A closed programme, a refund form, and four alternatives that still issue cards

Updated October 2026

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If you are reading this because you wanted a crypto payment card, I should start with the thing that decides everything else: the AQUA card, which Aqua called the Dolphin Card, was suspended worldwide on 4 December 2025 and has not been reopened. No new cards are being issued. If you already hold a balance on one, the official route to getting it back is a refund request through the Aqua website. If you were still thinking of applying, there is nothing to apply to. What follows is what the programme actually was, what the suspension means for money you may still have on it, what can go wrong if you are mid-refund, and which four cards do offer the same idea today.

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

The verdict: 2.4 out of 10

I score this card 2.4 out of 10. That is not a low score attached to a working product with rough edges — it is the score of a product that no longer exists as a payment card. The headline feature of an AQUA review used to be that the Dolphin Card needed almost no identity checks: an email address, a JAN3 account, a code in your inbox. That advantage vanished the moment the cards stopped. The programme’s own beta post is dated 21 May 2025, and the suspension announcement is dated 4 Dec 2025. In between sits roughly six months of a card that, third-party reporting says, already failed to work at Apple Pay, Google Pay and a Spotify payment from Argentina.

Who does this suit? Almost nobody, in the sense of using it as a card. Who it was designed to suit was someone who could not get an ordinary bank card, or who wanted to spend crypto without handing over identity documents — the beta was for users outside the US and Canada, with some merchants unsupported in certain countries. The one group this page is genuinely useful to is existing cardholders who need to recover their remaining balance. For them the advice is short: submit the refund form, watch for the email confirmations, and accept the currency you are given rather than the one you wanted.

A note on who stands behind it: Aqua is a crypto wallet, and the card programme was operated by JAN3 through Aqua. The card issuer itself is not named anywhere in the material I reviewed. That is not a technicality. When a card dies, the question that matters is which institution is liable for your money, and here the chain from app to issuer is only partly documented.

What happened to the programme

The Dolphin Card was announced in beta on 21 May 2025. In that announcement, Aqua described a virtual Visa card in US dollars, reloadable, and managed inside the Aqua’s Marketplace tab. The beta was open to users outside the US and Canada, with the caveat that some merchants would not support it in certain countries, and Aqua said cards for the US and Canada were hoped for in the coming months. Sign-up during the beta needed only a JAN3 account with an emailed verification code; no identity documents were mentioned. Apple Pay and Google Pay were promised for later, and tap-to-pay was not available at all.

Then, on 4 December 2025, all Dolphin Cards were suspended globally, effective immediately, after a problem with the card provider. Aqua did not name the provider. Other Aqua wallet services were unaffected, which tells you the outage sat in the card programme rather than in the exchange or the wallet infrastructure. The JAN3 team said afterwards that it was negotiating refunds and looking for alternative providers. As of my checks in 2026 I found no replacement provider and no relaunch, so the practical reading is that the programme is finished rather than paused.

Two details from that period are worth keeping in mind. First, the JAN3 CEO said on 30 November 2025 that partners had told him all cards were being suspended and that alternative providers would be sought — four days before the public announcement. Second, when the suspension happened, remaining balances were refunded in USDT on Liquid rather than in dollars on a bank rail. That single choice sets the character of everything that follows.

There were never tiers to speak of. Only one card was described in the beta post: virtual, US dollar, reloadable. Rewards were not stated, blocked merchants were not stated, and the card currency was USD with no multi-currency balance described. The card existed only as a virtual product; no physical card and no delivery were ever part of it.

One thing I should flag as unofficial: a third-party review dated 24 October 2025 described the card as issued in the United States and USD-denominated, and reported a Spotify payment from Argentina being rejected because the card country and the user’s country did not match. The card’s own pages did not name an issuing country. Treat the US detail as reported rather than confirmed.

If you already have the card

Here is the part that matters most, and it is short. After the suspension announced on 4 December 2025, remaining balances are refunded in USDT on Liquid. You request the refund through a secure request form on the Aqua website. The money can go to your Aqua wallet or to any wallet capable of receiving Liquid assets. Processing starts once Aqua receives the funds from its provider, and you get email confirmations along the way.

