The card is gone, the money may not be

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

If you were looking at Fiat24 as a way to spend crypto without the bank-account headache, you should know before you read anything else: the programme is not taking applications. The site sits in maintenance mode, the card page still carries the words “Coming soon in December 2024,” and the company’s own documentation says new clients face a USD 30,000 monthly limit rather than the higher figures elsewhere on the same page. There is no sign-up to do. My score for it is 3.3 out of 10, and most of that score comes from facts that were true once, not from what you can do today.

I have been through the card’s own pages, its developer documentation, the regulator’s register and the complaint record, and I want to walk you through what I found rather than through what the marketing once promised. The short version: this was a genuinely interesting product wrapped around an unusual idea — your account is an NFT in your own wallet — but it never got past a pilot’s worth of scale, and the people who tried it ran into support that did not answer.

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

My verdict on the Fiat24 card

Fiat24 scored 3.3 out of 10. That is a low score, but it is not a zero, because the underlying mechanics were sound and the company is a real Swiss entity under a real licence. The problem is not the concept. The problem is that the service is closed to new customers, the public pricing is silent, and the complaint record is thin in number and bad in quality.

Let me show you the score criterion by criterion, so you can disagree with my weighting if you want.

Read that table honestly and you will see the shape of the thing. Everyday use is the only category near half marks, and it is the only one that describes a working product rather than a promise. Who-can-get-it is a zero because there is no “who” any more. Reliability is a two because of something no amount of good engineering fixes, which is a support inbox that does not answer.

Who this suits. Almost nobody as a way to open something new. It suits exactly one group: existing holders with a remaining balance who need to know how to get that money out and what to look at while they do it. If that is you, the sections below are ordered for you.

Who this does not suit. Anyone hoping to apply in the next year. Anyone in a hurry to move a paycheck onto it. Anyone who needs a card that works at a specific shop, in a specific country, with a specific guarantee, because none of that is documented publicly. And anyone who reads “Swiss, FINMA-supervised” as meaning your funds are bank-deposit insured — the operator is a fintech licence holder, not a bank, and deposit insurance is not stated.

What happened to the programme

This is the part that saves you the most time, so I will be direct. The programme is closed to new customers and the company is winding down rather than growing.

The public status text is unambiguous. The card product page still displays “Coming soon in December 2024,” and that sentence has survived into 2026. The main site is described as being in maintenance mode with no new applications being accepted, and no dates are given for that either. That combination — a launch line never fulfilled and a site parked in maintenance — is the signature of a programme that stopped short of becoming a business.

There is one place where the documentation is more specific, and it is telling. The docs note that new clients from 5 June 2026 get a USD 30,000 monthly limit. On the same page, elsewhere, the stated figure for a top tier is USD 100,000 per 30 days. Those two numbers cannot both describe the same new customer, and the more conservative one is the one attached to the newest date. Read it as the ceiling the company felt comfortable offering to fresh accounts.

A few more dates sit around that. A refund processing fee applies from 15 May 2026: 1 USD, 1 EUR or 1 CHF per refund, or 7 CNH, deducted from the amount refunded and capped so it never exceeds the refund itself. There are documented forced-exit rules for sanctions, PEP status, fraud and recalls, which is the company telling you in advance that it can close your account without negotiation. Limit-upgrade requests, the mechanism that would have let you buy your way into a higher tier, are not being accepted.

The card itself, at its best, was a Mastercard debit card. Whether it was virtual or physical is not stated on the card’s documentation page. Transactions settle from the available balance in the currency of the transaction. If you were short in that currency, a different primary card currency could be chosen to cover the shortfall, but as a whole-amount conversion, not a split across two balances. The balances themselves were held in EUR, USD, CHF and RMB. A “Direct Pay” setting per currency would spend the matching balance first to avoid the conversion cost, and the default card currency handled whatever was left over. The amount of the FX fee is not stated anywhere on the public pages — a gap I would want closed before putting real money through any card like this.

The delivery story was thin, which in fairness matched the concept. It was a virtual card only, with no PIN, and no physical card or shipping mentioned at all. The card was valid for five years and renewed automatically unless it had been unused in the six months before expiry. That is a long life for a card that only exists inside a phone wallet.

Access ran through a dApp at app.fiat24.com, on the web, connecting a wallet on the Arbitrum network, plus a Telegram bot. There is no dedicated mobile app, and store ratings are therefore not applicable.

