Card.fi is a crypto-funded prepaid card with two pricing tiers and a metal option, but the fees and the company structure deserve a close look

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Card.fi is a prepaid payment card that draws on a crypto balance: you transfer coins to a deposit address tied to the card, the platform converts them, and the card spends the result at any merchant that takes a major network. The product is run under the trading name Kaanch Limited in Hong Kong, with cards issued by the On5 Card Network, and it positions itself around spending many different coins from a single balance on virtual, physical or metal cards. This review walks through what the card offers, who it suits, and where the potential rough edges are.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict

Card.fi scores 6.6 / 10. The card does one thing unusually well: it accepts a long list of coins across five networks and turns them into card spending without forcing you to convert manually first. That flexibility, plus support for Apple Pay and Google Pay, is the reason the everyday-use score sits at 10/10. The cost score, by contrast, sits at 2/10 because the issuance and FX fees are steep unless you are on the Premium tier, and the reliability score sits in the middle because the card is issued by a small, unfamiliar programme with no named licences and no public complaint history that I could find.

This is a card for someone who holds several different coins, wants to spend them through Apple Pay or Google Pay, and is comfortable holding a balance with a custodial provider in Hong Kong. It is not a card for someone who wants low fees, someone who needs the protections of a large bank-issued programme, or someone who is a resident of a sanctioned country where the service is barred.

Who will they give you the card

The eligibility story for Card.fi is unusually wide and unusually thin at the same time. The marketing banner says cards ship to 200+ countries, which is broad, but the terms do the usual narrowing: residents of, or orders from, a country subject to sanctions that would prohibit the service are excluded, and the issuer may require identity verification before issuing a card or before raising limits. Beyond that, the card states a minimum age of 18, and that is as much as the public pages say. There is no separate list distinguishing citizenship from residence, no published list of supported or excluded countries beyond the sanctions language, and no statement of which documents you will be asked for.

In practice, that means the answer to “is Card.fi available in my country” depends on two things: whether your country is on the relevant sanctions list, and whether the issuer’s verification step accepts your documents. The terms do not promise a specific list of accepted proof-of-address or proof-of-identity documents, so you should expect to find that out at the point of application rather than from a checklist on the site. Because the card is issued by On5 Card Network under licence from the relevant card schemes, the issuer — not Kaanch Limited — has the final say on who gets a card, and that decision can change as the issuer’s risk policy changes.

For most readers in most countries, the headline “200+ countries” will probably hold up at the shipping stage. The friction, if any, is likely to be in the verification step, not in the geography.

How to get it

Card.fi offers three shapes of card: Virtual Classic and Virtual Premium, physical Classic and Premium, and a metal (stainless-steel) card. Every physical order includes a virtual card as well, so you can start spending through a wallet before the plastic arrives. The cards are issued “under licence from the relevant card schemes” — the card network is not named on the public pages, so the question of whether the card runs on Visa or on Mastercard is one to confirm at the checkout screen rather than from the marketing.

The application flow runs through the Card.fi account (a web dashboard), with the token list referenced as living “in the app”. Physical Classic and Premium cards ship within 5 to 7 business days, and the metal card is described as express; replacement costs and exact delivery times for the metal tier are not stated. Shipping follows the same 200+ country rule as eligibility.

Two things about the process are worth knowing up front. First, the issuer may ask for identity verification before issuing the card or before raising limits; if verification fails, the card is not issued and the fee is refunded. Second, the level of verification (the KYC tier) is not stated, so you should not assume that the small top-up limits on a Classic card will rise to Premium levels simply because you uploaded a passport; the issuer’s policy, not the marketing, decides.

What it really costs

This is the section where the Card.fi pitch gets uncomfortable for anyone who is not a heavy Premium user. There is no monthly fee, no annual fee, no inactivity fee and no minimum-balance fee, which on its own would be a clean story. The catch is that the fees you do pay — issuance, top-up, FX — are large enough that the no-monthly-fee framing only works if you spend enough to amortise them.

Three everyday scenarios are worth running through, because the headline fees can hide the smaller ones.

A $50 supermarket shop on a Classic card paid in a currency that matches the card would be hit by no FX fee but would have been preceded by a top-up at 1.5% + $1.00; on a $50 top-up that is $1.75 before you have bought anything, so the real cost of the groceries is closer to $51.75. Step the same shop up to a Premium card and the top-up fee is 1% with no $1 fixed component, which is $0.50 on $50 — better, but still a real drag on small purchases.

