The SORA card has shut down — here is what existing holders do now and what to use instead
Available in US
The SORA card programme has closed. On 10 January 2026 the operator published a notice saying that the card, its app functions and related card features would stop after 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT. No new cards are being issued, and for anyone reading this with a card in their wallet, the question is no longer “is it any good?” but “what do I do with the balance I have left?” This review walks through what happened to the programme, where existing holders stand now, the risks that came with the closure, and the alternatives worth looking at if you need a crypto-linked card going forward.
The conditions described below are current as of October 28, 2026.
Verdict
SORA finishes with a score of 2.2 out of 10. The breakdown is in the table, but the short version is this: a closed programme cannot score well on who can get it, on reliability, or on everyday use, because nobody new can get one and the existing card functions have ended. Cost was a relative bright spot at 5 out of 10 while the programme was live, but that grade reflects fees that are no longer the deciding factor for anyone thinking about ordering today.
| Criterion | Score | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Who can get it | 0 / 10 | Card and app functions stopped after 30 January 2026 18:00 GMT; no new cards issued |
| Cost | 5 / 10 | Card issuance and monthly fee were €0, membership €39/year after the first year; international payments €0.90 + 1.1%, ATM €1.20 + 3% |
| Top-up options | 2 / 10 | Conversion between XOR and EUR, or a SEPA transfer; no direct crypto load to the card |
| Reliability and complaints | 1 / 10 | Programme closed; the issuer Unlimit EU Ltd suspended some accounts, with balances inaccessible until Unlimit reviews them |
| Everyday use | 3 / 10 | Physical and digital card were available, ATM withdrawals worked; Apple Pay and Google Pay were promised for a later phase that never arrived before closure |
| Total | 2.2 / 10 |
This is a page for two audiences. If you are one of the people who already has a SORA card and a balance stuck behind a closed app or a suspended account, the practical sections below (what happened, what holders do, what can go wrong) are written for you. If you were considering SORA because you have trouble getting an ordinary bank card and wanted something that would spend crypto in shops, the alternatives section is where to look. The “final recommendation” at the end is brief: for either group, SORA itself is no longer the answer.
What happened to the programme
SORA was a crypto-linked payment card aimed at people living in the European Economic Area. The site described eligibility by residence rather than by nationality: you had to be an EEA resident who passed the standard KYC checks, and the published rules excluded residents of Russia, Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with a longer list maintained at a /blacklist page. The card came in physical and digital form, and you could order it through the SORA app on iOS or Android.
While the programme was live, the fees were straightforward. The first card, whether virtual or physical, was free, the monthly fee was €0, and a “client membership” of €39 per year was charged only after the first year. International card payments cost €0.90 plus 1.1% of the transaction; the first ten online and ten in-store domestic payments each month were free. ATM withdrawals inside the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway cost €1.20 plus 3%, and outside that group they cost €1.75 plus 3%. A balance inquiry at an ATM was free once per month. SEPA and SEPA Instant outgoing transfers were €0.50 each. There was a single product, not a tiered range, so the membership fee was the only “tier” in the structure.
You loaded the card by converting XOR (the SORA network’s native token) into euro, or by sending a SEPA transfer to the card account. There was no way to load a different cryptocurrency directly; the conversion path was the route in, and a separate top-up fee line of €0 applied to ledger loads. A cashback or rewards scheme was not stated on the pages I read, and the only premium feature on the horizon was Apple Pay and Google Pay support, which the operator said would arrive in “Phase 2” of the rollout. That phase never came.
Then, on 10 January 2026, the operator published a notice of termination. It said the card, the card functions inside the app, and related features would stop after Friday 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT. Anyone holding funds in a linked GateHub wallet was told to move those funds out before the cutoff. At the same time the issuer, Unlimit EU Ltd, had already suspended some accounts in the period leading up to the announcement, which left balances visible in the app but unreachable. SORA itself said it could not submit balance-release requests on behalf of users; the only route was Unlimit’s support address at [email protected].
Two things matter here for understanding the rest of this page. First, “SORA the card” was never really “SORA the company” in the usual sense: the SORA Wallet (a self-custodial crypto wallet) continues to exist and operate, but the card programme is a separate product that has been switched off. Second, the card was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd, an electronic money institution licensed in Cyprus (licence 115.1.3.7), not by SORA directly. SORA Biome, based in Bulgaria, ran the site and the apps; Unlimit was the regulated entity behind the card. That distinction shows up again in the risks section, because account suspensions and balance releases are Unlimit’s call, not SORA’s.
