A self-custody card stopped mid-flight

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

I have spent time with this card’s own pages, with the reporting around its pause, and with the fee and limit claims that circulate on third-party sites. What I found is not really a review of features. It is an account of a programme that stopped being available partway through, and what that means if you are one of the people affected.

Here is my short answer. Solflare scores 3.2 out of 10 in my assessment, and the score is not mostly about fees or features. It is about availability. The cards were paused on 28 July 2026 after the issuer, named in reporting as Kulipa, wound down. As of late August 2026 the relaunch was still sitting in the roadmap as a future item, and no relaunch had been announced by 20 October 2026, when I checked. A replacement card was promised “in August” 2026 with Apple Pay, higher limits and cashback. That promise has not visibly landed.

If you are reading this because you hold a Solflare card, the practical news is better than the headline: your money was never on the card. It stayed in your own self-custodial wallet, so there is nothing for you to withdraw and nothing for anyone to freeze. What you have lost is the spending tool, not the funds. I go into that in the section on holders below.

If you are reading this because you were thinking of applying, then the honest situation is simpler: you cannot get one. There is no application route open, no new cards being issued, and existing cards do not carry over to whatever comes next. The eligibility rules the site used to publish are still described on paper, but they describe a programme that is not running.

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

The score, criterion by criterion

Here is how the total breaks down, with my reasoning for each mark.

The two marks that pull hardest are the zeros and the twos. A card that is not available cannot be recommended to anyone, and a card whose issuing partner disappeared cannot be called reliable. The 7 for cost is generous in a strange way: because the card’s own pages do not disclose pricing, the published numbers are all unofficial and they contradict each other, and I gave the criterion credit only for what looked cheap rather than penalising it for being unknowable.

The audience I would write this page for is Solflare wallet holders waiting for the relaunch. If you are already in the wallet, the sections on what happened and what to do matter most. If you are not, the alternatives section matters more.

What happened to the programme

Cards are currently paused. That single sentence explains most of the score, but the details matter, because “paused” is doing more work than it appears to.

The sequence I could establish runs like this. On 28 July 2026 Solflare paused its virtual and physical cards because the issuer wound down. Reporting at the time cited Solflare’s co-founder pointing to solvency issues at the issuer, named as Kulipa. A replacement card was promised, “in August” 2026, with Apple Pay, Google Pay, higher limits and cashback. By the end of August the relaunch was still a future item on the roadmap. By 20 October 2026 I found no relaunch.

What was not affected, according to the pause notice: the wallet, staking and swaps carried on as normal. Open Borrow positions remain accessible in the Cards tab. Auto-renewing subscriptions tied to the card stopped. The notice says user funds were not at risk, because the money never left the self-custodial wallet.

There is a detail I keep coming back to, because it is the kind of thing that catches people. The solflare.com pages still carry the old “Get Solflare Card” marketing, with no pause notice on them. So if you land on the site from a search engine, the page in front of you reads like a sales page for something you cannot buy. Nothing on those pages tells you the programme is closed. That mismatch between the public marketing and the actual status is itself worth weighing if you are deciding whether to trust anything else the site says.

On what the card was meant to be, the official description still stands: a self-custody Mastercard that deducts USDC from your wallet at checkout, accepted at “100M+ merchants”. The issuer is not named on the official pages. The site footer names Solrise Finance Ltd, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, and marketing may be handled by an affiliate, Blockadopt d.o.o., Zagreb, Croatia. Licences are not stated. Existing cards do not carry over to a replacement.

Two more pieces of the picture, both official. Verification in the app was instant; the pages do not state which documents, proof of address or age requirements apply. Google Pay works; Apple Pay was listed as “coming soon” and tied to the card relaunch. Whether gambling or specific merchants are blocked is not stated.

So where you were eligible matters less than it looks, but for completeness: cards were offered in the EEA, the UK and “other countries”, decided case by case, with eligibility checked by requesting a card in the app. There is no country list, and the pages do not say whether the rule follows residence or citizenship.

