A Visa Infinite card spending straight from self-custodied USDC

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Banqa card is not a bank account with a card attached. It is a Visa Infinite payment card that draws on USDC you hold in your own smart-contract wallet — you keep the keys, the card spends against your collateral. That single design choice explains both what is genuinely good about it (no annual fee on the Standard tier, no deposit fee on USDC top-ups, a Virtual card issued immediately and a metal-style physical one for $39.00) and what you have to accept (a published country list that does not exist, a 1.99% fee on every non-USD purchase, and per-withdrawal ATM charges of $1.50 plus 1% and $1).

I scored it 7.1 out of 10. The details below are the ones that should decide whether it is right for you.

Conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict: 7.1 / 10, aimed at people who already hold USDC and their own keys

Banqa is a competent, narrowly-built card for a specific person: someone who already keeps USDC in a self-custody wallet, is comfortable choosing a blockchain network before pressing send, and wants a Visa Infinite number — virtual and physical, working in Apple Pay and Google Pay — that spends that balance directly. For that person it is a good deal. The everyday-use score of 9 out of 10 is earned: virtual plus physical, both mobile wallets, ATM access.

It is a poor fit for anyone hoping to avoid paperwork, for anyone whose bank blocked them and who expects a crypto card to be a loophole, and for anyone who needs a published list of countries before committing. Banqa does not publish one. “Eligibility depends on residence and applicable rules,” confirmed during application and KYC. You cannot check eligibility from a page; you find out by applying. That single gap is why the who-can-get-it mark is 6 out of 10 rather than higher.

Two things I want to be straight about before the details. First, the Trustpilot rating of 3.7 comes from a single review, dated July 2026, and Trustpilot itself notes the company has not invited reviews. One review is not a reputation; it is a data point with a denominator of one, and it should not be read as either reassurance or warning. Second, Banqa states plainly that it is not a bank, and the card is issued by a Visa Principal Member under a Visa licence whose name the public pages do not give. Banqa is the brand and the front end. Your contractual counterparty is not them.

Will they give you the card?

There is no country list. Banqa links a supported-countries page, but the eligibility rule it actually states is that eligibility depends on residence and applicable rules, and is confirmed during application and KYC. I could not find a page that lets you pre-check your location, and I am not going to invent one.

That means the honest answer to “is Banqa available in my country” is: ask by applying. Some readers will find that fine — the check is fast in most cases. Others, particularly people who have been turned away by conventional banks and are cautious about another KYC round, will want a list first and will not get one.

Age is not stated on the public pages. What is stated is the verification tier system, which I cover next, because it is where eligibility really lives.

How to get it

Verification is document-based and it runs in two speeds. You need a government ID — passport, national ID card or driver’s licence — plus proof of address dated within three months. Higher verification tiers may ask for source-of-funds documents on top of that.

• Automated checks usually complete in minutes.
• Manual reviews take 24 to 48 hours.
• Failed checks can be retried from the dashboard rather than starting over.

What you receive is a Visa Infinite card, virtual and physical. Business customers get virtual and physical cards too. The card currency is USD, which matters a great deal: any purchase denominated in something other than USD picks up a 1.99% fee on the way through. The physical card’s issuance and shipping cost $39.00. Which countries it ships to, and how long delivery takes, is not stated on the pages I read — so if you are outside the obvious markets, treat delivery time as unknown until you see it in your dashboard.

Limits are tiered. Daily, weekly and monthly caps depend on your verification tier, and you can set your own per-transaction limits. The tier names and the amounts are not stated publicly, which is a genuine gap: you cannot model your monthly spending against Banqa’s caps before you are verified. Plan on discovering them inside the dashboard.

Fees: what it really costs

Here is the whole price list as published, with the items that genuinely are not stated marked as such rather than guessed at.

Three ordinary payments, walked through, because fees that look small in a table add up differently in real life.

Coffee in your own country, $4.50. The merchant prices in dollars or converts to dollars at the network rate. There is no FX fee if the amount is genuinely USD-denominated, no conversion fee because your USDC is spent directly as collateral, and no monthly fee on Standard. The cost of this coffee is the coffee.

A $60 online subscription billed in euros. The $60 is non-USD, so 1.99% applies: roughly $1.19 of the price is the currency conversion. That is the single most common way people get surprised by crypto cards, and it recurs monthly. Over a year on one $60-a-month subscription it is about $14 of pure fee.

