A self-custody Visa with no FX markup, and a published end date

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

If you have been circling crypto payment cards because ordinary bank cards are awkward to get in your situation, the Zeal card is genuinely interesting on paper: a Visa that spends straight from stablecoin balances you hold yourself, with no added foreign-exchange fee from the card brand, and a cashback rate tied to how much GNO you keep in the card’s Safe. That is a short, attractive list.

Then you read the date. Gnosis Pay, the company running the card programme behind Zeal, announced it will close its consumer card and web app at 23:59 UTC on 2026-12-20 and move to business customers only. Cardholders were told in a notice dated 2026-09-21. Users are expected to move to partner apps for a replacement card, with Safe funds remaining accessible.

Both of those things are true at the same time, and that tension is the whole story of this card. My score is 6.1 out of 10 — good as a product, poor as a place to park your everyday spending.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

The score, and who this card is really for

So who does this suit? The card is built for people who already run a self-custody wallet and want to spend EUR, USD or GBP stablecoins without giving up the keys. If that is you, the mechanics are some of the cleanest in the category — no custodian between you and the money, no added FX markup, a real Visa number you can put in Apple Pay.

And who does it not suit? If you need a card that will still be there in three years. If you want to be paid into it. If your country is not on the live list and you would be relying on third-party descriptions to find out. And if you are planning around cashback, because the GNO-linked rate stops qualifying after 2026-09-30.

Will they give you the card

Officially, Zeal says you spend in 150+ countries, and that issuance “depends on eligibility and regional availability”. That phrase does a lot of work: it means the card’s usefulness is broad, while the right to hold it is narrow.

The card programme is live in the EU, the UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, according to Gnosis Pay documentation. Zeal’s own app update notes added card support for Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia.

Everything beyond that is third-party, and I want to be plain about that. Unofficial descriptions — not confirmed by the card — say the EEA and UK are the baseline requirement, and that the order screen shows the EU, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway. The same sources say the card is unavailable in the US and much of APAC, with 36 countries available and 21 restricted, and Latin America listed as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico. Bolivia shows up as both supported and coming soon in one of those write-ups, which tells you exactly how much to trust any single one of them.

If your country is not on the official live list, assume you are guessing. The check happens at the order screen, not in an FAQ.

How to get it

Zeal is a Visa debit card issued by Monavate Limited with Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, offered as a virtual card and a physical card. The virtual one is for online use and can be added to Apple Pay. Accounts run in EUR, USD and GBP.

On identity checks, the honest answer is that Zeal’s own site does not state them. What it does say is that onboarding runs through Gnosis Pay and includes KYC after signing in with Ethereum, with verification handled by Sumsub. Which documents, what age, how long it takes, why an application might be refused — none of that is published.

Third-party write-ups, again unofficial, describe full identity and address verification, an 18+ age rule, a government ID or passport plus proof of address issued within the previous three months, and an explicit warning that uploading documents does not guarantee approval. Delivery is described as free physical shipping, with no delivery time given; one older fee page mentioned delivery within 10 days of shipping verification, though the date on that page is unclear.

The practical sequence people describe: sign in with your wallet, complete the Gnosis Pay onboarding, pass verification, then add the virtual card to Apple Pay or order the physical one.

Fees: what it really costs

This is where the card is strongest and where the information is weakest. Zeal publishes no fee schedule on its site or its App Store listing. So the table below mixes what is official with what is not, and I have marked it.

An older Gnosis Pay fee page lists a card purchase of EUR 30.23 including shipping with delivery within 10 days; the date on that page is unclear, so treat it as history rather than current pricing.

Now, three everyday payments, and which of those numbers actually touch them.

A coffee in your own country. If your balance is already in the currency you are spending, the only movement is the stablecoin value itself. No FX line, no card fee. This is the clean case.

A coffee in a country with a different currency. Zeal converts at the Visa mid-market rate and adds no FX fee of its own. Gnosis Pay fees may still apply on some operations. So the conversion cost is close to the wholesale rate, which is the best you will find in this category — but the rate itself is not the same as what your bank would give you, and there is no guarantee it is favourable on a given day.

Withdrawing cash at an ATM. This is where unofficial numbers start to matter. If the reported 250 per withdrawal and 500 per day hold, then a 300 withdrawal would be declined or reduced, and two 300 withdrawals in a day would hit the daily ceiling. Five free withdrawals a month is generous for occasional cash; a 2% charge after that is not punishing, but the allowance is small.

Two more cost facts worth knowing: there is a single card product with no paid tiers, and the cashback rate depends on how much GNO you hold in the card Safe, up to 4% — the site also cites up to 5% in reviews, and rates can change. Earn accounts are denominated in USD or EUR.