One thing to be careful about, when you read reporting on a card like this: the app rating on the App Store is 4.8 out of 5 from 9.6K ratings, per a third-party read on 6 October 2026. That is the wallet app’s rating, not the card’s. It tells you the app is well liked. It says nothing about whether you can get a card today. Third-party reviews also suggest that re-enrolling with a new KYC round is “likely” for a replacement card; the official pages describe instant in-app KYC verification and state no levels.

If you already have the card

Here is the part I would read twice if the card is yours.

There is no card balance. Your funds never sat with the issuer; they stay in your own self-custodial wallet. The official line is that “There is nothing you need to do”. Your existing card stopped working on 28 July 2026. Open Borrow positions stay accessible in the Cards tab.

The card spent USDC directly from your Solana wallet, which means there was never a load step in the first place. You did not top the card up. The card drew on the wallet at the moment of purchase. So the mechanics of “topping up” and “withdrawing from the card” do not apply to this product, and if you have been reading guides that tell you to move money from your wallet onto a Solflare card, that advice is describing a different card.

On limits and fees, the honest position is that the official pages state none of it. Daily, monthly and ATM limits are not stated. ATM fees are not stated. What circulates on third-party sites disagrees with itself:

• ATM fee of 2%, per one review, while another site lists free ATM withdrawals; the review page itself says to confirm in the app.
• Limits shown as unlimited on one third-party site, while another says no limits are published.
• Annual fee free, per one source; card price given as “TBD”, to be confirmed in the app.
• Virtual card issued instantly in the app, physical card optional, no shipping time or fee published.

None of that is confirmed by Solflare. Take it as a set of claims to check in the app if and when cards exist again, not as a price list.

Higher limits were part of what the notice said would return with the new card. Since there is no new card, that promise is untested.

Support is the one practical thing that still exists: a “24/7 human support team” reachable by message in the app. What happens with a dispute on a card that no longer works is not stated, and the help centre has a single card article, about the pause.

What can go wrong

Two kinds of risk here, and they are not the same kind.

The first is the one that already happened. Your card stopped working through no action of yours. The issuer behind it wound down. This is not a theoretical risk to weigh; it is the reason the score is 3.2 rather than something higher. It is worth understanding why, because the same structure is common across crypto cards.

A crypto card usually involves more parties than the brand suggests. The card network, Visa or Mastercard, routes the messages and sets the rules. The issuer, a bank or e-money institution licensed to issue under that network’s licence, actually holds the card programme. The crypto brand is often only a programme manager or a front end that markets the card. When the issuer disappears, the network does not step in to save the programme: Visa and Mastercard license issuers and can suspend a programme. 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 card issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Programme closures tend to follow a shape: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances.

Solflare’s shape is gentler than that, because there was no balance to withdraw. Self-custody did its job.

The second risk is the one that stays with you. Self-custody means the keys are yours, which means key loss, phishing and malware that swaps a copied address are yours to handle. A seed phrase, typically 12 to 24 words, is an unencrypted form of the private key; anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds. Blockchain transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen key has no built-in recovery — the network cannot freeze or return funds. That is the trade you made, and for most people it is the right one, but self-custody shifts the entire burden of security and recovery onto you.

On the company’s side, here is what I could and could not establish. Solflare’s site footer names Solrise Finance Ltd in the British Virgin Islands. Marketing may be handled by an affiliate in Zagreb. The card issuer is not named on official pages; third parties name Kulipa, and no new partner has been named. Licences are not stated. None of this is a legal finding — I am not assessing compliance and you should not treat it as one — but it does mean you cannot answer the question “who is actually behind this card” from the card’s own pages.

Security features the official page names: biometric protection, 3-D Secure authentication, partner fraud defences and instant spending notifications. Insurance is not stated. Keep the distinction in mind: 3-D Secure adds an identity check to online payments, where the issuer assesses risk and either approves frictionlessly or challenges you. Under 3-D Secure, liability for fraudulent online payments can shift, and critics argue it can shift to the cardholder.

Then there is the reviews. Trustpilot for solflare.com is 3.9 out of 5 from 66 reviews, per a third-party citation with no date given and the live page not read. About 45% of those are marked critical, citing lost funds, failed transactions and suspicious token approvals. Read carefully: these are wallet complaints, not card complaints, and I found no card-specific complaint pattern. A wallet that lets you approve a malicious token is a real and separate risk from a card that gets declined.

