The fees are the best part; the missing card and missing licence are the rest

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Cashi is one of those crypto cards that has solved one problem properly and left three others open. The problem it solved is cost: a virtual Visa that spends US dollars with no Cashi fee on USD payments, funds itself from USDC or USDT on nearly every network you might reasonably hold them on, and does not charge you to move money between users. That is genuinely good. The three open problems are physical form, transparency and durability. There is no plastic card — only a virtual one, Apple Pay is on the roadmap rather than in your wallet, and the company behind it says it provides “technology services only” without naming the institution that actually issues the card or holds the licences.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

If you are reading this because an ordinary bank card has been refused to you, or because you live somewhere a mainstream card simply does not reach, that matters: Cashi does not publish a country list at all. There is no page saying which countries the card is available in. What exists is a sign-up form whose country flags hint at Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Spain, Ghana, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, and a stated caveat that availability is subject to local laws. Those flags are not an eligibility list, and I would not treat them as one.

Verdict: 6.6 out of 10

My score for Cashi is 6.6 out of 10. That is not a rounding of a verdict; it is the arithmetic of six criteria that pull in opposite directions, and it lands slightly above the midpoint because the cost side is unusually strong while the practicality and transparency sides are unusually weak.

Who this suits, in one sentence: someone already holding stablecoins who wants to spend them without paying a card fee, who is comfortable with a virtual-only card and with a provider that will not tell you who issues the card.

Who it does not suit: anyone who needs a physical card in a letterbox, anyone who needs cash from an ATM, anyone whose bank already gives them a debit card, and — with some force — anyone who needs an answer to the question “who is my money actually with”. That last group should read the company section before they read the fee table.

The pattern I see across cards of this kind is worth stating once, because it recurs. Cashi sits in the stablecoin-holder camp: the user who already has USDC on Solana or USDT on Tron and wants that balance to become everyday spending without a weekend. It scores 10 on top-up options for exactly that reason — the chain list is long and the fees are honest. But the same design choice produces the low marks elsewhere. A card funded by stablecoins on many networks is, structurally, a virtual card; there is no reason to manufacture plastic for a balance that behaves like a prepaid account.

Will they give you the card?

Yes to many people, and the honest answer is that the card itself does not discriminate much: it works “anywhere Visa is accepted”. What discriminates is who can open the account behind it, and that is where the information runs out.

Cashi does not list the countries it serves. The public pages and help articles never name them. What you get instead is a set of country flags in the sign-up flow — AR, BD, BR, CO, DO, ES, GH, KE, MY, NG, SA — which hint at where sign-ups have been possible, and a blanket statement that availability is subject to local laws. I want to be precise about the difference, because this is the kind of detail people get wrong: a flag in a dropdown is not an eligibility list, and neither is a country that once appeared in a screenshot.

The second condition is more comfortable, and it is the one that carries the day-to-day usefulness. The card is accepted “anywhere Visa is accepted”. That is a genuine global reach, and it is what you are buying when you cannot get a local card. The catch sits on the other side: “Certain merchant types may be restricted for regulatory reasons”. No list of those types is given. In practice this is the shape of the constraint everywhere in this category — a merchant category code such as gambling is often blocked by issuer policy rather than by law, and the block list differs from one issuer to the next. You are not told which categories Cashi blocks; you find out at the till.

So the honest summary is: the card is broad, the account is narrow, and the gap between them is unfilled. If your country is not on an unpublished list, the answer is not “no” — it is “the sign-up form will tell you before you have typed anything else”.

How to get it

The route is short and the sequence is fixed. Sign up, verify your identity, add at least $5 to your balance, tap “Activate card for $5”, and get $5 back as Spending Credit.

That last part deserves a second look, because it is unusual and it is the reason the activation fee does not hurt. You pay $5, and $5 comes back as spending credit, so the net cost of switching the card on is zero — provided you were going to spend that $5 anyway. The catch is sequencing: the $5 must come from your cash balance, which means you have to have already converted or deposited funds. That is the step people trip over, not the verification.