If you already have the card
If you are reading this and you still hold a SORA card, the practical question is: where is your money, and how do you get it out? The situation for any individual account depends on Unlimit’s review.
First, if you had a balance in the card app before 30 January 2026 18:00 GMT and your account is not one of the suspended ones, the path is the SEPA outgoing transfer at €0.50 per transfer. SEPA and SEPA Instant outgoing transfers were both available at that price while the programme was live. The closure notice did not extend any new withdrawal windows beyond the cutoff, so this was the way out.
Second, if Unlimit suspended your account before the cutoff, you may still see a balance in the app, but you cannot move it. SORA’s position is that it cannot submit release requests on its own; the only route is to email Unlimit’s support at [email protected]. There is no public timeline for how long those reviews take, so if you are in that group, resolution is on Unlimit’s schedule.
Third, if you had crypto sitting in a GateHub wallet linked to the card, the instruction was to move that out before 30 January 2026 18:00 GMT. Anything left after the cutoff is governed by the same closure rules as the card balance, and SORA does not have a way to retrieve it on your behalf.
Fourth, on support more generally: the operator listed its support and contact portals, plus Discord, Telegram, X and Reddit. The site was published in English and Spanish; Russian was not offered. Hours were not stated, which is itself a useful thing to know going in. Replacement card costs, closure fees, card delivery times and the specific spending and loading limits that the fee page linked to (soracard.com/fees#4) were not present on the pages I read, so anyone trying to budget for a final SEPA transfer or to understand why a particular charge appeared should expect to ask support directly rather than find a published number.
The dispute process (chargebacks, contested transactions) was not stated on the pages I read. That is worth flagging: with a closed programme, the back-end support for raising a dispute on a transaction from three months ago is not something you can assume will be staffed, and a cardholder’s protection in that situation depends on the issuer’s general e-money obligations rather than any SORA-specific promise.
What can go wrong
A closed card programme is, in itself, the main risk. There is no published cause for the closure, and SORA did not characterise it as a regulatory action, a financial failure or a dispute with the issuer. What is on the record is narrower: a notice of termination, an earlier wave of account suspensions by the issuer, and the statement that SORA cannot submit release requests on the user’s behalf. Reading those three together, the realistic risk for an existing holder is administrative delay on getting a balance back, not necessarily a loss of the balance itself, but no one outside Unlimit can promise a timeline.
There are structural risks worth knowing about even if the closure had not happened. The card was issued by an electronic money institution, Unlimit EU Ltd, licensed by the Central Bank of Cyprus. EMIs in the EU are required to safeguard customer funds, typically by holding them in segregated accounts or insuring them, but those safeguarded funds are not the same as bank deposits and are not covered by the Cyprus deposit guarantee scheme. So if Unlimit itself were to fail, a cardholder’s euro balance would be handled through the safeguarding rules and the EMI’s wind-down, not through a deposit-insurance payout. That is the standard arrangement for e-money cards across the EU, but it is different from a bank account and worth understanding clearly.
On the crypto side, the SORA Wallet side of the product is self-custodial: the user holds the keys, which is a structural protection against the wallet provider disappearing with the funds, but it puts the burden of seed-phrase security, phishing resistance and clipboard-hijacking protection entirely on the user. Once a key is lost or stolen, the network cannot reverse a transaction, and there is no built-in recovery. Two-factor authentication and biometrics were mentioned on the operator’s pages, but a card-freeze function was not described, which on a closed product is academic anyway.
For the broader category rather than this specific card, there are risks that are common to crypto cards. Card programmes do close: Visa said in November 2022 that it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX”, and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018 and all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes closed. Stablecoins, the usual funding rail for these cards, can depeg: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. And while on-chain transfers are often described as censorship-proof, Tether says it has disabled tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity, so the practical picture is more mixed.
Finally, on the regulatory backdrop that did not cause this closure but is worth knowing about: in the EU, MiCA (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114) took legal effect in June 2023. The rules on asset-referenced and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024, and the rest, including crypto-asset service provider authorisation, from 30 December 2024. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may only be issued by a credit institution or an EMI. A transitional period lets providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026 or until they receive or are refused a MiCA authorisation. ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised CASPs. None of that is a verdict on SORA, but it is the framework any successor product will be working inside.