One practical thing that catches people: a card issued in one country can look foreign to a shop in another. Merchants can look up the issuing institution and country from the card’s first digits and apply extra scrutiny if it differs from the billing address. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards for exactly that reason. And address verification, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address a buyer types with issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines. A declined authorisation may also leave a hold on your funds that can stay for several days.

What to take instead

I am not going to pretend the three cards below are close to what Solflare promised. They are not. They are the options that exist while Solflare does not, and I have set out the differences plainly so you can judge for yourself.

RedotPay

This is the one whose country rules I would read most carefully, because two official pages word them differently.

The KYC list (“Unsupported Countries/Regions”) says: “If you are a citizen of any of the countries or regions listed below, you will not be able to complete identity verification (KYC) or use RedotPay’s services”, and that restrictions are “based on local regulations and sanction policies—not on individuals”. It lists Afghanistan, Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bouvet Island, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Congo (DR), Croatia, Cuba, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Mainland China, Mali, Montenegro, Myanmar, Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, North Korea, North Macedonia, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, United States, Venezuela, Yemen, Zimbabwe.

The card-issuance list, dated 28 August 2026 and covering 47 places, adds India, Indonesia, Morocco, Nepal, Singapore and Turkey, with a different formulation: “Residents of these areas are ineligible for both virtual and physical cards”, and they cannot be used as billing addresses. Citizenship is not mentioned there. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Serbia appear on both lists. Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan and the UAE appear on neither.

So depending on which page you read, the same person can be excluded on citizenship in one place and on residence in another. That is worth knowing before you apply, not after.

Cost-wise it is the most expensive of the three to enter: 10.00 USD for a virtual card, 100.00 USD for a physical one, non-cancellable and non-refundable once paid, 5.00 USD for a first virtual replacement and 10.00 USD each later. Account maintenance is waived, so no monthly or annual fee and no inactivity fee mentioned. There is a paid tier, RedotPay Pro, at 12.90 USD monthly or 129.00 USD annual. Fees: 1.00% transaction fee, waived on default-currency transactions and 1.20% on non-default currency; small authorisations of 1.00 USD or less are free for the first five per card per month then 0.2 USD; declines are free for the first three per month then 0.5 USD. Some merchants carry an extra 1.5% with a 0.50 USD minimum, waived for the first three per month, including Gulf Health Counsel, Free Fire, PUBG Mobile, Brawl Stars, eFootball, Facebook Ads and Discord. The 5 USD welcome reward is spending-only, valid 30 days, and cannot be used toward the issuance fee.

Bybit Card

This is the one with the most elaborate cashback structure, and the one where region matters enormously.

The help centre lists card regions as Argentina, AIFC (Kazakhstan), Georgia, Kazakhstan, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Asia Pacific. The cards page states: “This product is not meant for European Economic Area customers. All European Economic Area customer participation is strictly prohibited.” The application asks for country of residence; if unsupported, Bybit “will register your interest”. Separately, Bybit’s fiat-service restricted list — which covers deposits, withdrawals and One-Click Buy, not the card itself — includes Belarus, the Russian Federation, Serbia, China and the United States, with a note that “Russian users can only make RUB transaction in Fiat”. I found no card-specific statement on Russian or Belarusian citizens, and no citizenship-versus-residence rule.

Cards are virtual and physical, with a virtual card obtained first; physical is not available in Peru and the rollout is in phases. Networks vary: Mastercard prepaid in Argentina; Mastercard credit card as written in the table for AIFC, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Australia and Mexico; Visa prepaid in Brazil and Peru; Visa credit in Asia Pacific. Card currency is USD for AIFC, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Australia and Asia Pacific; ARS, MXN, BRL, and PEN or USD for the rest. Validity runs three years in most regions, six in Argentina, five in Brazil, Mexico and Peru.