The identity check itself is described as “a quick check with your ID and a selfie”. Most people finish in minutes; some take up to 24 hours. There are no described tiers, no level system, no stated list of what makes a check fail. What the card does not state is as instructive as what it states: proof of address is not mentioned, and an age requirement is not mentioned. Cards in this category are generally available to adults from 18, some issuers set higher limits, but I am telling you what Cashi publishes, and the age line is not in it.

You get a USD-denominated virtual Visa debit card. A physical card “will be available in the future”, which is all the detail there is on the subject — no date, no waitlist, no country list for delivery. Replacement follows the same vagueness: if your card details are exposed, you email support. There is no delivery to wait for, so delivery being virtual is not a limitation you will notice until the plastic arrives, or does not.

The sequence again, because it is the whole process:

• Sign up with an email and a phone number
• Verify identity with an ID document and a selfie — usually minutes, occasionally up to 24 hours
• Add at least $5 to the balance
• Tap “Activate card for $5”
• Receive $5 back as Spending Credit, and the virtual card details in the app

What it really costs: Fees

The cost structure is the reason to keep reading past section eight. Cashi’s headline numbers are $5 activation returned as $5 credit, 0% on USD payments, 1% on non-USD payments, no Cashi fee on crypto deposits or transfers, and $50 to raise a dispute. There is no monthly fee stated anywhere, and no annual fee stated anywhere. I have not assumed one is free — it is simply not published, which is a different thing and, for a card you may hold for years, a thing you should notice.

The $50 dispute fee deserves its own paragraph, because it is the number most likely to hurt you. Raising a dispute costs $50. Asking the merchant for a refund directly is free. If you take a shop’s word for it and skip the dispute route, you keep your money; if you go the formal route, you pay $50 to do it. For a $12 subscription that is a rational no. For a $900 laptop it is obviously worth it. The asymmetry is the point.

Now three everyday payments, because a percentage is only meaningful against a receipt.

A $30 subscription paid in USD, the common case for someone in the US or pricing in dollars: $0 in Cashi fees. That is the number that makes the card interesting. The same $30 subscription billed in euros by a merchant that prices in euros costs 1% — $0.30 — on top of whatever the merchant’s own currency markup is. And a $40 purchase from a non-USD store is where the second number bites harder: 1% is $0.40, and the card converts to USD automatically, so the conversion is something you did not choose and cannot decline at the till.

Two mechanics worth knowing before you need them. Holds above the final amount — a car rental is the standard example — are deducted at authorisation and adjusted afterwards, so your balance can dip for a day or two for a purchase you have not fully made yet. And a declined authorisation can leave a hold on funds that stays for several days, typically up to seven. Neither is a Cashi quirk; both are how card networks behave. They matter more here because your balance lives in a single pool rather than in a bank account with an overdraft line.

There is one more currency fact that shapes everything. The card is USD. Non-USD payments are converted to USD automatically with the 1% fee; USD spending is 0%. Your balance itself is in stablecoins — USDC or USDT — plus cash deposits and cash-out in 20+ currencies. In practice you are spending dollars from a stablecoin balance, and the 1% is the visible cost of that arrangement. The spread applied when crypto is converted into the cash balance is not stated, and that is where an unquoted cost would live if one exists.

How to top it up

This is the section where Cashi is genuinely excellent, and it is the reason the top-up criterion is a clean 10.

Deposit USDC or USDT on Tron, Solana, Polygon, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Bitcoin or Base. BTC, ETH and SOL are also accepted per the activation article. Add funds and cash out in 20+ currencies. That is eight networks for stablecoins, three native assets on top, and a long list of cash currencies — for a card whose entire fee philosophy is “we will not charge you to move money”.