Read that last clause carefully, because it sets your expectations. This is not an instant refund; it depends on a third party moving money before Aqua can begin. Ask for the refund early rather than assuming you can wait.

What will not come back: pending merchant refunds. If you had a payment in flight when the cards were suspended — a refund from a shop, a cancelled order, a subscription reversing — that money was headed to the Dolphin Card, and the card is gone. The Aqua notice states plainly that pending merchant refunds will not return to the card. A chargeback process is not stated at all, so I would not build a plan around one.

Other practical details: withdrawal fees are not stated. ATM behaviour is not stated, which is unsurprising for a virtual card that never got to live. Support is not stated either — the beta post named no support channel and referred people to the terms of service for the country list, which is not a route to a refund query. The honest summary is that the refund form is the only documented channel, and the email confirmations are the only progress signal you get.

For the record, what the card was before all this: a maximum of $4,000 USD per month, reloadable through the Card Management page in the Aqua app using BTC, L-BTC or Liquid USDt. The original post recommended making a small test load first, and warned that the balance may take a moment to update. Neither the top-up fee nor the minimum was stated.

What can go wrong

The largest risk here is the one that already happened, and I want to be plain about why it happened rather than dress it up. A card programme sits on top of other institutions: the network routes the messages, the issuer holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often only the front end. AQUA’s suspension was attributed to a card provider whose name was never published. When the provider disappears, everything above it — the app, the balance, the refunds — has to be rebuilt from scratch, and in this case it was not.

Three practical failure modes sit behind that.

Refunds in a currency you did not choose. Your balance was in USD on a card; the refund is USDT on Liquid, a specific network. If you have moved your holdings to another chain in the meantime, or you have never used Liquid, you now face a support problem, not a banking one. And blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a transfer sent to an address on a network the receiver does not support can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee attached.

Money that simply never arrives back. A pending merchant refund does not return to the card. That is stated. If your counterparty was going to hand you $60 next week, you will not get it through this route.

A thin operational layer. The issuer is not named, support is not stated, refund fees are not stated, and at the time of writing no user reports on Reddit or Trustpilot describe the experience either way — which tells you about user volume, not about reliability.

I also want to name a few category-level hazards that apply to whatever replaces this, because they will apply to your next card too.

• Top-up chains matter more than most people expect. On-chain deposits cost network fees paid by you to the blockchain, not to the card provider. On BTC those transactions wait for miner fees and three to four network confirmations before crediting (unofficial detail from the third-party review). Ethereum gas is paid only in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT with no ETH cannot send it. Tron prices transactions with bandwidth and energy and often burns TRX.
• A card can look “foreign” and be declined. Merchants read the first six or eight digits of a card number to see which institution and country issued it, and may apply extra scrutiny if that country differs from the billing address. The reported Spotify rejection from Argentina is an example of the same mechanism.
• Prepaid and foreign BINs get refused by policy. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards outright. Address verification is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK, and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which causes declines.
• Merchant categories get blocked by issuer policy. Gambling sits under MCC 7995, and many issuers block it on specific cards as a policy choice, not by law. The blocked list varies by issuer.
• Declines can leave holds. A refused authorisation may leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to seven.

On custody, one point deserves emphasis because it is the part people get wrong. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key. Custodial platforms have a real record of failure — Mt. Gox at roughly US$350 million reported stolen between 2011 and 2014, Coincheck at about US$400 million in 2018, and the Ronin Network bridge at US$625 million in 2022. With self-custody you carry a different risk: the seed phrase, typically twelve to twenty-four unencrypted words, restores the wallet and spends its contents for anyone who obtains it, and crypto transfers have no built-in recovery. Nobody can freeze and return a payment the network has already accepted.

If you are in the EU, the relevant frame is MiCA — Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, which took legal effect in June 2023, with its asset-referenced and e-money token rules applying from 30 June 2024 and the remaining provisions, including crypto-asset service provider rules, from 30 December 2024. Transitional arrangements let providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026, or until a MiCA authorisation is granted or refused, whichever comes first. ESMA maintains an interim register of authorised CASPs that you can search. Note that a card is a payment service regulated separately from the crypto side, so a card like this often depends on two licences; and electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds in segregated accounts or with insurance, which is not the same as a bank deposit and may fall outside deposit guarantee schemes.