Virtual issuance is free in all regions “until further notice”. Physical issuance or replacement: 29.99 USD in Australia, 5 USD or USDT in Argentina, 29,99 USDT in Georgia, 29,99 USDT in Kazakhstan (AIFC), 5 USDT in Asia Pacific, none in Brazil and Mexico. VIPs holding a physical card in Australia, Kazakhstan (AIFC), Georgia or Asia Pacific pay no issuance or replacement fee. The page states “Auto interest, no annual fees”.

The costs to watch are the conversion and FX fees. Crypto conversion is 0.9% over the One-Click Sell rate in Australia, Asia Pacific, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Brazil and Mexico; 0.5% in Argentina; Peru not supported. FX is 2% on top of the network rate in Australia, Asia Pacific, Georgia and Mexico; 2% “International Fee” in Kazakhstan (AIFC) on purchases outside Kazakhstan even in USD; 7% in Argentina; 1.5% in Brazil; 1% in Peru. Argentina also lists VAT at 21% on foreign digital services, 30% tax on foreign transactions and provincial gross-income tax of 1% to 13.2%. I am describing those numbers as published, not advising on what you would owe.

Rewards are unusually structured. From 5 October 2026 at 10:00 UTC, only crypto-funded transactions earn points or cashback; fiat-funded spending does not. The tiers: Base 2.00% with a 5 USD monthly cap and no unlock spend; Beta 2% with 50 USD cap at 500 USD spend; Alpha 4% with 150 USD cap at 3,500 USD; Apex 6% with 250 USD cap at 9,500 USD; Omega 8% with 400 USD cap at 12,500 USD; Infinite 10% with 600 USD cap at 25,000 USD. Points pend for four calendar days, cashback in USDT is points times 0.002, and Auto Cashback must be on. There is a welcome offer of 10% cashback up to 110 USDT in the first 30 days, and 100% cashback on “must-have subscriptions” for VIPs and Alpha tier and above.

The card has no balance of its own: it draws on the Funding Account and the Flexible Easy Earn balance, fiat first, and sells crypto if fiat is insufficient. Supported coins are BTC, ETH, XRP, USDT, USDC and GRAM, with a default priority of USDT over USDC over GRAM over BTC over ETH over XRP that you can reorder.

MetaMask

This is the closest in spirit to what Solflare was trying to be, and the most expensive.

Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay among the examples — with other regions on a waitlist. Proof of residency is required, and the page is explicit that “Ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending”. Citizenship rules are not stated. US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ.

It is a Mastercard. A virtual card is issued first and instantly; a metal card can be pre-ordered in the app after virtual approval; one card per user. The issuer is Monovate and the card provider is Crypto Life. Card currency is not stated. The virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee; the metal card is 199 USD a year.

Fees are described as a “minimal fee for each transaction” with no amount given on the pages I read, plus “no additional MetaMask fees”, no foreign transaction fee, and the Mastercard rate is used. It spends directly from the connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, with mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT named. A Solana-only wallet cannot withdraw credit.

Cashback is paid in mUSD into the Money Account: 1% on the virtual card; the metal card’s headline is 3% but the footnote limits 3% to the first 10,000 USD spent and 1% after that. There is also a $FLY bonus of 5X on virtual and 7X on metal via the Blackbird dining app.

What the comparison does not settle

None of these is Solflare with the pause fixed. The differences that matter most are structural and you should weigh them yourself:

• Custody. MetaMask and Solflare are self-custody: funds stay in your wallet until payment, and key management is yours. RedotPay and Bybit are closer to custodial or account-based models, where the platform holds the balance.
• Single coin versus several. Solflare was USDC on Solana only. That is simple, and it is also a hard limit if you hold anything else.
• Where you are. This is the axis on which these cards differ most, and the axis where the official pages contradict themselves most.
• What you lose when a programme closes. With no balance on the card, a closure is an inconvenience. With a balance, it is a withdrawal problem.

Who I would recommend it to

Nobody, right now, as a card to apply for. I would put it more plainly than that: there is no product here to recommend, and the honest recommendation is to wait and watch, or pick a different card.

To the specific people I would say this to:

If you hold a Solflare card and a Solflare wallet. You are fine on funds and finished on spending. Check that you understand what stops working: subscriptions on auto-renew through the card will not, and any recurring payment you forgot about will fail rather than silently succeed. That is the practical thing to audit this month. Your staking, swaps and open Borrow positions are untouched.