What to take instead
Because the SORA card is no longer available, the comparison below is for anyone who needs a replacement. The three alternatives below all have live card programmes; each has a different trade-off, and the right one depends on what you actually need the card to do.
MetaMask Card
The MetaMask Card is a Mastercard issued by Monovate, with Crypto Life as card provider. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories (Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain and Uruguay among them); other regions join a waitlist. Proof of residency is required, and US and UK sign-ups were temporarily closed per the FAQ. The card is virtual first (issued instantly), with a Metal version available to pre-order in the app after the virtual card is approved; one card per user.
On cost, the virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee, and Metal is $199 a year. The fee page references a “minimal fee for each transaction” without giving the amount on the pages I read, and states there are no additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee (Mastercard’s rate is used). Funding is from the connected wallet directly, on networks including Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, and the named spendable tokens include mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT (the page says nine in total). One constraint to note: a Solana-only wallet cannot withdraw credit.
Cashback is paid in mUSD into the Money Account: 1% on the Virtual tier, headline 3% on Metal with the fine print capping the 3% at the first $10,000 spent and then 1% above that. There is also a $FLY bonus of 5X on Virtual and 7X on Metal through the Blackbird dining app. The card currency itself was not stated on the pages I read.
KAST
KAST scored 6.1 out of 10. It runs a Visa programme with up to 10 cards per user across three tiers: Standard (Visa Platinum), Premium (Visa Infinite metal) and Private (Visa Infinite gold-plated), with optional Pengu, Solana and Bitcoin designs. Account balance is in USD; stablecoin deposits are converted 1:1 with a 0% spread. Annual membership is $0 for Standard, $1,000 for Premium and $10,000 for Private, billed annually upfront with no monthly option. An extra virtual card costs $2 in some regions, the Standard physical card has a $0 card fee plus a $40 delivery charge, and Premium and Private physical cards are included. There is a $1/month inactivity fee after 12 months; renewal and reactivation fees exist but the amounts were not stated.
On transactions, stablecoin top-up is 0%, card spend in USD is 0%, the per-transaction fee is 0%, and Apple Pay and Google Pay are 0%. Non-USD FX fees are 0.5%–1.75% depending on residence country, transaction country and card programme; non-USD transactions under $25 carry a $0.10 fee; a declined transaction for insufficient balance costs $0.50. Funding is in stablecoins (USDT, USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD) on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and TRON; the Terms describe acceptable tokens as “currently USDT and USDC”, which conflicts with the wider token list, so that is worth confirming in-app. Spending is from your own balance and deducted straight away, not credit.
Cashback is paid in USD when the transaction is authorised: Standard 1.5% on the first $2,000 a month, Premium 2% on the first $10,000, Private 3% on the first $40,000. KAST Points add another +1% on Premium and +2% on Private of eligible spend; Standard gets no points bonus.
On eligibility, the country list is shown at KYC rather than published, and the rules around citizenship and ID matter: a person who lives in a supported country but holds an ID from a restricted region can still be ineligible, while a dual citizen with an ID from a supported country may pass. Only the account holder’s own ID is accepted, and a VPN does not bypass the check. An account can be created in an unsupported country but KYC stays locked.
Zeal
Zeal runs a Visa programme built on top of Gnosis Pay. Spend is accepted in 150+ countries, with the card programme confirmed live (in the Gnosis Pay documentation) in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand; Zeal update notes add Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia. The card is virtual for online use and addable to Apple Pay; a physical card is not available. Accounts are held in EUR, USD and GBP under the Gnosis Pay setup. Zeal charges no additional FX fee; conversion runs at the Visa wholesale rate, and Gnosis Pay’s own fees (for example, ATM) may still apply. There is no published fee schedule on zeal.app or the App Store.
Funding comes from balances in the card Safe, which holds EUR, USD and GBP stablecoin accounts on Gnosis Chain and Celo (per the Gnosis Pay docs); the exact Zeal-side coin list is not published. Rewards are up to 4% cashback, paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain, with the GNO held in the card Safe to qualify; rates can change. The App Store also advertises up to 5% variable APY on EUR/USD balances.