Verification, when it happened, was a single KYC pass rather than a repeating one: biometric ID or a passport, age over 18, GPS location captured, a tax identification number collected, one account per person, and an account opening time of under one business day in CET hours. Excluded were US Persons, politically exposed persons, and anyone under OFAC or EU sanctions. Residents had to be in an eligible country, with the list sitting at a separate info page rather than named on the card page, and nationals of Iran, North Korea and Russia were excluded outright. Some emerging countries were limited to CHF 1,000 per 30 days. The stated rejection reasons were worth noting: domicile or risk profile or background not matching the business focus, duplicate registration, or failing any single criterion.

Here is the uncomfortable part. The card was live for the people who had it — the user documentation describes activating it from a card icon in the dApp, usually ready within seconds — which flatly contradicts the “Coming soon in December 2024” line on the products page. Both statements cannot be true. The likely reading is that the card functioned inside a small community while the public product page remained frozen in pre-launch wording, and that the “maintenance mode” is what a soft wind-down looks like from outside.

The programme limits were tied to something unusual: the length of the NFT account number. Standard, meaning a five-to-eight-digit NFT, gave 10,000 EUR per day and 20,000 EUR per month. Premium, a four-digit NFT, gave 100,000 and 200,000 EUR. Ultimate, a three-digit NFT, gave 500,000 EUR daily and 1,000,000 EUR monthly. You raised your tier by upgrading the NFT in the dApp, paying a price listed on the pricing page in Ether or the project token, and the upgrade completed within one business day. A reported daily spend of 9,800 EUR and unlimited monthly spending also appear in some contexts, but these values are unofficial, not confirmed by the card, and do not match the stated tier structure.

What I could not find on the card’s own pages: the fees. There is no fee schedule, no monthly charge, no issuance charge, no conversion or FX percentage, no rewards, no restricted merchant categories, and no list of countries or citizenship rules on the card page itself. Those silences are the reason the cost mark is a five rather than a nine, even though the unofficial picture is not bad.

If you already have the card

If you are reading this with money still on the platform, this is the section that matters most, and I want to be careful not to raise your blood pressure. Nothing in the company’s public material suggests a confiscation. It suggests an orderly run-down. Your job is to convert a balance into money in your own bank account, and to do it while the payout rails still work.

Start with the payout mechanics, because those are the part most likely to frustrate you. To withdraw to your own bank in EUR or CHF, you first make a small deposit from that same bank account using its IBAN, which is how the account gets linked. You may link up to ten accounts per currency. The payout minimum is 100 EUR or 100 CHF. A booked payout lands the same business day if you submit before 15:00 CET, and the next business day if you submit after that hour, over a weekend or on a holiday. A successful payout is free; a returned payout costs 10 EUR or 10 CHF.

That linking step catches people. You cannot just send to an arbitrary IBAN. The money has to come from a bank account the platform already knows is yours, which is a deliberate anti-money-laundering design and also a genuine obstacle if you have been spending from a card balance funded by someone else.

Closing the account is separate and final. You bring balances to zero, go to id.fiat24.com, Profile, Close Account. It is final, and no second account is allowed afterwards. The company states it keeps your KYC data per Swiss anti-money-laundering law, which means closing does not mean deleting.

The card itself was topped up through the dApp, and activation required a minimum balance of 10 EUR in the Eurozone, 10 CHF in Switzerland or 10 USD in the rest of the world. The card page does not state the deposit fee, which party pays the network fee, or which fiat top-up routes exist. Unofficial sources list USDC, USDT and ETH on Arbitrum as the crypto side, EUR, CHF, USD and RMB as the fiat side, and SEPA, SIC and SWIFT as the rails. Treat all of that as reported by third parties rather than confirmed by the card, and confirm on your own account screen before sending anything on-chain.

Two things are officially not stated that you may have relied on. ATM withdrawals are not mentioned on the card’s own pages; an unofficial source calls them unlimited, which I would not plan around. And funding mechanics beyond “the balance in the transaction currency gets spent” are not described on the card page either.

