Crypto Card Issuers 2026: 16 Programmes Checked

When a crypto card dies, it is almost never the brand on the front that killed it. Crypto card issuers are the layer underneath — the licensed entity that is actually allowed to put a card on Visa or Mastercard — and in July 2026 one of them failing took two cards dark in a week. So we asked a simple question of sixteen programmes on 19 October 2026: does your own site name the entity that issues your card? Four do. We read every cardholder agreement, footer and legal page we could reach, then looked each named entity up in its regulator's register, and the gap between what is advertised and what is licensed is wider than we expected.

The name on the card is not the issuer

A crypto card is five businesses wearing one logo. There is the brand you signed up with, which owns the app and the customer relationship. There is a programme manager running the product day to day. There is a processor moving the authorisation messages. There is the network, Visa or Mastercard, whose logo is on the front. And there is the issuer: a bank, or an electronic money institution, holding the scheme membership and the regulatory permission that makes the whole thing legal.

Only the last one matters when things break. The issuer decides whether your balance is safeguarded, insured or neither; it sets how much warning you get before the card closes; and its regulator is the one you can complain to.

What sixteen programmes disclose on their own pages

We pulled each programme's card page and, where one existed, its cardholder terms, and searched for a named legal entity. Not a brand, not a licence type, not a “partner”, but a company you could look up.

Four complete answers out of sixteen. And of those four, exactly one — Gnosis Pay — names the entity, the scheme licence, the regulator, the regime and the authorisation number in a single sentence. It is the best issuer disclosure in this market, and it belongs to a card that stops working on 20 December 2026, as our Gnosis Pay wind-down guide sets out. The most honest programme in the set is leaving.

One brand, five issuers

Crypto.com is the most-searched crypto card, and the one most often described as a single product. Its own cards page names five issuers.

Three of the five are Crypto.com's own licensed entities and two are third-party banks, which is why “is this card safe?” has no single answer. It also explains, structurally, why the fee schedules differ so much by country — something we measured separately in Crypto.com card fees by country. Different licence, different rulebook, different price.

The Singapore disclosure also contains the frankest sentence any issuer in this market has published: where Foris Asia issues e-money to non-Singapore residents, “this does not mean you will be able to recover all the money you paid to Foris Asia Pte. Ltd. if Foris Asia Pte. Ltd’s business fails.” That is the issuer telling you, in its own words, that the licence you are relying on may not reach you.

The two banks behind several crypto cards

Read enough of these documents and the same handful of names come back. WebBank, a Utah industrial bank, is named as the issuer by OKX on its card page and by Gemini on its credit card page — two competing crypto brands, one bank. Community Federal Savings Bank issues the Crypto.com US prepaid Visa. Digital Commerce Bank issues the Canadian cards. Pathward, N.A. is the named issuer of the Coinbase Card in the United States.

Concentration is not automatically a problem; a bank that issues for several programmes is a bank with a working compliance function. But it does mean a single issuer's decision to exit the crypto segment can close several cards at once.

A licence that does not cover card issuing

Bleap's own site is unusually forthcoming. It says it “operates in the EU through Bleap SIA, a crypto-asset service provider licensed by Latvijas Banka (the central bank of Latvia) under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA)”, it says Bleap SIA is a subsidiary of Bleap Ltd in London, and it links its own entries in the Latvian company register and the Latvijas Banka register of supervised entities.

So we performed it. The Latvijas Banka entry for Bleap SIA, registration number 40203714425, licence 27-55/2026/14, lists two authorised activities, both valid from 25 June 2026: exchange of crypto-assets for funds, and exchange of crypto-assets for other crypto-assets. There is no electronic money issuance. There is no payment card issuing. There could not be — MiCA authorises crypto-asset services, and issuing a card on a network requires a bank or e-money permission plus a scheme membership, which is a different regime entirely.

The distinction is practical, not pedantic: a CASP registration brings no safeguarding of a card balance, so citing it where an e-money permission belongs points a reader at protections that are not in play. We cover the regime itself in crypto cards and MiCA in Europe.

Terms you must read and cannot find

Plutus states the dependency plainly in its EEA terms, section 1.3: “Some of our services (i.e., the provision of debit cards and current accounts) are provided by our banking partner and are subject to their terms and conditions. You will be required to read and comply with any terms imposed by our banking partner in the provision of a Plutus Card.” Section 10 adds that your account is “an electronic money account provided through Plutus and managed by our banking partner, an authorised Electronic Money Institution”, and that your funds are “safeguarded in segregated accounts”.