A €45 dinner in Europe on a Classic card, paid from a USD balance, will trigger both the top-up fee on the way in and the 3.5% FX fee on the way out; on a Premium card the FX fee drops to 2.5%, and for someone who travels often that difference is the one that pays for the $249 Premium issuance in the long run. The card currency itself is not stated in the public materials, so which currency the FX fee is measured against is a detail to confirm in the app before your first foreign transaction.

A $200 ATM withdrawal on a Premium card sits inside the larger Premium allowance, while on a Classic card the allowance is smaller; the actual ATM fee amount is not stated, and that is one of the clearest gaps in the published pricing. As a rule of thumb, FX and ATM fees on crypto cards are where the marketing stops and the maths starts, and Card.fi is no exception.

How to top it up

Topping up Card.fi is the part of the product that does most of the work to justify the 9/10 top-up score. The platform accepts 32 coins across 5 networks: Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Solana and Kaanch. The list of named coins includes USDT, USDC, ETH, BNB, SOL and KAANCH, with the rest of the 32 to be found in the app’s token list. Each card is tied to its own deposit address, the deposit is converted at the market rate on arrival, and the order completes after on-chain confirmation.

The cost of that top-up depends on the tier. Classic pays 1.5% + $1.00, Premium pays 1% and Metal is not separately stated but follows the Premium schedule in the published schedule. A minimum top-up is shown in the app or account; the exact figure is not stated, and you should treat the in-app figure as the source of truth at the moment of deposit. The fee is shown before each top-up in the terms, so the cost is not hidden behind the confirmation button.

Two operational points matter more than the headline list. First, blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network Card.fi does not support, or to the address of a different network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. Second, on-chain gas for the deposit is charged by the blockchain, not by Card.fi, so the network fee is on top of the platform’s top-up fee. That distinction is easy to miss when the platform quotes a “1%” top-up fee, because the actual cost of getting value onto the card is the top-up fee plus the gas paid to the network.

Withdrawals run in the other direction and follow a different schedule. Money is paid out in a supported stablecoin 1:1, with a 1% fee on the amount and a 7-day hold during which the withdrawal can be cancelled. Closing the card returns the funds to a held balance that is still withdrawable, and a virtual card cannot be cancelled once it has been issued. The 7-day hold is worth knowing about if you plan to use Card.fi as a way to move money quickly between crypto and a bank-style account — it is not a same-day payout.

Paying with it every day

The everyday-use score is the highest in the table, and the product earns it. The cards work in physical and virtual form, every physical card includes a virtual card, and both Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported on Classic and Premium. Physical cards can be used at ATMs, with Premium and Metal offering larger allowances than Classic and Metal adding a dedicated account manager. There is no published app-store rating for the management app, which is a small gap, but the management itself runs through a web dashboard with the token list in the mobile app.

Spending, though, comes with a published list of blocked merchant category codes. The card declines transactions at 18 MCCs, which include crypto purchases (6051), cash equivalents (6010), ATMs (6011, although ATMs are otherwise supported on physical cards — the MCC appears in the block list for card-not-present channels), quasi-cash (6050), stored-value loads (6540), remittances (4829), financial institutions (6012), securities brokers (6211), telemarketing (5966), dating services (7273), massage parlours (7297), betting (7995), regional gambling (7800, 7801, 7802, 9406), and political or religious organisations (8651, 8661). If a planned purchase falls into one of those categories, the card will not work, and a different payment method is the only answer.

The cashback structure is layered. Card spending earns 0.8% on Classic (capped at 10 USDT a month), 1% on Premium and 1.2% or 2% on Metal depending on the sub-tier, with a headline 10% rate at coffee shops capped at 10 USDT a month. On top of that, balances held on a Metal card earn “up to 18%” — the rate is variable and the conditions are not spelled out in the public pages, so the upper bound should be read as marketing, not as a guaranteed yield. Cashback is paid on card spending only, which means transfers, top-ups and withdrawals do not qualify.

One detail that matters when something goes wrong: transaction disputes are not handled by Card.fi. The Card.fi terms pass card disputes to the issuer’s cardholder terms, and complaints on card accounts are passed to the On5 Card Network. In other words, if a transaction is wrong, your first point of contact is the On5 Card Network’s dispute process, not the Card.fi support team.