Who I would recommend this to
Honest answer: nobody, in the sense that nobody should be making a fresh decision to get a SORA card today, because the programme is closed. For existing holders, the right move is the boring one: move your balance out via SEPA if you still can, email [email protected] if you cannot, and do not expect SORA itself to escalate on your behalf. For anyone who needs a crypto-linked card in late 2026, the three alternatives above are all live and worth comparing on the dimensions that matter to you: which countries they actually serve, which networks and tokens they accept, what their fees look like in the currency you spend in most often, and what their cashback and membership structures look like at the tier you would realistically use. The category itself works, and the regulatory environment in the EU is now well defined; the specific product that was SORA is simply no longer part of it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the SORA card?
The SORA card was a crypto-linked payment card that let you spend a euro balance topped up either by converting the SORA network’s native token XOR or by a SEPA transfer. It came in physical and digital form, was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd, an electronic money institution licensed in Cyprus, and was marketed to residents of the European Economic Area. The programme stopped issuing cards and ended its app-based card functions after 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT.
How did the SORA card work?
You funded a euro balance on the card by converting XOR through a partner service or by sending a SEPA transfer to the card account. There was no direct way to load other cryptocurrencies. Once funded, the card behaved like a standard prepaid debit card at the till and online, with the same MCC-based rules, 3-D Secure challenges and AVS checks that apply to any Visa or Mastercard product. The card network was not named on the operator’s pages.
Is SORA a bank?
No. SORA Biome, the operator of the card programme and the apps, is a Bulgarian company; the card was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd, an electronic money institution licensed by the Central Bank of Cyprus under licence 115.1.3.7. EMIs can issue e-money and payment cards but cannot lend, and their safeguarded customer funds are not covered by the Cyprus deposit guarantee scheme, which is a different regime from a bank account.
Who owns SORA?
The card programme was run by SORA Biome (Bulgaria) and the card itself was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd (Cyprus). The SORA Wallet, a separate self-custodial crypto wallet, continued to operate after the card programme closed. Ownership or shareholder details for SORA Biome were not disclosed beyond its Bulgarian registration.
Is the SORA card available in my country?
It is not available anywhere, because the programme is closed. While it was live, it was restricted to residents of the European Economic Area, with explicit exclusions for residents of Russia, Iran and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and a longer list maintained at a /blacklist page. Citizenship was not the criterion; residence was.
Does the SORA card require KYC?
Yes. KYC was required, with a selfie, an ID document and proof of address. The operator’s pages did not state KYC levels or processing times. EU rules require regulated institutions to verify name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, run a sanctions check, establish the purpose of the relationship and determine whether the customer is a politically exposed person.
How do I get my money out of a SORA card?
If your account is active, the route is a SEPA or SEPA Instant outgoing transfer, which cost €0.50 each while the programme was live. If your account was suspended by Unlimit before the cutoff, your balance may still be visible in the app but inaccessible, and the only route is to email Unlimit’s support at [email protected]. SORA has said it cannot submit release requests on users’ behalf, so resolution depends on Unlimit’s review and is on Unlimit’s timeline.
How do I add the SORA card to Apple Wallet or Google Pay?
While the programme was live, Apple Pay and Google Pay support was promised for “Phase 2” but had not launched before the closure. After 30 January 2026 the app-based card functions stopped, so there is no working path to add a SORA card to a mobile wallet now. Anyone with a tokenised card number from before the closure should expect it to stop working once the issuer’s token lifecycle ends.
Is the SORA card safe?
The crypto side ran through a self-custodial wallet, which means you controlled the keys and were responsible for seed-phrase security, phishing and clipboard-hijacking malware. On the e-money side, funds were held by an EMI, Unlimit EU Ltd, which is required to safeguard them but not covered by the Cyprus deposit guarantee scheme. The bigger safety question in late 2026 is not the technology but the programme status: it is closed, and any balance retrieval depends on Unlimit’s own processes.
Is the SORA card worth it?
Not as a new purchase, because it cannot be purchased: the programme is closed. For existing holders the calculus is different and reduces to whether you can retrieve your balance cleanly; the published fee structure (free card, no monthly fee, €0.50 SEPA outgoing, €0.90 + 1.1% international) was reasonable for the category while it was live, but that is not a meaningful comparison when there is no product to sign up to.
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