Across 13,335 words of those terms, the word “issuer” appears zero times and the banking partner is never named. So the obligation is real and unmeetable: you must comply with terms imposed by a company the agreement does not identify.

Plutus does publish a page for precisely this, in two versions, linked from its own footer. Here is the EEA one in full, below the heading and the date:

The UK version is identical, with “UK GBP” swapped in and the same February 2023 date. Both were live on 19 October 2026. These are the two pages on the entire site whose job is to tell you who holds your money and under whose safeguarding rules, and both have been a dangling pointer for more than two and a half years. The company behind the brand is itself disclosed, in the footer: Block Code Ltd, England and Wales 09674279, and BLOCK CODE LT UAB in Lithuania. Who issues the card is not.

“Regulated partners” is not a name

The commonest non-answer is a reassuring abstraction. KAST's FAQ handles it well right up to the last clause: “Is KAST a bank? No. KAST is not a bank and does not take deposits as one. It is a payments app that issues cards through regulated partners, so your money moves on” — and the partners are never listed. Elsewhere the site says it works with “carefully selected, regulated partners”. Both sentences are almost certainly true. Neither is checkable.

Our reviews of the KAST card, Bleap card and MetaMask Card each carry the detail per programme. The pattern across them is the point: the layer that determines your legal position is the one layer nobody is required to advertise.

Your issuer can change without your signature

Suppose you do the work, find your issuer, check its register entry and decide you are comfortable. On at least one major card, that conclusion has a shelf life, and the clause saying so is section 34 of the Crypto.com US prepaid cardholder agreement, headed “Changes to Your Card Relationship”:

You get advance notice and an opt-out, and the opt-out is the card being cancelled and the balance sent back — free of charge, which is more than the same agreement grants when you close the account, as we found in crypto card closure fees. A programme manager needs a clause like this to survive a bank exiting the segment. But it makes the issuer a variable rather than a fixed property of your card, and the replacement only has to be “a different FDIC-insured depository institution” — no particular one.

The issuer layer consolidated on 1 May 2026

Here is the development that makes this worth checking again. On 1 May 2026, Exodus Movement, Inc. — a company listed on NYSE American as EXOD — acquired 100% of Monavate Holdings Limited, Monavate Ltd and Baanx.com Ltd, and separately acquired Baanx US Corp for $30.0 million payable over four years. Monavate is the named issuer of the Gnosis Pay card. Baanx was the programme infrastructure behind the MetaMask Card.

The useful part is not the deal; it is that the issuer now files quarterly with the SEC, so anyone can read its balance sheet. Exodus's own filing describes the acquisitions as adding “payment processing, card issuing, card program management, sponsorship, and related payment infrastructure services”, and describes Monavate as “the Company's regulated Electronic Money Institution subsidiary” whose customer funds sit “in designated safeguarded accounts under the UK Electronic Money Regulations 2011”, “segregated from the Company's own funds and not available for general corporate purposes”.

Those customer deposit liabilities are, substantially, cardholder money: the filing says balances “representing safeguarded funds, customer account balances, cardholder balances, or similar obligations are presented as customer deposit liabilities”. A third of a billion dollars of it, from zero to $331.5m in six months because an issuer changed hands. That is the most useful fact here: when your issuer is owned by a listed company, its finances become public.

Safeguarding under the UK e-money rules is not deposit insurance, and the difference decides what you recover; we work through each regime in crypto card balance protection.

Why the issuer is the layer that fails

All of this would be bookkeeping if issuers never failed. They do, and 2026 supplied the case study. Kulipa, a Paris-based card issuer, wound down in late July. Within days the Solflare Card and the Ready Card stopped working, and Ready's co-founder said publicly that they were given no notice. Neither card's own pages had ever named Kulipa. Users of two separate brands discovered their shared dependency at the point of sale.

Both of those cards pulled funds at the moment of purchase rather than holding a balance, which is why nobody lost money — custody, not disclosure, saved them. The full register of 2026 wind-downs, and how much warning each gave, is in our crypto card shutdowns guide. The lesson for this article is narrower: the entity whose failure ends your card is, on twelve of the sixteen programmes we read, an entity you cannot name.

Kulipa's own website did not answer us at all on 19 October 2026: the domain resolves, the server does not respond. A failed issuer takes its documentation with it, so find out who yours is while the site is still up.

Find your own card's issuer in ten minutes

The only tool you need is a browser, and it took us under ten minutes per card.

Step 4 is the one everybody skips and the one that caught the most. A licence number on a website feels like the end of the enquiry; it is the beginning. If steps 1 and 2 both come back empty, you have your answer anyway: the programme has chosen not to tell you, and you can price that however you like.