What can go wrong

The reliability score of 5/10 is the one to read most carefully, because the risks are not dramatic but they are real. The trading name behind the card is Kaanch Limited, registered in Hong Kong and operating under Hong Kong law. The cards themselves are issued by the On5 Card Network, and on-chain settlement runs on the Kaanch Network. The terms do not name any of the licences held by either party, and the public pages do not link to a regulator entry that a reader can check. For a product that holds your balance and issues you a payment card, the absence of a named licence is a meaningful gap.

The balance model is custodial: the terms describe the balance as “a sum we owe you”, which is the language of a debtor-creditor relationship rather than of segregated client money. The terms do not address safeguarding or segregation, so the funds you hold with Card.fi are not, on the published wording, separated from the company’s own assets. That is the standard arrangement for custodial crypto products, but it is also the arrangement that has failed at other providers, and the difference between a segregated client-money account and an unsecured debt is the difference between a recovery process and a queue with the liquidator.

The complaint history is the part that I found most difficult to assess. A search run on 2026-10-21 found no Trustpilot page for Card.fi or Kaanch, and no Reddit thread complaining about the service. The absence of complaints is not the same as the presence of satisfied users — a small user base produces few reviews of either kind — but it is also not evidence of trouble. Treat the silence as silence, not as endorsement.

Security controls are present but standard: app-based two-factor authentication, instant card freeze from the account, per-card limits set at the authorisation stage and 3-D Secure confirmation on online payments. Support runs through email (sent from the account address) and Telegram, with the terms promising acknowledgement within two working days and a resolution or explanation within fifteen; Premium support is described as priority. The card’s on-chain settlement on the Kaanch Network is a design choice with its own risks — a network-specific settlement layer is only as reliable as the network, and a small network is a smaller set of validators and a smaller set of eyes.

Finally, because the card is a prepaid product, the protections that come with a US bank-issued debit or credit card — Regulation E for debit, Regulation Z for credit, chargeback rights, deposit insurance — do not apply in the same form. Prepaid card coverage varies and should not be assumed, and the dispute path runs through the issuer’s cardholder terms, not through a consumer protection regime.

What to take instead

If Card.fi is not the right fit, the three alternatives below cover different corners of the same space. None of them is a perfect substitute, and the cards on the market change quickly, so treat this as a starting point for your own comparison rather than a recommendation.

CardFlow

CardFlow positions itself as “Nigeria’s smartest fintech card platform” and markets to Nigerians and global users; no country list or sanctions carve-out is published. The product is a virtual USD Mastercard, created in three minutes from a sign-up flow. Creating the card is free according to the site’s FAQ, and the card is funded with Bitcoin, USDT, ETH or a Naira bank transfer, with the funding networks not stated on the public pages. Fees beyond the issuance cost, cashback structure and any monthly charges are not stated. The product is worth a look if you want a free virtual USD card and you are happy with the funding options on offer.

HyperCard

HyperCard is a prepaid card whose card balance is held in USD or EUR, with the App Store page saying the card works in more than 176 countries — that figure is about acceptance, not eligibility, and the official pages do not publish an eligibility list. The card is funded by depositing crypto such as USDT, BTC or ETH in the app, and the deposit is converted to USD or EUR on the card; the deposit networks are not stated. No fees are listed on the readable pages, which is not the same as “free”. HyperCard is the alternative to look at if you want a prepaid USD or EUR balance and a wide acceptance footprint.

Nero

Nero is a virtual card with a standard number, expiry and CVC, on a network that is not named on the public pages. The card is topped up with USDT or USDC and the conversion to fiat happens at the time of payment, which means the balance is held in stablecoins rather than in fiat. The published top-up commission is 4%, no FX fee is stated and the one-time issuance fee amount is not stated. Eligibility is not stated in detail, and the site refers to restricted countries without publishing the list. Nero is the alternative to look at if you want a virtual card funded directly from stablecoins and you are willing to accept a 4% top-up commission.

Who I would recommend it to

The short version is that Card.fi suits a specific reader and only that reader. If you already hold several different coins across different networks, want to spend them through a single card, and are happy to do that with a custodial Hong Kong provider, the card does that job at a level most competitors do not match. The 32 coins in 5 networks figure is real, the Apple Pay and Google Pay support is real, and the 10/10 everyday-use score reflects how smooth the spending side is once the card is funded.