How to Top up

The card spends balances sitting in the card Safe: EUR, USD and GBP stablecoin accounts, on the Gnosis Chain and, per the documentation, Celo. The exact coins are not stated for Zeal, though unofficial descriptions name EURe, GBPe and USDCe.

The card top-up fee and minimum are not stated. Bank transfers are split by currency: EUR transfers are processed by Monerium ehf, other transfers by Unblock LT UAB, and neither provider’s fees are stated. Network fees for a crypto top-up are not stated either.

What unofficial sources add: SEPA top-up arrives in 1–2 business days, and conversion, off-ramp and gas fees are listed as 0%, with Ethereum bridging needing gas.

The self-custody part matters more here than the fee part. Funds stay in your own wallet or Safe. Earn balances in USD or EUR are withdrawable 24/7 with no lockups. What is not stated: the steps and fees for withdrawing the card balance itself, and what happens to a balance sitting on the card when it closes. Given the announced closure, that last question is not academic, and I would want an answer in writing before loading anything you care about.

One category-wide warning that applies directly to topping up: blockchain transfers are irreversible. A deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee. Check the network and address twice.

Paying with it every day

Apple Pay is supported with the virtual card. Google Pay is not confirmed by Zeal — unofficial sources say both wallets work and that Google Pay is not subject to the physical-card contactless limit. Blocked merchant categories are not stated by Zeal.

The app is iPhone-focused: iOS 16.2 or later, including Mac with M1+ and Vision Pro. The App Store listing showed 4.5/5 from 17 ratings when I read it, with version 0.33.3 dated 1 September. I did not read the Google Play rating. There is no Android listing in what I saw.

Rewards work like this: up to 4% cashback, paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain, and you must hold GNO in the card Safe to qualify. Rates can change. The App Store also advertises up to 5% variable APY on EUR and USD balances — a different product from the cashback, and worth reading carefully before you assume both are live. The App Store listing is in English; the site is in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. Russian is not offered.

Disputes are the weak point and they are quiet about it: zeal.app and the App Store listing say nothing about how disputes are handled. That matters more than usual here, because one Trustpilot reviewer describes a scam transaction with slow dispute handling, and Zeal’s reply was that card disputes take time.

What can go wrong

The biggest thing that can go wrong is already scheduled.

Gnosis Pay has announced it will close its consumer card and web app at 23:59 UTC on 2026-12-20 and move to B2B. The notice to cardholders is dated 2026-09-21, with other outlets reporting it on 2026-09-25. Users are to move to partner apps — MiniPay is named — for replacement cards. Safe funds stay accessible and the web app stays in a limited form for withdrawals. GNO cashback eligibility ends 2026-09-30. One secondary report says Zeal has not confirmed its own future plans; I could not find a Zeal statement.

Beyond the shutdown, the ordinary risks of self-custody apply. Because Zeal is self-custodial software and not regulated, no bank or company can freeze or seize your funds — and lost funds are unlikely to be recoverable. There is biometric passkey authentication, real-time transaction alerts, the ability to freeze the card in the app, a wallet that has been audited with its security policy published, Safety Checks and transaction previews. Deposits are not insured and the site says plainly that your principal is at risk.

There was also a security incident: an ERC-1271 module exploit on 2026-06-01 that affected Card Safes, reported by a third party.

On support, the listed channels are Discord and X. No email address, no live chat, no published hours. Users do report slowness: App Store reviews mention problems transferring from balance to card and slow support; a January 2026 one-star Trustpilot review describes support requests going unanswered for around two weeks, with Zeal apologising publicly. Zeal’s Trustpilot sits at 3.5/5 from 17 reviews (the page also shows 3.7). The issuer’s own score is worse: Gnosis Pay at 2.3/5 from 38 reviews, 58% one-star, with slow or unanswered tickets. No official incident was found beyond the above.

If you want the general shape of this, crypto card programmes do close. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all its Visa programmes. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022. Typical closure shape: notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you withdraw what’s left.

What to take instead

None of these are the same card. They are the alternatives I would actually weigh against Zeal, given what I now know about the closure date.

A few details that decide between them. MetaMask spends directly from your connected wallet — genuinely self-custodial in the Zeal sense — and its cashback is 1% on Virtual, 3% headline on Metal but capped at the first $10,000 spent before dropping to 1%. Its US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per its own FAQ. KAST is the most flexible on cards, up to ten, and its non-stablecoin tokens may be auto-converted at a fee shown in the app; its Terms name only USDT and USDC as acceptable even though the app lists PYUSD and RLUSD, which is the kind of inconsistency you want to see before you commit. Rizon’s page claims 122+ countries while also saying it is intended for people domiciled in the U.S. or LATAM, and it hides prices in the app.