Refunds work like this, and it is worth knowing because it is where the new fee bites. A refund usually arrives within seven days, and up to 30 days if it crosses a border. From 15 May 2026 the company deducts a processing fee of 1 USD, 1 EUR, 1 CHF or 7 CNH from the refunded amount, capped at the refund’s own size. There is no dispute or chargeback procedure described anywhere on the public pages, which is a significant absence in a product where a card payment can go wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

Support, if you need it, runs through the Telegram bot at t.me/fiat24bot, labelled for general inquiries, plus a status page at status.fiat24.com and the company’s X, LinkedIn, Medium and Telegram channels. There is no email address and no phone number on the site. Languages and opening hours are not stated. That structure is part of the story: a bot, a status page and social channels are not a support function, and the complaints below are largely about exactly that.

While you are in there, two practical safety habits are worth repeating. The card uses 3-D Secure with a one-time password by email, there is automatic blocking for unusual activity, and you can lock and unlock the card in the dApp — but each lock or unlock action itself locks changes for 24 hours, so plan before you panic. And your account is an NFT in your own wallet, which means the private key is yours. If you ever think that key has been exposed, move the funds quickly, because there is no recovery path and no support desk that can reverse a blockchain transfer.

What can go wrong

I want to separate two kinds of risk here. One is the ordinary risk of any card that spends a stored balance. The other is specific to this programme’s condition, which is a company in maintenance mode with a thin support record.

Start with the specific. On Trustpilot, the Fiat24 listing as read on 20 October 2026 shows 2.2 out of 5 from eight reviews, every one of them a single star, running from 26 April 2024 to 13 May 2026. Eight reviews is not a statistically meaningful sample, so treat the average as a temperature reading rather than a measurement. What the individual reports describe is more informative than the average. Users mention support that does not respond across email, Telegram and Discord, with the bot looping instead of answering. Users mention card pre-authorisations or funds held and never released. Users mention a SEPA transfer arriving weeks late and then roughly 50 EUR being charged after it was re-routed. And users mention scammers posing as support inside the community’s own channels, which is a warning that applies to you right now, in this moment, as much as it ever applied to them.

A separate unverified aggregator, which links no reviews, collects themes of invasive ID checks, fees on crypto top-ups, support that goes slow while funds sit frozen and emails go unanswered past ninety days, and a January 2025 restriction on third-party bank deposits for standard users. I could not find a Reddit presence or a Fiat24 Trustpilot page beyond the one above, so the picture here is thinner than the Trustpilot number alone suggests.

On the corporate side, the operating entity is SR Saphirstein, which the official site describes as holding a Swiss fintech licence under Article 1b of the Banking Act and being supervised by FINMA. The card issuer named in the documentation is SR Saphirstein AG, BIN 5481 0849. Being FINMA-supervised is a genuine positive and not nothing: it means there is a regulator to complain to. It is not the same as being a bank, and deposit insurance is not stated. If your balance is held by a licensed e-money or fintech entity rather than a bank, it sits outside the bank deposit guarantee that a retail current account enjoys, and that difference matters more than most people realise until they need it.

The card’s own security design is reasonable. Three-D Secure with an email one-time password, automatic blocking on unusual activity, and a manual lock in the dApp. The wallet design is the riskier half, and it is a category risk rather than a Fiat24 risk. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key or the seed phrase — typically twelve to twenty-four words in an unencrypted form that anyone who obtains it can use to restore the wallet and spend from it. Blockchain transfers are essentially irreversible; the network cannot freeze or return what has left. Custodial platforms have a poor track record, with Mt. Gox reporting roughly US$350 million stolen between 2011 and 2014, Coincheck about US$400 million in 2018, and the Ronin Network US$625 million in 2022. Fiat24’s design keeps the NFT in your own wallet rather than with a custodian, which pushes the risk onto you: you own the key loss, the phishing attempt and the malware that silently swaps a copied address.

Then the ordinary card risks, which apply to the balance you are trying to spend. A card number begins with a six- or eight-digit BIN identifying the issuing institution, and merchants can look that up, which is why a Swiss-issued card can read as foreign to a shop in another country and draw extra scrutiny. A merchant category code is a four-digit classifier assigned to a business, and MCC 7995 covers gambling; many issuers block it by policy rather than by law, and the blocked list varies by issuer, so a card that works everywhere can still fail at a specific category. Address verification, which compares the numeric parts of a billing address against issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which causes declines. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on your money for several days, typically up to seven. And a fee you cannot see is worse than a fee you can: because the FX and conversion amounts are not published, you cannot compute your effective cost per purchase in advance.