If you were about to apply. Do not spend time on it. Eligibility rules exist on paper but issuance is closed, and the pages you would be reading still read like a sales page.

If you are drawn to the self-custody idea specifically. That is a good idea, and MetaMask is the closest live implementation I found, though it costs 199 USD a year for the metal card and sign-up is limited to 45 listed places. RedotPay is the cheapest to hold and the most expensive to enter, with the most complicated country rules. Bybit has the richest cashback and the strictest regional exclusions.

If you need a card in the next week. Go with an option that is actually issuing, and check the fees for your own country and your own spending pattern before you pick — several of these numbers vary by region and some of the published figures contradict each other.

Frequently asked questions

What happened to the Solflare card?

The cards were paused on 28 July 2026 after the issuer, named in reporting as Kulipa, wound down; a Solflare co-founder cited solvency issues. A replacement was promised for “in August” 2026 with Apple Pay, higher limits and cashback, but by late August it was still a roadmap item and no relaunch had been announced by 20 October 2026. Your funds stayed in your self-custodial wallet throughout.

Is Solflare a bank?

No. The site’s footer names Solrise Finance Ltd, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, and licences are not stated. In this kind of product the brand is often only a programme manager or front end, while a licensed bank or e-money institution actually issues the card. The card issuer is not named on Solflare’s own pages.

Do I need to withdraw my money or close my account?

No. There is no card balance, because the card spent USDC directly from your Solana wallet, so there is nothing held by the issuer to take back. The official notice says “There is nothing you need to do”. What you may want to do is check subscriptions that were on auto-renew through the card, since those stopped.

Can I still use my Solflare card?

No. Existing cards stopped working on 28 July 2026, and the solflare.com pages still show the old “Get Solflare Card” marketing with no pause notice on them. If you land on the site from a search engine, the page will read like a product you can buy, which it is not. Support is still reachable by message in the app.

Is the Solflare card safe and is my money at risk?

Your funds are not at risk in the way a custodial balance would be, because they never left your wallet. The risk that materialised was availability: the card stopped working through no action of yours. What you do carry with self-custody is responsibility for your keys, since anyone with your seed phrase can restore the wallet and blockchain transfers are typically irreversible.

Does the Solflare card require KYC, and how long does it take?

Verification in the app was instant. The official pages do not state which documents are required, nor whether proof of address or a minimum age applies, and they describe no KYC levels. Citizenship versus residence is also not stated. Third-party reviews say a new KYC round is “likely” for a replacement card, but that is not confirmed by Solflare.

How much did the Solflare card cost?

The card’s own pages do not state pricing at all. Unofficial sources report a free annual fee, a 1% service fee, FX of 0.7% in one fee table and 0.40% to 0.70% for UK and EEA in the text, another source saying a fixed 1% FX, and an ATM fee of 2% that one site contradicts by listing free withdrawals. None of it is confirmed by the card.

What can I use instead of the Solflare card?

RedotPay, the Bybit Card and MetaMask are all issuing now, and all three scored higher in my assessment, at 6.9, 6.0 and 7.1 against Solflare’s 3.2. They differ where it matters: MetaMask is self-custody like Solflare, RedotPay and Bybit run on account balances, and each has its own country rules that contradict each other in places.

How do I add a Solflare card to Apple Wallet?

You cannot at the moment, and that is part of the pause rather than a settings problem. Google Pay was listed as working; Apple Pay was marked “coming soon” and explicitly tied to the card relaunch. Since no replacement card has been confirmed, there is nothing to add. This is worth knowing because Apple Pay tokenises the card number into the device’s Secure Element rather than Apple’s servers.

Is Solflare card free, and is it worth it?

Whether it is free is officially unstated; unofficial sources say the annual fee is free and the card price is “TBD”, to be confirmed in the app. On whether it is worth it, the question does not arise while issuance is paused. Judged on what it was built to do, self-custody spending of USDC from a Solana wallet is a sensible idea that currently has no card attached to it.

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