Digital assets are the good case, and the numbers are clean. No minimum. No Cashi fee. Only the blockchain network fee, and even that is not taken from your card balance in the way you might fear: for a deposit it comes out of the sending wallet, and for a send from your Cashi balance it comes out of there. So a deposit of, say, 50 USDC on Tron costs you the Tron network fee and nothing else; the card does not take a cut and does not set a floor.

Cash is the messy case, and it is worth being blunt about it. Local currency deposits and sends carry a Cashi fee on every one. The amount depends on the currency, the method and the size of the transaction, and it is quoted in the app before you confirm. Minimums vary by currency. So before you tap, you will see the cost — the design here is at least honest — but there is no published rate card, and I cannot tell you what a euro deposit costs in euros because the card does not say.

The USD account has its own rule: receiving is free, while sends and receives together are capped at 3,000 USD in any 7-day window. That is a low ceiling if you are using the card as a quasi-bank account, and worth knowing before you rely on it.

Getting money back out is symmetrical. You can send digital assets out, paying only the network fee, across those eight networks. You can send or withdraw cash in 20+ currencies, with the fee quoted in the app. USD account sends carry a fixed bank fee plus a small transfer fee on top.

One warning, and it is the one that can cost you the whole balance. Blockchain transfers are irreversible. Send on a network Cashi does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, and the money can be gone or can need manual support recovery with no guarantee. Read the network list twice.

And a harder one. You cannot close the card permanently — only freeze it. To delete the account you must “transfer any remaining balance out of your Cashi account”, because after deletion “you won’t be able to access your funds”. So the exit has a price and a procedure, and it is not the same as freezing a card in the app.

Paying with it every day

Daily use is where this card is weakest, and it is weak for a structural reason: it is virtual only.

Google Pay works, for in-store tap-to-pay, but on Android. On iPhone the situation is specific: Apple Pay is “not available yet, but it’s on our roadmap”, so iPhone users pay online with card details instead. There is a help-centre article titled “Does Cashi support Apple Pay?” — the existence of the question tells you the answer better than the wording does.

Cashback is the part that rewards you for spending, and its structure is specific enough to plan around. Three percent on eligible subscriptions, two percent on eligible online shopping, one percent on eligible travel, credited automatically as Spending Credit. The caps are where the headline rates stop being true:

• 3% subscriptions — monthly plans only, including Amazon Prime, Google One, Canva and Uber One, one charge per service per month; the cap amount is not stated
• 2% eligible online stores — the first $500 per store per calendar month, up to $10 cashback per store; other eligible stores share $500 and $10 per month
• 1% travel — up to $20 cashback per month, with each booking counting up to $2,000

Read that twice and you will see the real offer. The 2% is capped at $10 per store per month, so a $500 monthly shop spend earns the full ten dollars and nothing beyond. The 1% travel cap of $20 means a booking over $2,000 earns the same as a $2,000 booking. Nobody is cheating you; the caps are just much tighter than the headline.

Two limits and one charge you should know about. Your daily spending limit is set by you in the app, up to $50,000 per day — a ceiling high enough that it is really a self-control tool rather than a risk control. A monthly limit is not specified. And a dispute costs $50, while asking the merchant for a refund is free; per the help centre, cashback is removed if you get a refund, though that article was not read in full and the time frames are not stated.

The app is on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Store ratings are not shown, which given the beta timeline is unsurprising.

What can go wrong

Two risks, one practical and one structural, and the structural one is the bigger.

The practical risk is that the product is new and unproven. Cashi has been in public beta since August 2026 — press reprints of the launch are dated 11 August 2026 — and a full launch was expected before the end of 2026. I found no Cashi-specific Trustpilot page, Reddit thread or news complaint, and no official incident. I also found no user reviews at all. Read that twice as well: no complaints in a young product is not the same as a good track record. It is an absence of evidence, and the press material around the beta date is user-supplied and unverified.