One more, purely practical. Stablecoins are not what their name suggests. USDT and USDC are dollar-pegged and together make up about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation by the BIS’s July 2025 assessment, but USDC lost its peg briefly in March 2023 and TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022. If you are topping up in a stablecoin and the card is closed, you are exposed to that market on top of everything else. Network fees are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider, and gas on Ethereum must be paid in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT with no ETH cannot send at all. Transfers to an unsupported network or a wrong-network address can be lost outright. Tether states it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity, so stablecoins are not censorship-proof either.

What to take instead

Since the programme is not taking applications, this section is less “competitor comparison” and more “where the same need is served elsewhere.” I have kept the facts to what each provider publishes, and I have not invented comparables where the pages are silent.

Cardex scores 5.6 out of 10 in our comparison. It advertises one crypto card across 200-plus countries with no country list and no stated exclusions, though its App Store listing is Naira-focused and priced in naira. It runs on the VERVE, Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay networks and offers virtual and physical cards. Its distinguishing feature is the conversion mechanic: real-time crypto-to-fiat conversion at the moment of payment, with the site describing an “AI-Powered Conversion Rate” that scans global exchange rates and picks the best one at the moment you spend. No fee percentage is published. Funding is from USDT, USDC and BTC wallets, networks unstated. Fees, costs and rewards are not stated.

MSX scores 6.4 out of 10, the highest of the three here. I could read no official page stating who can get it, what the card is, what it costs, what the fees are, how it is funded or what it rewards, and I am not going to fill those gaps with guesses. A higher score built on thin public detail is a caution in itself.

Whop Cards scores 5.2 out of 10. This is the most transparent of the three. It is available to consumers in 31 US states — Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming — and to businesses in 41 states. Unsupported consumer countries are Belarus, China (Mainland), Cuba, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam, with Russia and Belarus also unsupported for corporate entities. Whether the test is citizenship or residence is not stated, which is exactly the kind of detail you want to know before you try.

Whop’s model is the one most worth understanding, because it is the cleanest illustration of how these cards usually work. It spends from a Whop balance, a pending balance becomes usable as soon as a payment arrives while standard withdrawals use settled funds, and the starting position is backed by stablecoin collateral from a linked wallet, though the specific coins and networks are not stated. It pays 5% cashback at select merchants, currently Uber, with more planned, and the payout currency and conditions are not stated. The page says no extra fees, and lists no issuance or monthly amounts.

Now the part that decides most applications, and it is not in any provider’s marketing. Licence architecture. A card is a payment service, regulated under e-money and payments law, while the crypto side — custody, exchange, transfer — sits under a separate regime. A crypto card usually depends on two licences, not one. In the EU that crypto side is MiCA, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, which ESMA says took legal effect in June 2023; its rules on asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024 and the remaining provisions, including crypto-asset service provider rules, from 30 December 2024. Under Article 48, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. Transitional arrangements let providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026, or until they are authorised or refused authorisation under MiCA, whichever comes first. ESMA maintains an interim register of authorised CASPs, white papers and non-compliant entities that you can check a provider against. An electronic money institution can issue e-money, payment cards and wallets but cannot lend, and it must safeguard customer funds by segregating them or insuring them — funds that are not bank deposits and may fall outside any deposit guarantee scheme. In the US, FinCEN guidance FIN-2013-G001 treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters, while ordinary users buying things are not.

None of that is Fiat24-specific, but it tells you what to look for in whatever replaces it. Ask who the issuer is, ask who the crypto service provider is, ask whether customer funds are safeguarded and how, and check the register. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves — they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. Visa said in November 2022 that 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 its WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Closures follow a pattern: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. One 2026 closure reported by a secondary source ended new loads on 8 July 2026 and spending on 8 August 2026, which is a single unconfirmed source but matches the shape.

Who I would recommend it to

Let me be blunt, because a low score deserves a clear sentence rather than a hedge.

If you do not currently hold a Fiat24 account, I would not start here. There is nothing to start. The programme is closed to new applications, the pricing is not public, and the complaint record describes a support function that does not answer. Choosing it as a place to move money in 2026 would be choosing the version of it with the least information available.

If you do hold a balance, the recommendation is procedural rather than emotional. Link your own bank account with the small IBAN deposit the platform requires, withdraw in chunks of at least 100 EUR or 100 CHF, submit before 15:00 CET to avoid the next-business-day delay, and get the balance to zero before you close anything. Do not close the account until it is at zero, because closure is final and no second account is permitted. While you do it, assume support will be slow or absent, so keep your own records of every transaction reference and never let anyone who messages you in a community channel talk you into moving funds — that scam pattern is in the complaint record for a reason.

