The card stopped working and the promise of a replacement has not landed

Updated October 2026

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Available in US

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18+ Only

Solflare’s card is not available to sign up for at the moment. The programme was paused on 28 July 2026 after the issuer behind the cards wound down, and although a replacement card was promised for August 2026, no relaunch could be confirmed as of 20 October 2026. That is the single fact that shapes everything else on this page, and it is why the score is low: not because self-custody spending is a bad idea, but because a payment card is a piece of infrastructure, and the infrastructure underneath this one is currently absent.

If you are reading this because you hold crypto and cannot get an ordinary bank card, you are exactly the reader this page is written for. The alternative section below matters more to you than the fee table does, because your problem is not optimising yield — it is having something that works at the till.

The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict: 3.2 out of 10, and the score is mostly about the pause

My score for the Solflare card is 3.2 out of 10. Nearly all of that comes from the programme being suspended rather than from anything wrong with the underlying idea. If you already use the Solflare wallet for its staking and swaps and you were waiting for the card to come back, the wallet still works — it is the card that is missing. If you were planning to open a new account specifically for the card, I would not start today, because there is nothing to start with.

The audience note for this card, in plain terms: this review is mostly written for Solflare wallet holders waiting for the relaunch. If that is you, skip to the section on what to do if you already have the card, then read the alternatives carefully, because the relaunch timing is the only thing that will change your options.

Who this suits, and who it does not

It does not suit anyone starting from zero today. You cannot apply, you cannot verify, and there is no waiting list to join. The site still describes the product, but the product is not on sale.

It suits wallet holders who already hold USDC on Solana and treat the card as a convenience on top of a wallet they use anyway. The spending model itself is the cleanest thing about this card: no card balance to load, no top-up step, no exchange rate set by the card company between you and the shop. The card draws USDC from your own wallet at the moment of purchase.

It does not suit anyone who needs a card they can rely on this month. A subscription, a travel booking, a deposit — anything with a deadline — should not sit on this card while the programme is paused.

It does not suit people who hold anything other than USDC on Solana. There is one asset, one network, no conversion layer. If your crypto is on Ethereum, or it is BTC, or it is a token you bought last week, the card has nothing to say about it.

What I could not verify

A fair amount, and I would rather list it than paper over it. The card’s public pages do not state the official cost or the fee schedule, do not name the issuer, do not publish a country list, and do not say whether eligibility follows residence or citizenship. The application was checked by asking for a card inside the mobile app, case by case. So when I give you numbers below, mark them: they come from third-party sites, not from Solflare, and they contradict each other in places. You will need to confirm them in the app if the programme ever restarts.

What happened to the programme

The sequence is short and the date is exact.

On 28 July 2026 Solflare paused both its virtual and its physical cards. The stated reason was that the issuer, Kulipa, wound down; a Solflare co-founder pointed to solvency issues at Kulipa. On the same day, auto-renewing subscriptions tied to the card stopped working, though the wallet itself, staking and swaps were unaffected and open Borrow positions stayed reachable in the Cards tab. A replacement card was promised “in August” 2026, with Apple Pay and Google Pay, higher limits and cashback. By the late-August 2026 roadmap, the relaunch was still sitting in the future column, and I found no relaunch as of 20 October 2026.

Two things about that timeline are worth sitting with. First, the promised date and the current date are a month or more apart with nothing to show for it. Second, and more awkward: the solflare.com pages still show the old “Get Solflare Card” marketing with no pause notice anywhere in the public site. If you landed on the site from a search, the impression you get is of a live product. That mismatch is itself a signal about how much weight to put on the marketing copy.

The card description the site still carries is a self-custody Mastercard that deducts USDC from the wallet at checkout and works at “100M+” merchants. The issuer is not named on the official pages; the footer says Solrise Finance Ltd. Existing cards do not carry over to a replacement.

On the practical questions the site would normally answer, it does not. Eligibility was described as the EEA, the UK and “other countries”, decided case by case, with no country list and residence versus citizenship not stated. KYC verification in the app was instant, though the documents, proof of address and age requirements are not stated and there were no verification tiers. Apple Pay was “coming soon” and tied to the relaunch; Google Pay worked. Whether gambling or specific merchant categories were blocked is not stated. Cashback was described as returning with the relaunched card, with no rate and no payout currency. Currency handling was never published, delivery times were never published, and with the programme paused the site had nothing current to say about any of it.

The one thing the app itself did supply: Solflare’s wallet app is on iOS and Android, and a third-party read of the App Store listing on 6 October 2026 gave it 4.8 out of 5 from 9.6K ratings. That is the wallet, not the card, and I did not read the Play Store listing.

