limit and a withdrawal bounces, you can find a chunk of your balance frozen while support works through email or Telegram.

One cost that is not Card.fi’s is worth naming because it surprises people: the blockchain charges for your deposit, not the card provider. Sending USDT on Ethereum costs gas, and it is paid in ETH — so a wallet holding USDT and no ETH cannot send. Tether and Circle coins live on different chains with different fee structures, and that is a cost you pay before Card.fi ever sees the money.

Top up: 32 coins, 5 networks, one irreversible step

This is the strongest section of the product, and the reason most people will end up staying.

Card.fi accepts 32 coins across 5 networks: Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Solana and Kaanch. Among the coins named are USDT, USDC, ETH, BNB, SOL and KAANCH. Your balance arrives converted at the market rate, so you are not choosing a pair in advance — you send what you hold and spend what it becomes.

Every card gets its own deposit address. That is a nice detail for operational privacy and a useful one if you have several cards, but it also means there is a place to get it wrong. The card’s own terms warn about it, and the warning deserves to be repeated: send on the wrong chain and the loss can be permanent. Blockchain transfers are irreversible by design. If you send USDT on a network the card does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, the money can be gone or tied up in a manual support recovery with no guarantee of success.

Two practical consequences follow, and neither is Card.fi’s fault. First, if you hold USDT, check which chain your version is on before you send — the same ticker exists on many, and Circle alone lists USDC as natively supported on 38 networks. Second, remember that “wrong network” is not a theoretical error. It is one of the most common ways people lose money in this whole category, and it happens to people who have done it before.

The order completes after on-chain confirmation. The top-up fee is the one in the fees table. The minimum top-up is shown in your account rather than published, so check it there rather than guessing.

Cash-out is the reverse, and it has one term you must not miss: withdrawals are paid in a supported stablecoin 1:1, with a 1% fee on the amount, and a 7-day hold during which the withdrawal can be cancelled. Seven days is a long time to wait to change your mind, and it is also a long time to be stuck if the company is slow. Closing a card returns your funds to a held balance that is still withdrawable. Virtual cards, once issued, cannot be cancelled at all — which is worth pausing on before you ever buy one.

Paying with it every day

The everyday mechanics here are the best in this whole review, and I mean that without hedging.

Virtual, physical and stainless steel options. Every physical order includes its virtual card. Apple Pay and Google Pay on Classic and Premium, which is the practical answer to “can I pay with my phone” — yes, and the tokenised number is stored on your device, not on a server. ATM access on physical cards. Cards managed from a web dashboard where you can freeze one instantly and set your own limits, with per-card limits applied at authorisation time.

What you cannot do is spend freely. Eighteen merchant category codes are blocked, and the list is worth reading as a whole because it tells you what kind of card this is:

• Crypto (6051), cash (6010), ATMs (6011) and quasi-cash (6050)
• Stored-value loads (6540), remittances (4829), financial institutions (6012), securities brokers (6211)
• Telemarketing (5966), dating (7273), massage (7297)
• Betting (7995), regional gambling (7800/7801/7802/9406), political and religious organisations (8651/8661)

Read that as a map of the intended user. This is a card for buying groceries, travel and ordinary services, and it is actively not a route back into crypto, not a way to move money between accounts, and not a gambling wallet. Blocking crypto purchases prevents you from round-tripping your balance through a gambling site and taking losses. It also means you cannot use it at a crypto-adjacent merchant you might not expect.

Rewards sit in a similar middle. Cashback applies on card spending only: 0.8% on Classic capped at 10 USDT a month, 1% on Premium, and 1.2% (capped at 10,000 USDT, then 2% capped at 20,000 USDT) on Metal. The headline “10% at coffee shops” is real but capped at 10 USDT a month. There is also a balance-based rate of “up to 18%” on Metal, which is explicitly variable — treat it as a marketing number, not a promise. What all of this means in practice: the cashback does not come close to covering the Classic FX fee if you spend outside your own currency.

Two gaps to note. Card.fi disputes are not covered by Card.fi terms — if a transaction goes wrong, you are under the issuer’s cardholder terms, and complaints on card accounts are passed to the On5 Card Network. That means when something goes wrong you are reading someone else’s rules, and the rulebook is not the one you signed up under. Prepaid-card reversal rights vary by country and should not be assumed to be the same as a bank’s. And I found no store ratings for the app, so I cannot give you a read on how well it works day to day.

