The Monolith card is gone: what former holders can still recover

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

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If you are weighing the Monolith card, there is a very short answer: you cannot get one. The programme closed on 8 October 2024, the cards were deactivated, and accounts were closed. There is no application, no waiting list and no country where this still works. Anything you may still be reading — a review, a comparison, a “how to apply” guide — describes a product that no longer exists, and the honest thing to do is tell you exactly what happened, what is still recoverable if you were one of the people who held one, and where the same needs might be met by something that is running today.

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

I went through the card’s closure notice, the company’s own background material and the surrounding record, and I want to address two separate things that people constantly mix up: your crypto and your card balance. They were in different places, they are handled by different organisations, and one of them is entirely in your hands while the other depends on a request you file. That distinction is the whole story of the Monolith card today.

Verdict: 1.8 out of 10, and the zeroes are not a formality

My score for Monolith is 1.8 out of 10. I do not give a closed product a benefit of the doubt, and I do not average the good memories into the current state. A card that cannot be applied for, cannot be loaded, cannot spend and whose app has been removed from the stores is not a card that scores five out of ten because it used to be cheap.

The Cost mark of 5 is the only mark that is not near the floor, and it reflects that the fee structure, as far as anyone outside the company could verify it, was genuinely reasonable — and irrelevant now. You cannot pay a top-up fee into a service that will not accept the top-up.

Who this suits: nobody, as a card. Who it still concerns: former holders with a little money left on a card balance, and holders of the TKN token who are waiting for a swap notice. If that is you, keep reading — there is real, concrete work you can do. Who it does not suit: anyone looking for a way to spend crypto today, or anyone who has read an old review and is planning around it.

What happened to the programme

The closure is dated and explained. On 8 October 2024, Monolith’s services were closed, the cards were deactivated and the accounts were closed. The stated reason was “increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK”. Notice what that reason is and is not: it is not a fraud, not a hack, not a bankruptcy filing. It is a licensing environment tightening around a business model.

That matters for how you read the rest. The official notice does not mention MiCA — the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation — even though MiCA is the obvious backdrop to a 2024 European crypto-company closure and its stablecoin and custody rules took effect through 2023 and 2024. I would rather tell you the notice says what it says than construct a regulatory theory on your behalf. What I can say is that the pattern of a programme closing, balances being swept to the issuer, and an app disappearing from the stores is a pattern I have seen repeat in this category, and that the people left holding the balance are the people who end up filing forms.

Beyond that first closure there is a tail of unfinished business, and this is where the story gets slightly untidy:

• On 8 October 2024 the closure took effect. Cards stopped working; balances stayed.
• The app was delisted from the app stores on 17 February. The year is not stated on the page, though the context points to 2025. So the app that would have shown you your balance is no longer something you can download fresh.
• In April 2025 the company promised details of a swap of the TKN token to a new token. Holders of TKN were told to expect details; as of the update of 28 February 2025 that detail was still pending.
• The entity behind the service is UAB “Belela”, Lithuania, code 305982313, a virtual currency deposit and exchange operator. The site copyright is held by Token Group Ltd under licence to UAB “Belela”. The card issuer is Solaris. The named successor app is Token.com.

One more thing worth stating plainly because it trips people up: Monolith itself is not a bank. It never was. The card was issued by Solaris, an external issuer — earlier coverage from 2019 names Contis Financial Services Ltd as the issuer at that time. The Monolith brand was the programme manager and front end. When you read that “your balance is held by Solaris”, that is not a technicality; it is the whole reason there is a separate redemption process at all, and the reason you need to talk to Solaris and not to Monolith about money.

Historically — and I am flagging this as unofficial, since it comes from third-party reporting and not from Monolith’s own pages — the card was a Visa debit card for the EEA, described as covering 31 European countries and “not usable in the USA or Asia”. The network and the physical forms are not stated on the notice itself. None of this matters for a decision now; I include it only so that old comparisons make sense to you.

If you already have the card: two pots of money, two different routes

This is the section I would read twice if you were one of the people affected, because the single most common and most expensive mistake is treating the card balance and the crypto as one thing that one organisation will sort out.

The crypto is entirely fine, and entirely yours. Monolith was non-custodial: your coins never sat with the company, they sat in a wallet controlled by your seed phrase. That is why the closure notice can say plainly that the crypto remains accessible with the 12-word seed phrase in another wallet. You can import that phrase into MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet or anything else you trust, and your funds are there. If you never wrote the phrase down, the notice says it was shown in the app under Settings and then Back up Seed. If the app is delisted from the stores and you never saved it, that is a serious problem, and nothing in the notice rescues it — recovery of a lost seed phrase is not something a support desk can do.

The card balance is a different matter entirely. Any money left on the card itself is held by Solaris. To get it, the notice describes a route rather than an automatic payout:

• Go to the Solaris Redemptions page and submit a request.
• Use the subject line “Redemption funds of Monolith customer”.
• Provide your payout account details in EUR or GBP — the currency of the card.
• Provide a colour copy of your ID if the email on the request differs from the one on your account.
• Solaris aims to respond within 14 days.