The fees nobody can agree on

Everything in this block is unofficial — third-party sites, not Solflare’s own pages, and they contradict each other.

I am not going to pick a winner from that table. Take the 2% ATM figure as the pessimistic case rather than the likely one, and assume the FX number is somewhere in that 0.4%–1% band (unofficial and not confirmed by Solflare) until the app tells you otherwise.

If you already have the card

Here is the good news first, and it is genuinely good news: there is no card balance. The funds never sat on the card. They sit in your own self-custodial wallet, and the card only drew on them at the moment of purchase. Solflare’s own notice says there is nothing you need to do. Your money was never exposed to the issuer’s failure, and that is not a small thing in this category.

What actually broke:

• Your existing card stopped working on 28 July 2026.
• Auto-renewing subscriptions tied to the card stopped. If you had recurring payments running, they failed and you need to move them.
• Open Borrow positions stay accessible in the Cards tab, so that part of your position is not stranded.

What has not been stated: ATM fees, spending limits, dispute handling and top-up mechanics are all unpublished for the card, and since the programme is paused there is nothing current to read. The help centre has a single card article, which is about the pause.

If you are the kind of person who reads review pages to work out what a provider’s Trustpilot looks like, the honest answer here is that what exists is about the wallet, not the card. A third-party report citing Coin Bureau put Trustpilot at 3.9 out of 5 for solflare.com from 66 reviews, with roughly 45% of them critical, mentioning lost funds, failed transactions and suspicious token approvals. The date on that reading was not stated and I did not read the live page. The complaints named are wallet complaints. I found no card-specific complaints.

One more unofficial data point, since it is the kind of thing you will want: a third party considers it “likely” that re-enrolling for the replacement card would mean a fresh KYC round. That is a guess by an unnamed source, and the card is not back yet, but it is worth assuming you will be verifying again rather than assuming continuity.

And the parts that would help if you were already using it are only partly there. Support is described as a 24/7 human team reachable by message in the app. Security-wise, the model is genuinely the better one: self-custody means you keep the keys, and the site names biometric protection, 3-D Secure authentication, partner fraud defences and instant spending notifications. Whether any of that is insured is not stated, because no one publishes that figure for a card that is not running.

What can go wrong

Ordering these by how likely they are to affect you, rather than by how dramatic they sound.

The relaunch does not come, or comes in a form that does not suit you. The promise was August 2026. It is late October. A new issuer has not been named. Your money is safe in the wallet, but the use case you opened the account for does not exist, and there is no date you can plan around.

You are re-verified and re-screened. New issuer, new compliance requirements. That is normal in this category and it is also the moment your personal circumstances get looked at again from scratch.

Your auto-renewing payments failed silently. This is the practical one. Subscriptions do not retry politely forever; they fail, and services cut off. Audit what was on the card and move it somewhere that works.

Fees land worse than the sources suggest. With every number unofficial and the sources disagreeing, a 1% service fee plus an FX fee plus an ATM fee can turn a routine month into an expensive one. If your spending is mostly domestic and in the currency your wallet holds, you avoid the FX line entirely — but the service fee is the one nobody has ruled out.

Self-custody cuts both ways. This is the trade-off nobody should gloss over. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key. A seed phrase is typically 12 to 24 words in unencrypted form, and anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds. Blockchain transfers are typically irreversible: the network cannot freeze or return them. Custodial providers do lose money — Mt. Gox reported about US$350 million stolen in 2011–2014, Coincheck about US$400 million in 2018, Ronin Network US$625 million in 2022 — and holding funds with a custodian carries that counterparty and hack risk. Self-custody removes the custodian and hands you the key-loss, phishing and clipboard-hijacking risk instead. Neither side is the safe side.

The Binance-mint question you will not be warned about at checkout. Merchants can look up the card’s issuer identification number and see which institution and country issued it, and they may apply extra scrutiny when that differs from your billing address. Address verification service checks, mainly in the US, Canada and the UK, are generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which causes declines. Merchant category 7995 covers gambling and many issuers block it by policy rather than by law, with the list varying by issuer — and Solflare does not publish whether it blocks anything. Declined authorisations can also leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to seven.

The regulatory floor is moving under all of this. MiCA, the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation, took legal effect in June 2023; its rules on asset-referenced and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024 and the remaining provisions, including crypto-asset service provider rules, from 30 December 2024. The transitional period for existing providers runs until 1 July 2026 or until they receive or are refused authorisation, whichever comes first — and that date has now passed. A card is regulated separately again, as a payment service, so a crypto card often depends on two licences. In the US, FinCEN guidance treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters, while people merely buying goods are not. Where you live determines which of these applies to you, and I am not going to guess.