$200 withdrawn from an ATM. Fixed $1.50, plus 1% of the amount ($2.00), plus $1 — about $4.50 for the withdrawal. The $0.60 balance, decline or authorisation check is a separate line and I have seen no published allowance that covers it. ATM limits follow Visa partner standards, and there is no stated monthly free allowance, so treat ATM use as something to price before you rely on it.

Also worth knowing: there is no cashback. The rewards on offer are a referral programme paying 0.15% of your friends’ spend and a $10 bonus when a friend reaches $500 of spend.

How to top it up

Top-up is where Banqa’s design is clearest and where a mistake is most expensive. USDC sits in a self-custody smart-contract wallet on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum. The site says “Hold USDC on Base and Arbitrum” and, more pointedly, “Send only USDC on Base.”

On fees: zero deposit fees, and no fee on USDC top-ups. Other assets and other networks cost from free to 1% depending on the route. The minimum top-up is not stated.

Three practical points follow from that, and none of them are optional.

• The network must be one the card supports. Base, Arbitrum and Ethereum are named. A transfer sent on a network Banqa does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee — blockchain transfers do not reverse.
• The asset must be USDC. The instruction is unusually blunt about it. Sending a different token is not a fee question, it is a funds question.
• Gas is not paid by Banqa. On Ethereum, fees are paid only in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT or USDC with no ETH cannot send at all. That is a network rule, not a Banqa rule, and it is the kind of detail that strands people.

Withdrawing goes the other way: USDC moves from the card’s collateral back to your self-custody wallet via on-chain authorisation. An offramp fee of 1% plus $3.00 appears as an example on the home page. Closing the account costs $10.00.

Paying with it every day

Everyday use is this card’s best section, and the 9 out of 10 is not generous. You get a Visa Infinite, virtual and physical, and both Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported as official features. Virtual first means you can be spending minutes after verification rather than waiting for post.

What the card cannot do is at least as relevant. No cashback is offered. Blocked merchant categories are not stated — meaning I cannot tell you whether gambling, adult content, fuel, or airline tickets will decline, and neither can you, until you try. At a physical terminal the card behaves like any Visa card, which cuts both ways: it works widely, and a card with a foreign-looking issuer identification number can be declined by merchants who check that number against your billing address.

Chargebacks exist and are disclosed in the fee schedule as a cost. The process and time frames are not described anywhere I read, so if a payment goes wrong you should assume it will take longer than you would like and that it will not be free. In the US, prepaid-card coverage under Regulation E is narrower than ordinary debit coverage, and it should not be assumed to apply.

The interface is a web/app dashboard. Which platforms it runs on, and how it rates in the app stores, is not stated.

What can go wrong

Self-custody means you own the failure modes. Your recovery phrase is shown once and cannot be recovered by Banqa. Lose it and the wallet is gone. Nobody reverses crypto transfers. Clipboard-hijacking malware that swaps a copied address is a real and common theft vector. Against that, the card is genuinely well built: instant card freeze in the app, card details displayed for 60 seconds, email OTP or Google 2FA, passkeys rolling out, self-custody wallet underneath, and Codego Group running penetration tests and operating under SOC 2 controls.

The issuer is unnamed. Banqa says its cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member pursuant to a licence from Visa, and that Banqa itself is not a bank. The issuer’s name and licences are not named on the public pages. That is not automatically a warning — plenty of programme managers arrange exactly this — but it means you are entering a contract with an unnamed regulated entity, and you should be comfortable with that before you load funds.

Country exposure is unknown by design. With no published country list, you cannot tell in advance whether your residence, your citizenship, or both will pass. Nationality is screened separately from residence for sanctions and issuer risk purposes, so passing an address check is not the same as clearing the file.

The category has a scar tissue of closures. Visa terminated its global 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 several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme it ran. Closures follow a pattern: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw remaining balances. Treat any crypto card as something you can be exited from, and do not treat a balance sitting on it as savings.

The support picture is thin and untested. Support is by email, with replies usually within 24 hours. No complaints were found; Trustpilot carries one review, rated 3.7, five stars, July 2026, with no themes to learn from and a note that the company has not invited reviews. One five-star review from one person is not evidence of a functioning support desk. If your plan involves a large balance, find out how this one responds before you need it.