Two warnings about this. First, 14 days is the stated aim for a response, not a guarantee of payment, and I would not plan around a specific date. Second, an app balance is no longer accurate after the closure, so the amount you remember seeing in the app may not be the amount Solaris pays out. Go by what you can evidence.

Beyond the money, there is the token question. If you held TKN, the announced swap to a new token had not been detailed as of the end of February 2025. The channel given for the TKN/TOKEN questionnaire is Monolith via Telegram and email; the support hours and languages are not stated. Solana Redemptions Support — Solaris — handles card funds; Monolith handles the token questionnaire. Two different desks for two different pots of money. It is not stated anywhere that anyone will be compensated for inconvenience, for the loss of a service, or for fees you may have paid in anticipation; the notice mentions disputes or compensation not at all.

For the historical picture, unofficial and from 2023 reporting: cash withdrawals were capped at £350 (€378) a day, spending at £7,500 (€8,113) a day, and top-ups were possible with ETH, TKN, DAI, DGD, DGX, MKR, SAI and USDT. The ATM fee was not stated. Those limits no longer govern anything, but they are worth reading once, because they show how the card was designed: small, capped, and deliberately not a way to move large sums.

What can go wrong

Let me separate what is documented from what is simply how this category fails, because I would rather you weigh the second with the first in view.

Documented, from the closure notice itself: the app balance is no longer accurate. The crypto is reachable only through a seed phrase. Any card balance sits with Solaris and moves only if you make a request and supply documents. The app has been removed from the stores, so the ordinary place you would have checked your balance no longer exists. And the promised TKN swap was still undelivered as of the update of 28 February 2025.

On complaints, I looked and I found nothing specific to Monolith: no Monolith Trustpilot page exists, and a search on 20 October 2026 returned only unrelated card shutdowns. I want to be careful about what that does and does not mean. It does not mean nobody has been unhappy; it means there is no public body of complaints to point you at. The one adjacent pattern worth knowing is that other Solaris-issuer closures — Plutus is the name that comes up — did draw Trustpilot complaints about slow refunds. Treat that as context, not as a forecast of what will happen to your claim.

Then the risks that belong to this product category and would have applied to you anyway:

• Seed phrase loss is unrecoverable. A seed phrase is the unencrypted form of your private key; anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds, and the network has no way to freeze or return them.
• Irreversibility runs one way. Crypto transfers cannot typically be undone, and a stolen key has no built-in recovery.
• Self-custody means sole responsibility. The upside of non-custodial is that a company’s closure does not touch your coins; the downside is that nobody is there to help you when your key is lost or your clipboard is hijacked by malware that swaps a pasted address.
• Custody is not free of risk either. Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018) and the Ronin Network breach (US$625 million, 2022) are the standing reminders of what trusting a provider can cost.
• Stablecoins are not what their name suggests. TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022 and USDC lost its peg briefly in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. Tether itself states it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity — stablecoins are not censorship-proof.
• Networks and fees bite. On Ethereum (ERC-20) gas is paid only in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT with no ETH cannot send; on Tron, fees are paid through bandwidth and energy, often burning TRX; and a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee.
• Merchant-side friction is real and often feels like fraud when it is not. The issuer identification number at the start of a card number tells a shop which institution and country issued the card, and some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards on that basis. Address Verification is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which causes declines. A declined authorisation can also leave a hold on funds for several days, typically up to 7.
• Programme closures follow a shape. Visa terminated its agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer; WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all its Visa programmes. The typical sequence is a notice period, then loading stops, then spending stops, then you are asked to withdraw what is left.

One point about regulation and money that is easy to misread: Monolith’s own notice says that Lithuanian deposit insurance and the UK FSCS do not cover crypto activities or funds held in the non-custodial wallet. Nor should you assume a card balance is a bank deposit — e-money balances are safeguarded by segregation or insurance under e-money rules, which is not the same thing as a deposit guarantee scheme.

What to take instead

I want to be careful here. These are products I have scored on their own evidence, not endorsements, and none of them is a like-for-like replacement for what Monolith was. Two of the three I know very little about from official sources; I say so rather than filling the gaps.

International Visa Card is the one with the most published detail, and the most obvious caveats. On costs and fees: virtual card issuance is $5 one-time with no maintenance fee; card use in USD is free on all plans; foreign currency costs the “Visa exchange rate + 2% FX fee”; deposits of any kind are free. You fund the USD account by depositing USDC or USDT at 1:1, and it also accepts USD, EUR, SEPA, SWIFT and FedNow deposits. On access, and this is the part you must read properly, the account and card are not available to residents or legal registrants of a long list of countries: Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam. FATF grey-list countries are reviewed case by case with compliance approval. Purchases are blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. The rule is written by residence or registration — citizenship is not mentioned — but sanctions screening in this industry is usually applied to citizenship and country of birth as well, so do not read “residence” as a loophole.