One last background point, because it explains why the Visa name meant very little here. 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. In 2018 Visa suspended WaveCrest in Europe, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Closures of this kind are the normal failure mode of crypto cards, not an exotic one.

What to take instead

All four cards below are open programmes, and each has a published score from the same kind of assessment. They differ enormously in how much you have to hand over to hold one, which is the trade-off that matters most for the reader described at the top of this page — someone who has trouble getting an ordinary bank card.

MetaMask — the strongest of the four

This is the card I would look at first if I wanted something that works. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay are among the examples — with other regions on a waitlist, and US and UK sign-ups temporarily closed per the FAQ. Proof of residence is required, and the citizenship rule is not stated. The card is Mastercard, virtual first and instant, with metal pre-orderable in the app after the virtual is approved, one card per user, issued by Monovate with Crypto Life as card provider. The virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee; metal is $199/year. Fees are a “minimal fee for each transaction” with the amount not stated on the pages read, no additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee. It spends directly from the connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, naming mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT. Cashback in mUSD goes to the Money Account at 1% on Virtual; metal has a 3% headline but the footnote caps 3% at the first $10,000 spent and 1% after that, plus a $FLY bonus at 5X or 7X through the Blackbird dining app.

The catch for the reader I have in mind is proof of residence. That is a document requirement, not a citizenship requirement, which is a meaningfully different kind of friction.

KAST — most transparent pricing, steepest membership

KAST publishes its prices, which almost nothing in this category does. It offers virtual and physical cards, up to ten per user: Visa Platinum (Standard), Visa Infinite metal (Premium), Visa Infinite gold plated (Private), plus Pengu, Solana and Bitcoin designs, with the balance in USD and stablecoin deposits converted 1:1 at a 0% spread. Membership is $0, 1,000 USD or 10,000 USD per year, billed annually upfront with no monthly option. Fees are unusually clear: 0% to top up, 0% to spend, 0% transaction fee, 0% for Apple and Google Pay, but a 0.5%–1.75% FX fee on non-USD depending on where you live and which programme you are on, 0.10 USD on non-USD transactions under 25 USD, 0.50 USD for a declined transaction, and a 1 USD/month inactivity fee after 12 months. Delivery is 40 USD for the Standard physical card, which is included with Premium and Private.

KAST funds from USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD across Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and TRON, with no bank account needed. Its own Terms say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”, which conflicts with the app listing PYUSD and RLUSD — check with support before sending. Cashback is USD: 1.5% on the first 2,000 USD/month for Standard, 2% on the first 10,000 for Premium, 3% on the first 40,000 for Private, with KAST Points adding +1% or +2% on Premium and Private.

The eligibility rule is where this can hurt you. The country list is not published; it is shown at KYC, and if your country is not listed KAST is not available there. Citizenship is judged separately from residence: if you live in a supported country but hold an ID from a restricted region, you may still fail KYC; dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass; only your own ID is accepted and a VPN does not bypass it. You can create an account in an unsupported country, but KYC stays locked. This is the strictest identity posture of the four, deliberately written.

TokenPocket — the middle ground

TokenPocket covers the widest map with one caveat: Visa debit for a list of European countries and territories including Germany, France, Spain and Switzerland, and Mastercard debit for Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, the UK and others, with the Americas planned for Q2 2025. The card runs on Arbitrum and balances sit in EUR24 and USD24. Fiat24 cards are virtual, with no physical card mentioned. On cost, TokenPocket partly covers the NFT creation fee and the user pays “a small portion”, with the amount not stated, and “apart from these, TP Card does not charge any additional fees”. The one real charge is 1% on crypto deposits into the card, which is to be refunded later through rewards or reduced transaction fees; no cashback percentage is stated. Crypto deposits come from the TokenPocket wallet, and the FAQ does not list specific coins or networks.

The $4,000 monthly ceiling I would apply mentally to AQUA, by the way, is not unusual in this category, and none of these three publishes a comparable headline figure in what I read.

Who I would recommend it to

Honestly: nobody, as a card to use. There is no version of this recommendation that says “pick AQUA if you want X”, because the card cannot be picked. What I can do is tell you which of these situations you are in and where that leaves you.