The structural risk is the licensing one, and it deserves plain words. Cashi says it “provides technology services only”. The financial products — the card, the balance, the accounts — are issued and managed by licensed third parties. But the card’s own pages do not name the issuer, the registration country or the licences. In this category that omission has real consequences. The card network does not issue consumer cards itself; it licenses issuers and can suspend a programme. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022, and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, an issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Programme closures have a pattern: a notice period, then loading stops, then spending stops, then you are asked to withdraw what is left. One 2026 closure reported by a secondary source ended new loads on 8 July 2026 and spending on 8 August 2026 — single source, unconfirmed, but the shape of it is what to watch for. And since you cannot close this card permanently, only freeze it, the first step of that sequence is not one you control.

On safeguarding, the card says the company provides technology only and that assets are with licensed third parties. Whether those funds are safeguarded or insured is not stated, and that is exactly the line that an electronic money institution is normally required to be able to fill in. I would not read this as a warning sign; I would read it as an unanswered question.

What the card does offer is ordinary, competent security tooling. Freeze the card instantly in the app. Set daily limits and online payment controls. Two-factor authentication, PIN and biometrics articles in the help centre. Real-time activity alerts, and what the company calls secure account controls and continuous monitoring. None of that is exotic, and none of it protects you from the issuer question.

Support is email at [email protected], a Help Centre at help.cashi.com, Telegram at t.me/cashi, and X. The site runs in English, Chinese, Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean, with support-staff languages including those.

One geography note, offered as an unverified report rather than a fact: one outlet describes Cashi as Hong Kong-based, with the release datelined Sharjah, UAE. Two different places in one sentence is a reason to hold that lightly. Mexico expansion was planned for late 2026.

What to take instead

If the reason you are looking at Cashi is that a normal card is hard to get, the alternatives are not obviously better — they are differently bad. Here is how the field looks.

Bitrefill is the closest comparison and it scores a fraction higher, 6.8 against 6.6. It has the thing Cashi lacks most visibly: a physical card alongside the virtual one, in euros, with a card page that says the card is free through the app. Its catch is the funding side — it takes a deposit spread on crypto-to-euro conversion and 1.99% for SEPA pay-ins, and its access terms say eligibility is “subject to eligibility criteria” with “further eligibility requirements, established and verified by our partners” layered on top. Its 2% cashback is marketed as having no cap, split 1% per crypto deposit and 1% per purchase, which is a different bargain from Cashi’s category rates: it rewards funding as much as spending.

UPay is the weakest transparency of the three in some ways — no cost figures on the card page at all, no network named, no cashback stated — but it does publish something Cashi does not: a note that it does not serve residents of certain countries and that the list can change. It also claims support in 180+ countries, and its KYC partner accepts only ID documents issued by the same country as the user, which is a sharper and more useful rule than “subject to local laws”.

Kemy has the most transparent price list and the most expensive one. Virtual cards cost $15 to issue, valid three years, plus $2 a month; the physical Mastercard is $250 with DHL Express included, valid three years, one per user, plus $10 a month. Its transaction fee is 3.5% plus $1, and a failed transaction costs $0.80. That per-transaction structure makes Kemy a poor fit for everyday spending and a reasonable one for occasional larger purchases. It also has an internal conflict in its own pricing — the main-account deposit fee appears as 8% in one summary and 5% in another — which is a good reminder to read the page you are actually on rather than the one you were told about.

Where Cashi wins on this table is narrow and real: it is the only one of the four with a clear, low, published percentage on everyday non-USD spending, the only one with no monthly fee, and the only one whose activation is self-cancelling. Where it loses is the thing that costs you most in daily life — it is the only one without a physical card.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Cashi to someone in a specific shape: you already hold USDC or USDT, probably on Tron or Solana, and you want to spend it without your card issuer taking a cut or asking which exchange you used. You are online most of the time, you do not need cash from an ATM, you pay mostly in dollars or accept a 1% conversion without blinking, and you are comfortable being an early user of a beta product run by a company that will not tell you who its issuer is. If that is you, this is a good card at a low price, and the eight-network funding list is the best in its class.