If, on the other hand, you want low fees, a known issuer with named licences, or a balance protected by segregated client money, Card.fi is not the right product. The 2/10 cost score is not a rounding error: $49 to issue a virtual Classic card, 1.5% + $1.00 to top it up and 3.5% on FX will eat into small purchases noticeably, and the Premium tier’s $249 issuance fee is only worth paying if you will use the lower top-up and FX fees often enough to recover it. For someone whose main concern is protection of funds, the absence of named licences and the custodial balance model are deal-breakers, and the FAQ on safety below goes into more detail on what that means in practice.

The honest summary is that Card.fi is a feature-rich crypto card with a price tag that matches its ambition, a corporate structure that is thinner than the marketing suggests, and a use case — spending many different coins through a single prepaid balance — that it does better than most. Read the fee schedule, check the block list, and decide whether the flexibility is worth the cost.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Card.fi card?

Card.fi is a prepaid payment card that draws on a crypto balance. You transfer coins to a deposit address tied to the card, the platform converts them, and the card spends the result at merchants that take a major network. The product runs under the trading name Kaanch Limited, Hong Kong, with cards issued by the On5 Card Network.

Is Card.fi a bank?

No. Card.fi is a card programme, not a bank. The trading name is Kaanch Limited in Hong Kong, the cards are issued by the On5 Card Network, and the public pages do not name any banking or e-money licence. The balance is held as a debt the company owes you, not as a segregated client-money account.

Who owns Card.fi?

The card is operated under the trading name Kaanch Limited, registered in Hong Kong and operating under Hong Kong law. Cards are issued by the On5 Card Network, and on-chain settlement runs on the Kaanch Network. The public materials do not name any individual owners, parent companies or regulators.

Is Card.fi available in my country?

The banner says cards ship to 200+ countries, and the terms bar only residents of, or orders from, a country subject to sanctions that would prohibit the service. There is no separate list distinguishing citizenship from residence, and the documents you will be asked for are not published. Treat the 200+ figure as a shipping figure, not as a guarantee of approval.

How do I get a Card.fi card?

You sign up through the Card.fi account (a web dashboard), choose a tier, pay the one-time issuance fee and pass any identity verification the issuer requires. Virtual cards are issued immediately; physical Classic and Premium ship in 5 to 7 business days and the metal card is described as express.

Does Card.fi require KYC?

The issuer may require identity verification before issuing a card or before raising limits, and if verification fails the card is not issued and the fee is refunded. The minimum age is 18, and the specific documents you will be asked for are not stated in the public materials.

How do I top up my Card.fi?

You transfer one of 32 supported coins across Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Solana or Kaanch to the deposit address tied to your card. The deposit is converted at the market rate on arrival and the order completes after on-chain confirmation. The top-up fee is 1.5% + $1.00 on Classic, 1% on Premium, and blockchain gas is charged on top by the network.

How do I withdraw money from Card.fi?

You request a withdrawal in a supported stablecoin, the amount is paid 1:1 with a 1% fee, and there is a 7-day hold during which the withdrawal can be cancelled. Closing the card returns the funds to a held balance that is still withdrawable, and a virtual card cannot be cancelled once it has been issued.

Is the Card.fi card free?

No. Virtual Classic costs $49 to issue and Virtual Premium costs $249. There is no monthly, annual, inactivity or minimum-balance fee, but top-up fees are 1.5% + $1.00 on Classic and 1% on Premium, and FX is 3.5% on Classic and 2.5% on Premium. The price of “free” is a fee on the way in and a fee on the way out.

How do I add Card.fi to Apple Wallet or Google Pay?

The card supports Apple Pay and Google Pay on Classic and Premium. Once the virtual card is issued, the standard wallet flow is to open Apple Wallet or Google Pay, choose to add a card, and follow the prompts; the exact path depends on your device and region, and the Card.fi support team can walk you through it if the in-app flow is unclear.

Is Card.fi safe?

The card uses standard safeguards — app-based two-factor authentication, instant card freeze, per-card limits and 3-D Secure — but the balance is held as a debt of the company (custodial) and the terms do not address safeguarding or segregation. No licences are named, and no public complaint history was found. Safety here means operational security, not deposit-style protection.

How do I delete my Card.fi account?

The public pages do not describe an account-deletion flow. The card itself can be closed, and the balance returns to a held balance that remains withdrawable; a virtual card cannot be cancelled once issued. For full account deletion, contact support through the email or Telegram channel listed in the account.

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