What can go wrong

Three things, in order of how much they should worry you.

The balance is the company’s debt, not your deposit. The terms describe your balance as “a sum we owe you”. Your crypto arrives, converts at the market rate, and becomes a claim on Kaanch Limited against On5 Card Network. The terms do not address safeguarding or segregation, so the money is not stated to be held in a ring-fenced account anywhere, and it is not stated to be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. This is a custodial arrangement: the provider holds the credentials and controls the balance, and you trust them completely. That is not a hidden flaw, it is the model — but you should decide whether you trust this particular provider, and not assume that being Hong Kong-domiciled settles the question either way.

Nobody will name the licences. The trading name is Kaanch Limited, Hong Kong, under Hong Kong law. The cards are issued by the On5 Card Network. On-chain settlement runs through the Kaanch Network. No licence or registration is named on the pages I read. I searched for complaint pages — Trustpilot, Reddit, any card-pages — for Card.fi and for Kaanch and found nothing at all, which I want to be precise about: that is not a sign of a clean track record, it is a sign that there is not enough public history to have a track record. A company with no visible complaints and no visible complaints page is a company you know less about, not one you know is safe.

A programme can be switched off, and you get notice, not protection. Cards in this category get suspended. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down. Visa suspended WaveCrest in Europe in 2018, closing every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves — they license issuers, and they can withdraw that license. When a programme closes, the pattern is a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then you are asked to withdraw. That is precisely why the 7-day withdrawal hold and the fact that a closed card’s funds stay withdrawable are the two details in this review I would most want you to read twice.

Two more practical risks. Freezing a card is instant and works, but a decline can leave a hold on your funds for up to seven days, which is how a temporary ATM problem becomes a real one. And if you are in the EU or the UK, remember that a card is a payment instrument and a crypto service is a separate business: MiCA took legal effect in June 2023, its stablecoin rules applied from 30 June 2024, and crypto-asset service provider rules from 30 December 2024, with a transition running to 1 July 2026. Card.fi does not present itself to me as a MiCA-authorised CASP, and ESMA keeps a public register where you can check any provider’s status. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice — but if you are in the EU, that register is the first thing to look at.

Support is email from your account address and Telegram. The terms promise acknowledgement within two working days and a resolution or explanation within fifteen. Premium gets priority support. Those are commitments on paper; how they hold up when a blockchain transfer has gone wrong is the thing I would want to see a track record of before trusting.

What to take instead

I scored the three alternatives I looked at for this page myself, on the same criteria, so treat the numbers as comparative rather than absolute.

Cardex is the most interesting of the three, because it runs on named networks rather than an unnamed one, and because it converts at the moment of payment instead of on arrival — which is better when the market moves between loading and buying, and worse when you would rather control the rate. Its problem is disclosure: no fee percentage is published, which is not the same as no fee.

CardFlow is the cheapest to try on paper — a free virtual USD Mastercard — but a card with unstated fees and unstated limits is a card you are meant to discover the cost of by spending. HyperCard’s “more than 176 countries” line is the classic slip worth calling out: that is where the card is accepted, not who can get one. Card.fi, for its part, at least states its exclusions.

If you want a straight comparison rather than a verdict, the honest summary is this. Card.fi wins on breadth — coins, networks, card materials, mobile wallets. Every alternative wins on at least one kind of transparency Card.fi withholds: Cardex on networks, CardFlow on entry cost, HyperCard on card currency. Weigh that against the custodial balance question, which none of them escape either.

Who I would recommend it to

Yes, if you are somewhere the ordinary banking system has failed you or is not built for you, and you have crypto or stablecoins you actually want to spend. If you live in a sanctioned jurisdiction, the answer is no and I would not go looking for a workaround. If you are in the EU or UK, check the ESMA register first and accept that the answer may be no.

Yes, if you hold many different coins across several chains and want one card that spends all of them. That is the use case this product is genuinely built for and the one place it beats everything I compared it to.

Yes, if you will pick Premium rather than Classic and mostly spend in a single currency. $249 sounds steep, but the FX fee drops from 3.5% to 2.5%, the top-up fee from 1.5% + $1.00 to 1%, the limits are higher, and support is prioritised. Anyone spending real money through this card should be on Premium and should not be on Classic.