I would not recommend it to someone who needs a card that arrives in the post, to someone whose budgeting depends on physical cash, to an iPhone user who pays in shops, or to anyone who has asked themselves the question “what happens to my balance if this company folds”. That last question has a documented answer pattern in this industry — notice, then loading stops, then spending stops, then you withdraw — and Cashi’s decision not to let you permanently close the card makes it a question worth asking out loud before you fund it, not after.

The honest summary is that Cashi is a good cost structure wrapped in an unfinished product. The fees, the funding options and the cashback are genuinely competitive; the missing physical card, the absent Apple Pay and the unnamed issuer are genuinely serious. If you can live inside those limits, the arithmetic works in your favour. If you cannot, the extra two-tenths that Bitrefill scores is not enough to justify switching.

Frequently asked questions

What is Cashi card?

Cashi is a USD-denominated virtual Visa debit card funded from a stablecoin balance. You deposit USDC or USDT, the app converts them into a spendable cash balance, and the card draws on that balance like a prepaid card. Cashi says it provides technology services only, and that the financial products are issued and managed by licensed third parties.

Is Cashi a bank?

No, and it does not present itself as one. Cashi describes itself as a technology provider whose partners issue and manage the financial products. The card’s public pages do not name the issuing institution, its registration country or its licences. That is a real gap, and it is one of the reasons I did not score reliability higher.

Who owns Cashi?

The public pages do not say clearly. One report describes the company as Hong Kong-based, while the release itself was datelined Sharjah, UAE. Those are unverified press details, not company statements, and I would treat them as a reason to look rather than as an answer.

Which countries can I use Cashi in?

The card works “anywhere Visa is accepted”, and that much is stated. Which countries can open an account is not: no country list appears on the site or in the help articles, and availability is said to be subject to local laws. Country flags in the sign-up flow suggest Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Spain, Ghana, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, but they are not an eligibility list.

Do I need KYC to get the card?

Yes. The card asks for an ID document and a selfie, described as a quick check. Most people finish in minutes and some take up to 24 hours. Proof of address and a minimum age are not stated on the card’s pages, though prepaid and debit cards in this category are generally for adults from 18.

How do I activate the card?

Add at least $5 to your balance first, since the activation is paid from cash funds. Then tap “Activate card for $5” in the app and the $5 is returned to you as Spending Credit, making the activation net zero. A physical card “will be available in the future”, with no date given, so everything happens in the app.

How do I top up the card?

Deposit USDC or USDT on Tron, Solana, Polygon, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Bitcoin or Base; BTC, ETH and SOL are also accepted. There is no Cashi fee and no minimum on digital-asset deposits — only the blockchain network fee, which comes out of your sending wallet. Cash deposits and sends in 20+ currencies do carry a Cashi fee, quoted in the app before you confirm.

Is Cashi card free?

Effectively, yes at the start: the $5 activation is returned as $5 of Spending Credit, USD payments carry no Cashi fee, non-USD payments cost 1%, and crypto transfers cost only the network fee. But no monthly or annual fee is stated rather than stated as zero, and raising a dispute costs $50. Check those two before you commit.

Can I add Cashi to Apple Pay or Google Pay?

Google Pay works for in-store tap-to-pay on Android. Apple Pay is “not available yet, but it’s on our roadmap” — the help centre has an article on it, but the function itself is not there. iPhone users pay online with card details. Both a physical card and Apple Pay were planned as part of the roadmap at launch.

Can I use the Cashi card at an ATM?

No. The virtual card cannot be used at ATMs, and the card’s pages say nothing about ATM fees because the facility does not exist. If cash is part of your week, this card does not serve that need at all.

How do I close my Cashi account?

You cannot close the card permanently — only freeze it in the app. To delete the account you must first transfer any remaining balance out, because after deletion “you won’t be able to access your funds”. The wording is worth reading twice: the exit is a procedure, not a button, and you should fund the card knowing that.

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