Regulation is settling around cards like this. MiCA took legal effect in June 2023; its stablecoin rules applied from 30 June 2024 and the crypto-asset service provider rules from 30 December 2024, with transitional periods running until 1 July 2026 or until authorisation, whichever comes first. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may only be issued by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. A card is regulated separately from the crypto side, so a product like this often rests on two licences. Providers who are not yet authorised appear on ESMA’s interim register of non-compliant entities, and it is worth a look before you commit money.

What to take instead

All four cards below are scored on the same basis out of 10, so the numbers are comparable rather than flattering. None of them is a universal winner; each trades the thing Banqa has (self-custody, USDC-native, published $39 physical card) for something else.

MetaMask Card — 7.1 / 10. The closest alternative on paper, and equal on score with a different shape. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories (Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay among the examples), with other regions on a waitlist; proof of residency is required, and US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ. It is Mastercard rather than Visa. You get a free virtual card instantly and can pre-order a metal card in the app, at $199 a year. Spending comes straight from the connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, with mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT named. No additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee, with the Mastercard rate used. Cashback is the reason people pick it: 1% on the virtual card in mUSD, 3% on metal up to the first $10,000 of spend then 1%, plus 5X or 7X $FLY bonuses through the Blackbird dining app. If your balance is USDC and you want cashback rather than cheapest top-ups, this is the live comparison.

KAST — 6.1 / 10. The most transparent fee schedule of the four, and the most expensive at the top. Residence-based eligibility is applied at KYC rather than published, and citizenship matters independently: living in a supported country with an ID from a restricted region may still fail, dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass, and a VPN does not bypass it. Standard is free; Premium is $1,000 a year and Private $10,000 a year, billed annually upfront with no monthly option. Against that, the spending costs are unusually clear: 0% stablecoin top-up, 0% USD card spend, 0% transaction fee, 0% Apple and Google Pay, non-USD FX 0.5%–1.75% by residence and transaction country, a $0.10 flat fee on non-USD transactions under $25, and $0.50 for a declined transaction. Cashback runs 1.5% on the first $2,000 a month, 2% on $10,000, 3% on $40,000.

TokenPocket — 5.8 / 10. The weakest of the four on score, and the one with the widest country coverage: a Visa debit across a list of European countries and territories, Mastercard debit across Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and the UK, with the Americas planned for Q2 2025. It runs on Arbitrum, the cards are virtual with no physical card mentioned, and balances sit in EUR24 and USD24. An NFT creation fee is partly covered by TokenPocket, with the user paying “a small portion” of an amount not stated. There is a 1% fee on depositing cryptocurrency, which the company says will later be refunded through rewards and reduced transaction fees — which means at the moment of depositing you pay 1% and hope for a later credit.

If you want the background rather than the comparison: most of these cards work the same way. A card number starts with a 6- or 8-digit issuer identification number that merchants can look up, and if the issuer country differs from your billing address some shops apply extra scrutiny or decline — which is why a card issued in one country can look foreign in another. Many crypto cards behave like prepaid cards drawing on a stored balance, so they cannot overdraw. The card network routes the messages and sets the rules, the issuer is the licensed bank or e-money institution holding the programme, and the crypto brand is often only the front end. Neither Visa nor Mastercard issues crypto cards to consumers directly; they license issuers and can suspend a programme, which is exactly what happened to FTX and WaveCrest.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Banqa to someone who has three things: USDC they already intend to hold, a self-custody wallet they have used to make a transfer before, and a tolerance for 1.99% on anything not priced in dollars. If all three are true, you get a Visa Infinite — virtual and physical, in both mobile wallets — with no annual fee on Standard, no fee to fund it with USDC, and no conversion step between your coins and your spending. That is a good, narrow product.

I would not recommend it as a first crypto product. The combination of “only USDC”, “only Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum”, a recovery phrase shown exactly once and unrecoverable, and irreversible transfers is a lot of sharp edges to meet on day one. Learn those on a chain where a mistake costs you nothing.

And I would not recommend it to anyone hoping this is the way around having no ordinary bank card. Banqa runs KYC like everyone else — government ID, proof of address within three months, sanctions screening, verification tiers, and citizenship considered separately from residence. If a bank turned you down for a compliance reason, this is a compliance check too, and it may turn you down for the same reason. If your banking problem is unresolved rather than technical, fixing it with the bank is more reliable than routing around it.