If you want a replacement Visa rather than a replacement of Zeal specifically, MiniPay is the partner app Gnosis Pay named in the closure notice — worth watching, though I have no pricing or terms for it here.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Zeal to someone who already holds stablecoins in a self-custody wallet, spends mainly in EUR, USD or GBP, values holding a real Visa number with no added FX markup, and has somewhere sensible to be in two months’ time. For that person, in the time left, the card is a good instrument — the fee structure is genuinely clean and the custody model is the right one.

I would not recommend it as your primary everyday card. Not because the product is bad, but because the programme is ending on a published date and the cashback that helps justify it stops qualifying on 2026-09-30. Building a spending habit on a card with two months left is how people end up with stranded balances in February.

And the comparison I keep coming back to: if you need durability, take the card that will still exist after Zeal’s web app goes quiet, and accept a slightly worse fee for it. If you need self-custody now, use Zeal while it works, keep your balance small enough that you can move it quickly, and read the closure notice in full before you load.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Zeal card?

The Zeal card is a Visa debit card issued by Monavate Limited with Gnosis Pay Co Ltd that spends stablecoin balances you hold yourself. You get a virtual card for online use, addable to Apple Pay, and a physical card. Accounts run in EUR, USD and GBP. It is self-custodial software, not a regulated bank, so the card is a front-end for funds that never leave your own wallet.

How does the Zeal card work?

You hold stablecoins in a Safe, the card converts and loads them as spendable fiat balance, and the Visa draws on that balance like a prepaid card. Spending is at the Visa mid-market rate with no additional FX fee from Zeal. Cashback, up to 4%, is paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain and requires holding GNO in the card Safe. Balances stay in your own wallet.

Is Zeal a bank?

No. The app developer is grwth lbs ltd and Zeal is self-custodial software that is not regulated. The card side is run by Gnosis Pay Co Ltd (UK no. 14919639), while the issuer is Monavate Limited, an FCA-authorised e-money institution licensed by Visa Europe. So your funds are in your own wallet, not a bank account — and deposits are not insured.

Who owns Zeal?

The card programme belongs to Gnosis Pay, a UK company registered as Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, number 14919639. Monavate Limited is the issuing bank partner. Zeal itself is built by an app developer called grwth lbs ltd. Worth noting that Gnosis Pay has announced it is closing its consumer card at 23:59 UTC on 2026-12-20 and moving to business customers.

Which countries can I use Zeal in?

Spending works in 150+ countries, but issuing depends on eligibility and regional availability. The programme is officially live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Unofficial sources say the US and much of APAC are unavailable, and they disagree about Bolivia. Your order screen, not an article, is the real answer.

Does the Zeal card require KYC?

Yes in practice, though Zeal’s own site does not spell it out. Onboarding runs through Gnosis Pay and includes KYC after signing in with Ethereum, verified by Sumsub. Unofficial sources describe full identity and address checks, an 18+ age rule, and government ID plus proof of address from the last three months. Zeal publishes no KYC tiers, processing times or refusal reasons.

Is the Zeal card free?

Mostly, as far as third-party sources describe it: ordering is free, physical shipping is free, and there is no monthly or annual fee. Replacing a lost card is reported at 4.99 in EURe, GBPe or USDCe. But Zeal publishes no fee schedule at all, so none of those numbers is confirmed by the card itself. The honest position is that the card brand charges you no FX fee; everything else is unofficial.

How do I top up the Zeal card?

You add funds to the card Safe in EUR, USD or GBP, on Gnosis Chain and Celo per the documentation; unofficial sources name EURe, GBPe and USDCe. SEPA top-up is reported to arrive in 1–2 business days, and EUR transfers are processed by Monerium ehf while other transfers go through Unblock LT UAB. Top-up fees and minimums are not stated. Send only on a supported network — transfers are irreversible.

Is the Zeal card safe?

It depends what you mean. On custody, it is the safer model: your keys, your funds, no bank able to freeze them. On cost and continuity, it is exposed — deposits are not insured, the site says your principal is at risk, lost funds are unlikely to be recovered, an ERC-1271 module exploit hit Card Safes on 2026-06-01, and the consumer card closes 2026-12-20. Support is Discord and X, and reviewers report slow replies.

Is the Zeal card worth it?

For the remaining weeks, yes, if you already hold EUR, USD or GBP stablecoins and want a Visa with no added FX markup. For anything longer, no — the programme closes at 23:59 UTC on 2026-12-20, GNO cashback eligibility ended 2026-09-30, and no Zeal statement on future plans has surfaced. Weigh it against MetaMask, KAST or Rizon if you want a card that will outlast this one.

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