If you have a balance sitting on a Dolphin Card, this page’s job is done: file the refund form on the Aqua website, choose USDT on Liquid, send it to a wallet that can actually receive on Liquid, and expect processing to start only after Aqua receives funds from its provider. Accept that pending merchant refunds are gone. Keep the email confirmations.

If you were refused a normal bank card and you were drawn to AQUA because it asked for nothing, the honest replacement is not another no-KYC crypto card — it is a mainstream one with a real issuer behind it, even though that means handing over documents. Between MetaMask and KAST, KAST is the easier one to predict and the harder one to qualify for; MetaMask is the easier one to qualify for if your country is on its list, since it asks for proof of residence rather than a passport from a specific region.

If you already self-custody and simply want to spend from your own wallet, MetaMask is the closest fit to that idea in this set.

If you are in the EU and want to know whether a provider is properly authorised before you hand over anything, search ESMA’s interim register of CASPs. It costs you two minutes and answers a question no card page will answer for you.

And one warning that applies to all of them: do not treat a crypto card as a bank account. The funds behind a card like this are usually safeguarded e-money or a wallet balance, not a bank deposit, and that distinction is exactly what you are reminded of the moment a provider suspends a programme.

Frequently asked questions

What was the AQUA card?

It was a virtual Visa card in US dollars, reloadable with crypto and managed inside the Aqua wallet app’s Marketplace tab. Aqua announced the Dolphin Card in beta on 21 May 2025 for users outside the US and Canada, and suspended all of them worldwide on 4 December 2025 after a problem with its card provider, which was never named.

Is AQUA a bank?

No. Aqua is a crypto wallet, and the card programme was operated by JAN3 through Aqua. The card issuer itself is not named in the material I reviewed. Aqua also said other wallet services were unaffected by the card suspension, so the failure sat in the card programme rather than in the exchange.

Who owns AQUA?

AQUA was operated through JAN3, and the JAN3 CEO is the person who publicly commented on the suspension, saying on 30 November 2025 that partners had told him all cards were being suspended and that alternative providers would be sought. Beyond that association, the ownership structure is not stated in what I reviewed.

Why was the AQUA card suspended?

The stated reason was a problem with the card provider, announced as effective immediately on 4 December 2025 across all Dolphin Cards globally. No provider was named, no specific fault was described, and as of my 2026 checks I found no replacement provider and no relaunch of the programme.

Can I still apply for an AQUA card?

No. No new cards are being issued, and no application route exists. If you were looking for a crypto card with light identity checks, the realistic options in this review are MetaMask and KAST, both of which document their requirements.

Does the AQUA card require KYC?

During the beta it needed only a JAN3 account with an email verification code, and identity documents were not mentioned; a third-party review dated 24 October 2025 also described sign-up as requiring only an email. That advantage is now moot, since no card is being issued, and it says nothing about how the alternatives treat you.

How do I get my money back from the AQUA card?

Remaining balances are refunded in USDT on the Liquid network after the 4 December 2025 suspension. You request it through a secure form on the Aqua website, choose either an Aqua wallet or any wallet able to receive on Liquid, and processing begins once Aqua receives funds from its provider, with email confirmations. Refund fees are not stated.

What happened to payments that were in transit?

Pending merchant refunds will not return to the card, which the Aqua notice states directly. So a shop refund or cancelled order that was on its way to the Dolphin Card does not come back to you through this route. A formal chargeback process is not stated.

Is the AQUA card safe?

The safety question is overtaken by the fact that the programme is closed. What I can say is about custody in general: control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key, and custodial platforms have failed before — Mt. Gox at roughly US$350 million reported stolen in 2011-2014, Coincheck at about US$400 million in 2018, Ronin Network at US$625 million in 2022.

Is the AQUA card free, and what did it cost?

The card’s own pages do not state an issuance fee, a monthly fee or transaction fees — the cost and fee fields are simply not stated, and I found no published fee statement. A third-party review dated 24 October 2025 mentioned no issuance or monthly charge, but that is an unofficial observation rather than a disclosed price list, and it describes a card that no longer issues.

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