Before you commit money, check three things yourself: whether your residence and ID pass the check (you cannot pre-check this, so go in knowing it is a real possibility); what your verification tier’s daily and monthly limits actually are, because they are not published; and what a support request looks like in practice, by writing to them before you need them. Then read the withdrawal and closure terms properly — 1% plus $3.00 to offramp, $10.00 to close — because those are the numbers you will meet if you stop using the card.

Frequently asked questions

What is Banqa card?

Banqa is a Visa Infinite payment card that spends USDC you hold in your own smart-contract wallet rather than money in a bank account. You get a virtual and a physical card, a USD card currency, and Apple Pay and Google Pay support. Banqa is a brand of Codego Group, states that it is not a bank, and says cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member under a Visa licence. It keeps your keys; you keep the responsibility.

How does Banqa card work?

You hold USDC in a self-custody smart-contract wallet on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum, and the card spends against that collateral. There is no manual conversion step — USDC is used directly, which is what the company means by “no manual conversion”. Limits depend on your verification tier, and you can set your own per-transaction limits. Withdrawing sends USDC back to your wallet on-chain via authorisation, at an offramp example fee of 1% plus $3.00.

Is Banqa a bank?

No, and Banqa says so itself. The card is issued by a Visa Principal Member pursuant to a licence from Visa, but the issuer’s name and licences are not named on the public pages. That means your contractual counterparty is an unnamed licensed issuer rather than Banqa, and if you are deciding whether to hold a large balance, ask them directly which entity holds your funds and under what safeguarding rules.

Who owns Banqa?

Banqa sits under Codego Group, recorded as CODEGO GROUP LTD. Codego is the party that runs penetration testing and operates under SOC 2 controls. It also brands the card as not being a bank, so the group is a financial technology company rather than a deposit-taking institution — which is the shape most crypto card businesses take.

Is Banqa card available in my country?

Banqa publishes no country list. The stated position is that eligibility depends on residence and applicable rules, and is confirmed during application and KYC, though a supported-countries page is linked. Nationality is screened separately from residence for sanctions and issuer risk purposes, so being resident somewhere may not be enough. There is no way to pre-check this — you find out by applying.

How do I get a Banqa card?

You register, then supply a government ID — passport, national ID or driver’s licence — and proof of address dated within three months. Higher tiers may also ask for source-of-funds documents. Automated checks usually finish in minutes; manual reviews take 24 to 48 hours; failed checks can be retried from the dashboard. Approval is followed by a virtual card immediately, with the physical card costing $39.00 for issuance and shipping.

Is Banqa card free?

Partly. There is no annual fee on the Standard tier, and topping up with USDC carries no deposit fee. But the physical card costs $39.00, non-USD transactions cost 1.99%, an ATM withdrawal costs $1.50 fixed plus 1% and $1 for end users, a balance or authorisation check is $0.60, account closure is $10.00, and no monthly fee figure is stated either way.

How do I top up Banqa card?

Send USDC to your self-custody smart-contract wallet on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum, following the instruction to send only USDC on Base. USDC top-ups carry zero deposit fees; other assets and networks cost from free to 1% depending on the route, and the minimum is not stated. Gas is paid by you on the network, and on Ethereum that means ETH — so a wallet with USDC and no ETH cannot send.

Is Banqa card safe?

The security design is genuinely strong in the places it can be: self-custody wallet, instant card freeze in the app, card details shown for 60 seconds, email OTP or Google 2FA, passkeys rolling out, SOC 2 controls and penetration testing at group level. The trade-off is that self-custody has no safety net — your recovery phrase is shown once and Banqa cannot recover it, blockchain transfers cannot be reversed, and copied addresses can be silently swapped by malware.

Can I use Banqa card in another country?

You can spend anywhere Visa is accepted, subject to merchant acceptance — some shops decline prepaid or foreign-issued card numbers. But two things apply to foreign use: any purchase not priced in USD picks up the 1.99% FX fee, and the country you are in does not change what happens to your funds, which sit in your own wallet. There is also no stated list of blocked merchant categories, so whether gambling, fuel or travel will decline is not something you can check in advance.

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