Final take

Nothing here says a card with no named issuer is a bad card. What the count shows is that the disclosure is optional in practice, and that this market advertises the network and omits the issuer — exactly backwards relative to what matters if the programme stops.

So treat the issuer as a specification, like a fee or a limit. Four of sixteen programmes will hand it to you. One will hand you a licence number that turns out to cover something else. Two will tell you to read terms they do not publish. And one, the one with the model disclosure, is winding its card down in December. Ask the question before you need the answer, because the day you need it is the day the site goes quiet.

Sources

All read on 19 October 2026. Crypto.com cards page; Crypto.com US prepaid cardholder agreement (CFSB, Foris Inc., section 34); Gnosis Pay; Monavate (FRN 901097; UAB Monavate LB002139); Companies House; Exodus Movement Form 10-Q to 30 June 2026; Latvijas Banka register and Bleap; Plutus EEA terms and Partner Safeguarding Policy; OKX Card, Gemini Credit Card, MetaMask Card, KAST, Bitget Wallet Card. Bybit's card terms article returned “This article is currently not supported on this site”. Coinbase's card page refused our requests, so Pathward, N.A. is taken from its published disclosure as reported, not a document we read. Wirex returned no response.

Related Articles

• Crypto Card Balance Protection 2026: The Insolvency Rules
• Crypto Card Shutdowns 2026: 90 Days or No Notice
• Crypto.com Card Fees by Country 2026: 9 Schedules
• Crypto Cards in Europe: What MiCA Changes in 2026
• Crypto Card KYC Rules 2026
• Crypto Card Supported Countries 2026: The Three Lists

Frequently Asked Questions

Who actually issues a crypto card?

Not the brand printed on it, in almost every case. A crypto card is assembled from layers: the consumer brand, a programme manager, a processor, a licensed issuer holding the scheme membership and the regulatory permission, and the network. On the Crypto.com US card the issuer is Community Federal Savings Bank; on the OKX Card and the Gemini Credit Card it is WebBank; on the Gnosis Pay card it is Monavate Limited.

How do I find out who issues my crypto card?

Read the cardholder agreement rather than the marketing page, because the agreement has to name the issuer and the marketing page does not. The opening paragraph usually carries it. Then look the entity up in its regulator's register. If no document on the site names a legal entity, that is your answer.

Does a MiCA licence allow a company to issue a payment card?

No. MiCA authorises crypto-asset service providers for activities such as exchange and custody. Issuing a card needs a bank or e-money permission plus a scheme membership, which MiCA does not grant. Bleap describes its card as “issued under a MiCA license”, but the Latvijas Banka entry for Bleap SIA, licence 27-55/2026/14, lists only two activities, both crypto-asset exchange.

Can the issuer of my crypto card change without my agreement?

On at least one major card, yes. Section 34 of the Crypto.com US prepaid cardholder agreement says you agree the Program Manager may at any time, as your agent and on your behalf, open a new card account at a different FDIC-insured institution, arrange a new card, and transfer your balance. You get advance notice and an opt-out, and opting out cancels the card and returns the balance.

Why does it matter who issues my crypto card?

Because the issuer decides whether your balance is safeguarded, insured or neither, how much notice you are owed before closure, and which regulator you can complain to. It is also the layer that fails: when the Paris-based issuer Kulipa wound down in July 2026, the Solflare and Ready cards stopped within days, and neither card's pages had named it.

Which banks issue crypto cards?

A small number carry a disproportionate share. WebBank is named by both OKX and Gemini. Community Federal Savings Bank issues the Crypto.com US prepaid Visa, Digital Commerce Bank the Canadian cards, and Pathward, N.A. the Coinbase Card in the US. Outside the US the equivalent layer is usually an electronic money institution rather than a bank, such as Monavate Limited or Foris MT Limited.

Is one crypto card brand always issued by the same entity?

No. Crypto.com's own page names five by region: Community Federal Savings Bank in the US, Digital Commerce Bank in Canada, Foris MT Limited in Malta, Foris Asia Pte. Ltd. in Singapore and Foris GFS Australia Pty Ltd under AFSL 467462. The brand is shared; the licence, the regulator and the protection regime are not.

What should a complete issuer disclosure contain?

Five elements, and only Gnosis Pay's footer carried all five: the trading company with its registration number, the issuing entity in full, the scheme licence it issues under, the regulator, and the authorisation number and regime. Its version names Monavate Limited issuing under licence by VISA Europe Limited, authorised by the FCA as an Electronic Money Institution under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011, FRN 901097.