No, if you are a first-time crypto user. Everything here assumes you already know what a wrong-chain transfer costs you, which chain your USDT lives on, and that a “sum we owe you” is a legal category rather than a reassurance.

No, if you need dispute rights, chargeback protection or deposit-guarantee coverage. This is not the card for someone whose peace of mind depends on being able to argue with a bank.

No, if you are planning to move savings through it. The 7-day withdrawal hold, the 1% withdrawal fee, the custodial balance and the absence of any named licence are four separate reasons to keep a card like this for spending, not for storing.

My own verdict, if you want it in one line: this is a competently built card for someone who already knows crypto, held by a company you will have to take on trust, at a price that only makes sense on Premium. That is worth a 6.6. Someone who wants their crypto to be spendable anywhere, cheaply, without a company standing in the middle is not reading the right kind of card page, and the search that finds this one will not fix that.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Card.fi card?

A prepaid-style payment card that spends a balance you load from your own crypto wallet. You send coins such as USDT, USDC, ETH, BNB or SOL, the amount converts at the market rate on arrival, and the resulting balance pays for goods and services. It comes as virtual, physical plastic, or stainless steel metal, and every physical order includes a virtual card. It is not a bank account and not a credit card.

How does a Card.fi card actually work?

Each card has its own deposit address across Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Solana or the Kaanch network, covering 32 coins. You send to that address, the transfer confirms on-chain, and the value lands as a spendable balance. The terms describe that balance as “a sum we owe you”, which means it is a claim on the company, not a segregated deposit. Spending is capped by tier limits and by whatever you set yourself in the account.

Is Card.fi a bank?

No. It is a Hong Kong trading name, Kaanch Limited, with cards issued under the On5 Card Network and on-chain settlement through the Kaanch Network. No banking licence or payment licence is named on the pages I read, and your balance is not stated to be safeguarded or covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. That is a material difference from an ordinary bank account and it should shape your decision.

Does the Card.fi card require KYC?

Possibly, yes. The issuer may require identity verification before issuing a card or before raising limits, and the minimum age is 18. Which documents you need is not stated on the public pages. If verification fails the card is not issued and the fee is refunded. Verification levels, if there are tiers, are also not stated — you will find out when you apply.

Is the Card.fi card free?

No. A Virtual Classic card is $49 and a Virtual Premium is $249, and there is no monthly, annual, inactivity or minimum-balance fee to offset that. After the entry cost you pay 1.5% + $1.00 to top up on Classic or 1% on Premium, and 3.5% or 2.5% in currency conversion respectively. I scored cost at 2 out of 10 for exactly this.

What are the Card.fi card fees in total?

Top-up is 1.5% + $1.00 on Classic and 1% on Premium. Currency exchange is 3.5% on Classic and 2.5% on Premium, with the conversion fee shown to you before each top-up. Withdrawing to a supported stablecoin costs 1% of the amount with a 7-day hold. ATM availability and allowances depend on card type but no amounts or withdrawal fees are published. Blockchain gas on your deposit is charged by the network, not by Card.fi.

How do I top up a Card.fi card?

Send one of 32 coins to your card’s deposit address on one of 5 networks, and the order completes after on-chain confirmation. The single most important thing to check before you send is the network — the card’s own terms warn that sending on the wrong chain risks permanent loss, and blockchain transfers cannot be reversed. The minimum top-up is shown in your account rather than published, so check it there.

Can I add a Card.fi card to Apple Wallet?

Yes. Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported on Classic and Premium. Your card number is replaced on your phone by a device-specific token stored in the secure element, and each payment uses a one-time code, so the wallet route is the safest way to pay with this card. Spending limits still apply at authorisation, and blocked categories are still blocked.

Is a Card.fi card safe?

Safe enough to use, not safe to depend on. The balance is custodial, licences are not named, and no complaint pages exist for Card.fi or Kaanch in the searches I ran. Protect yourself by keeping only what you need to spend on the card, freezing it in the account the moment you finish, setting your own per-card limits, and treating anything held there as money you could lose access to.

Is a Card.fi card worth it?

It is worth it if you have been unable to get an ordinary bank card, or if you want to spend many different coins without converting them all in advance. It is not worth it if you are in a currency other than the card’s and stay on Classic, because 3.5% on every purchase eats the benefit. On Premium, for someone spending steadily in one currency, the maths works much better — that is who I would point at it.

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