Three-quarters of your balance is in two tokens. Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC are dollar-pegged, and the BIS put about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in those two as of July 2025. Circle says USDC is redeemable 1:1 for USD and fully backed by cash and cash equivalents, mostly in an SEC-registered government money market fund, with monthly reserve attestations. But “despite the name, stablecoins are not necessarily stable”: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022 and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023. And a chain transfer to a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to another network, can be lost outright. Get the network right.

The credit side has limits you have not been told about. EMIs must safeguard customer funds by segregating them or insuring them, but those funds are not bank deposits and may not sit under a deposit guarantee scheme. And if you are using the Borrow feature in that Cards tab, a debit-style card and a lending product are two different risk buckets.

What to take instead

Three alternatives from the same category, with their own scores beside Solflare’s 3.2. None of them is a like-for-like replacement — that is the point of showing them.

International Visa Card — the most conventional option

This one is closest to an ordinary bank product, and for anyone whose problem is “I need a card that behaves normally” it is the most straightforward of the three.

• What it is: a US-issued Platinum Visa, virtual, paying in USD. A physical card is listed as coming soon.
• Cost: virtual card issuance is US$5 one-time, with no maintenance fee. Plans: Classic free, Pro US$9.00 per month, Max US$19.00 per month.
• Fees: card use in USD is free on all plans. Foreign currency costs the Visa exchange rate plus a 2% FX fee. Deposits of any kind carry no fee.
• Funding: deposit USDC or USDT into the USD account at 1:1, free; also USD, EUR, SEPA, SWIFT and FedNow deposits. Networks for the stablecoin deposits are not stated.
• Rewards: no cashback stated.
• The catch you must read carefully: the account and card are not available to residents or legal registrants of Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela or 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 applies by residence or registration — citizenship is not mentioned, so if you hold a passport from one of those countries but live elsewhere, the published rule points at where you are, not what you carry. That distinction matters and I would check it against your own situation rather than assume.

Young Card — rewards tiered by club

• Cashback is paid in YNG tokens, at a rate set by your Club tier: Essential 0.1%, Gold 1.8%, Platinum 3.6%. Bronze and Silver are not stated.
• Not stated officially: who can get it, what the card officially is, the cost, fees, and how the card itself is funded.
• The catch: the headline reward rates are large and they are denominated in a token, not cash. A 3.6% rate in a token whose value you have to check is not the same as 3.6% back, and I would want to know what YNG is before optimising anything around it.

Cardex — multi-network, wide reach

• Reach: marketed as one crypto card for 200+ countries, with no country list and no exclusions published.
• Networks: a debit card on VERVE, Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay, with virtual and physical options in the App Store listing. The listing’s card currency is Naira, and it is Naira-focused — pay in Naira.
• Conversion: real-time crypto-to-fiat conversion at the moment of payment, with an “AI-Powered Conversion Rate” that scans global exchange rates and picks the best one when you spend. No fee percentage is stated anywhere on the site.
• Funding: USDT, USDC and BTC wallets; networks not stated.
• Rewards: not stated.
• The catch: “no fee percentage stated” for a product whose entire value proposition is conversion at the point of sale is the thing to resolve first. And “200+ countries” with no published exclusions is a marketing sentence, not a guarantee.

How to weigh these

Read that last row again. Of these four, exactly one publishes a fee schedule on its own site. For a card you are considering because the banking system is not cooperating with you, an issuer that states its prices in advance is worth a lot.

The category, briefly

Since you may be new to crypto cards rather than choosing between four of them, a little background.

A payment card number starts with a six- or eight-digit issuer identification number that says which institution and country issued the card. Merchants can look that up, and it is why a card issued in one country can look foreign to a shop in another. Card payments involve several parties: the network (Visa or Mastercard) routes the messages and sets the rules, the issuer holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often only a programme manager or a front end. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves; they license issuers and can suspend a programme. In November 2022 Visa said it had terminated its global agreements with FTX, 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 WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes.

Most crypto cards behave like prepaid cards rather than debit cards: crypto is converted and loaded as a fiat balance, and the card can only spend that balance. Solflare is the interesting exception here — with no stored card balance at all, the wallet funds the purchase directly. That is the design’s real strength and the reason the wallet survived the issuer’s collapse intact.

KYC is not optional in this category. Anti-money-laundering law requires regulated businesses to verify customers and monitor transactions; in the EU that covers name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documents, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship and whether you are a politically exposed person. If due diligence cannot be completed, EU rules require the institution to decline the transaction or, where necessary, end the relationship — which is why accounts get closed or frozen pending documents. In the US, the customer identification programme requires name, date of birth, address and an identification number. Nationality is screened separately from residence, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy often apply to citizenship and country of birth as well as country of address. Cards are generally for adults 18 and over.