Cardex converts crypto to fiat at the moment of payment, and the site describes an “AI-Powered Conversion Rate” that scans global exchange rates and picks the best one when you spend. No fee percentage is stated anywhere I could find, which is the first thing you would want to know. It funds from USDT, USDC and BTC wallets, networks not stated. Its own store listing is Naira-focused and the card currency is given as Naira, so think about where you actually are.

Young Card is the thinnest on official detail and the most distinctive on rewards: cashback is paid in YNG tokens rather than money, at a rate that depends on your Club tier — Essential 0.1%, Gold 1.8%, Platinum 3.6% — with Bronze and Silver not stated. Token-denominated cashback is a different proposition from cashback in your own currency, and you should price it that way.

None of these removes the two structural questions you should ask of any card in this category. Who actually holds your money, and what are you covered by? If it is an e-money institution, its safeguarding is segregation or insurance, not a bank deposit guarantee.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Monolith card to nobody, and if you are holding one, I would recommend you stop treating it as a card today and start treating it as two claims to settle: the seed phrase, and the card balance.

To a former holder with a balance, I would say this: the seed phrase first, because it is the part that only you can act on and the part that can be lost while you wait for anything else. Import it into a wallet you control now, verify you can see the balance, and write the phrase on paper somewhere safe. Then the Solaris Redemptions request, with the exact subject line, in the currency of the card, with the ID if your email does not match. Then the TKN questionnaire if you hold that token, and be sceptical of any message that arrives asking for fees, seed phrases or remote access — none of that is how any of this works.

To someone who arrived here looking for a crypto card, I would say this: the interesting thing about Monolith’s closure is not the card, it is the shape of the ending, and that shape is what you should look for in every card you are considering. Who is the issuer, and are they a regulated institution with a name you can search? Who holds the crypto, and can you leave without asking permission? What happens to my balance if this company decides to stop? If the answer to that last question is a redemption form addressed to an unrelated company with a 14-day response aim, you already know how it ends.

The honest summary is this: Monolith was a reasonable, low-fee, self-custodial card in a category that has since proved it is fragile, and the company’s non-custodial choice is the single reason most holders came out of this with their crypto intact. The lesson is not that self-custody is unsafe. It is that the card was the fragile part, the crypto was not, and they were never the same pool of money.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Monolith card?

It was a crypto-linked Visa debit card, issued by Solaris, letting people spend from a non-custodial wallet after topping up a fiat balance. Third-party reporting from 2023 described it as available across the EEA, 31 countries. The programme closed on 8 October 2024, the cards were deactivated and accounts were closed.

Is the Monolith card still available anywhere?

No. Services closed on 8 October 2024 in every market, with no application process and no waiting list. The closure notice gives no eligibility information for new customers because there are none. Anyone offering to “activate” or “restore” a Monolith card is not offering you something official.

Why did Monolith close?

The stated reason was increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK. The notice does not mention MiCA specifically, and I would not tell you it did. What is documented is the date, the deactivation, the closure of accounts, and where the remaining balance sits.

What happened to my crypto if I had a Monolith card?

Your crypto is still yours. It was never held by Monolith. You can import your 12-word seed phrase into another wallet such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet and your funds are there. If you never saved the phrase, it was shown in the app under Settings and Back up Seed.

How do I get money back from a closed Monolith card?

Card balances are held by Solaris. Go to the Solaris Redemptions page and submit a request with the subject “Redemption funds of Monolith customer”, your payout account details in EUR or GBP, and a colour copy of your ID if your email differs. Solaris aims to respond within 14 days — an aim, not a guaranteed payment date.

Was Monolith a bank?

No. It was the programme manager and front end; Solaris was the card issuer, and earlier 2019 coverage names Contis Financial Services Ltd. The operating entity was UAB “Belela” in Lithuania, code 305982313, and the site’s copyright sits with Token Group Ltd under licence to it.

What were Monolith’s fees before it closed?

Unofficial figures from 2023 reporting: a 1% top-up fee, a 1% community contribution, up to 2% per top-up otherwise, a 1.75% FX fee outside the card’s currency, and no monthly or shipping fee if you used the card in its country of registration. No cashback. None of this is payable now.

Is my Monolith balance protected by deposit insurance?

No, not for the crypto. The closure notice states that Lithuanian deposit insurance and the UK FSCS do not cover crypto activities or funds in the non-custodial wallet. Card balances are safeguarded under e-money rules rather than bank deposit guarantees, and the notice offers no compensation for inconvenience or service loss.

What happened to TKN, and what should I do about it?

A swap of TKN to a new token was announced with details promised in April 2025, and as of the 28 February 2025 update those details were still pending. Monolith handles TKN/TOKEN questions via Telegram and email. I found no official channel for individual recovery of that specific token beyond that questionnaire.

What should I look at instead?

If your priority is spending USD, the International Visa Card is the most fully documented of the alternatives, at $5 one-time for the virtual card, no maintenance fee, free USD use and a 2% FX fee abroad — with a long list of countries where the account is not available. Cardex and the Young Card are worth reading about too, but I would want to see their fee and access terms from the company itself first.

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