One last practical note for your own records, not advice: the IRS treats digital assets as property, so exchanging them for goods or dollars generally produces a taxable gain or loss, measured in local fiat at fair market value on the date of the transaction. Each card payment funded from crypto can be a separate disposal. How that works where you live is between you and whoever handles your taxes.

Who I would recommend it to

Recommended, with eyes open, to: existing Solflare wallet holders who hold USDC on Solana, use the wallet for staking or swaps anyway, and can comfortably live without a card until a new issuer is named. For you, the wallet is the product and the card is a bonus that may or may not return. The self-custody model is the right one for this, and the fact that your funds were never on the card is the single strongest thing I can say about this company’s handling of the collapse.

Recommended to nobody who: needs a working card this month, plans around recurring payments, wants a published fee schedule, wants to hold anything other than USDC on Solana, lives in one of the countries International Visa Card names, or wants to know what dispute process they would be under. Every one of those is a reasonable requirement and the card does not meet it today.

Not recommended as a first stop if your problem is access to banking. If you are in the situation this page is aimed at, the International Visa Card is the one I would look at first, because it is the only option here with a published fee schedule, a named country policy and a stated card price. Its country list is long and includes several populous countries, so check it against where you live before you invest an afternoon. If you are outside its list, Cardex’s reach and Young’s reward tiers are the two things left to examine — with the understanding that neither publishes its prices.

My honest overall view: the idea here is better than the execution. A card that spends straight from your own wallet, with no issuer balance and no top-up step, is a design I would want to see more of. What is missing is the boring part — a named licensed issuer, a published fee table, a country list, a dispute process and a launch date. Until those exist, this is a wallet with a card-shaped aspiration, and it scores 3.2 out of 10.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Solflare card?

It is a self-custody Mastercard that draws USDC directly from your Solana wallet at the moment of purchase, with no card balance and no top-up step. The site still describes it as working at “100M+” merchants. The issuer is not named on the official pages, and cards have been paused since 28 July 2026.

Is the Solflare card available in my country?

Eligibility was described as the EEA, the UK and “other countries”, decided case by case through the app, but no country list has ever been published and it is not stated whether the test is residence or citizenship. More importantly, the card is not being issued at all right now, so the question is academic until a relaunch.

Why did Solflare pause the card?

Because the issuer behind it, Kulipa, wound down; a Solflare co-founder cited Kulipa’s solvency issues. Cards were paused on 28 July 2026. A replacement was promised for August 2026 with Apple Pay, Google Pay, higher limits and cashback, but no relaunch was confirmed as of 20 October 2026.

Do I need to do anything if I already have a card?

Nothing with your money. There is no card balance — the funds stayed in your self-custodial wallet and Solflare says there is nothing you need to do. What did break is your card itself and any auto-renewing subscriptions tied to it, so move those payments elsewhere.

Is Solflare a bank, and who owns it?

The site footer names Solrise Finance Ltd, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, with marketing possibly handled by affiliate Blockadopt d.o.o., Zagreb, Croatia. Licences are not stated, and with the issuer wound down and no replacement named, I would not describe this as a banking relationship in any meaningful sense.

What does it cost, and is it free?

The official pages state neither the cost nor the fees, so any figure you read elsewhere is third-party. Unofficially: the annual fee is free, there is a 1% service fee, FX is quoted variously between 0.4% and 1%, and the ATM fee is listed as 2% by one source and free by another. Treat all of it as unconfirmed and check the app.

Is the Solflare card safe for my money?

Your funds are in a self-custodial wallet, so they were never with the issuer that failed — that is the safest part of this story. The trade-off is that you hold sole responsibility for key loss, phishing and misdirected transfers, since blockchain transactions are typically irreversible and the network cannot freeze or return funds.

Can I add the Solflare card to Apple Wallet or Google Pay?

Google Pay worked. Apple Pay was described as “coming soon” and tied to the relaunch of the card, so with no relaunch there is nothing to add. Tokenised mobile wallets are stored on the device in the Secure Element, never on the provider’s servers, but that only matters once you have a working card.

How do I top up or use the virtual card?

There is no top-up step. The card spends USDC straight from the wallet at the point of purchase, so no card balance ever exists. Unofficially the virtual card appeared instantly in the app and a physical card was optional, with no shipping time or fee published — all of which is moot while issuance is paused.

Will the card come back?

Nobody knows, and I will not pretend otherwise. The promised date was August 2026, no new issuer has been named, and as of 20 October 2026 no relaunch could be found. If you are waiting, keep your funds in the wallet, do not plan recurring payments around the card, and watch for a named issuer rather than a marketing page — the solflare.com card pages still show the old “Get Solflare Card” pitch with no pause notice.

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