If you are simply choosing a crypto card in general, pick on the things Fiat24 left unstated. Who is the issuer, and under whose licence. How are customer funds safeguarded. What does a deposit cost, in crypto and in network fees. Which currencies your balance can hold and what happens to a transaction in a currency you do not hold. Whether refunds cost you and whether a dispute process exists at all. Whether a human being answers. A card that publishes none of these is asking you to be the risk.

There is one group for whom the underlying idea still deserves a second look. If you hold crypto in a self-custody wallet and want a spending card that never asks a custodian for permission, the model Fiat24 used — an account as an NFT in your own wallet, a card that spends the converted balance — is the right shape. The execution and the company behind it are what failed, not the shape. That idea now sits with other providers, and the questions above are how you tell a durable one from a temporary one.

Frequently asked questions

What is Fiat24 card?

Fiat24 was a crypto-linked Mastercard debit card issued by the Swiss company SR Saphirstein AG, BIN 5481 0849. Your account was an NFT held in your own wallet rather than a bank account, and the card spent a balance you loaded yourself, in EUR, USD, CHF or RMB. It existed as a virtual card with no PIN. The programme is now closed to new applications and the site sits in maintenance mode.

Is Fiat24 a bank?

No. The operator, SR Saphirstein, describes itself on its site as holding a Swiss fintech licence under Article 1b of the Banking Act and being supervised by FINMA. That is a real regulated status, but it is not a banking licence, and deposit insurance is not stated. Treat any balance you hold as safeguarded funds rather than a bank deposit, because the protections differ.

Why did the Fiat24 card programme close?

Nobody has published a clear explanation, so be careful with anyone who offers you one. What is documented is a card product page still reading “Coming soon in December 2024”, a main site in maintenance mode with no new applications, docs limiting new clients from 5 June 2026 to a USD 30,000 monthly limit, a refund fee from 15 May 2026, and forced-exit rules for sanctions, PEP status, fraud and recalls.

Can I still apply for a Fiat24 card?

No. The programme is not accepting new applications, and no dates have been given for reopening. The score I give “who can get it” is therefore zero out of ten, the lowest on the card. If you were planning around opening one, you need a different provider, and the comparison section above sets out what each publishes about eligibility.

Does the Fiat24 card require KYC?

Yes, a single verification pass rather than a repeating one. It used biometric ID or a passport, required age over 18, captured GPS location and a tax identification number, and allowed one account per person. US Persons, politically exposed persons and anyone under OFAC or EU sanctions were excluded, as were nationals of Iran, North Korea and Russia.

How do I withdraw money from Fiat24?

You cannot withdraw to an arbitrary bank account. You first make a small deposit from that same account by IBAN to link it, up to ten accounts per currency. The minimum payout is 100 EUR or 100 CHF. Submitted before 15:00 CET, it books the same business day; after that or at a weekend, the next business day. Successful payouts are free; returned ones cost 10 EUR or 10 CHF.

What fees does the Fiat24 card charge?

The official card pages publish no fee schedule at all, which is itself the answer. Unofficial sources list issuance, the monthly fee, ATM use, FX, top-up and declines as free, and put a crypto deposit at 1–1.75% plus gas, with roughly 50 EUR charged on a SEPA transfer that was re-routed. From 15 May 2026 a refund costs 1 USD, 1 EUR, 1 CHF or 7 CNH, deducted from the refund.

Is the Fiat24 card safe to use?

The card design itself was reasonable: three-D Secure with an email one-time password, automatic blocking on unusual activity, and a manual lock in the dApp. The risks sit elsewhere. The account is an NFT in your own wallet, so a stolen private key means lost funds with no recovery. Support is a Telegram bot and a status page with no email or phone, and scammers posing as support in community channels appear in the complaints.

Can I add the Fiat24 card to Apple Wallet?

Officially yes. The documentation lists Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay among supported digital wallets. One third-party aggregator says the opposite, that Apple Pay and Google Pay do not work, so I would not rely on the wallet unless you have seen it work on your own account. Payments are refused for OFAC-sanctioned countries and entities, and some categories are limited by country.

Is Fiat24 worth it now?

For a new user, no — you cannot open one. For an existing holder, the question is different and narrower: get your balance to zero through a linked bank account before you close the account, keep your own records, and assume replies will be slow. The product was a good idea executed by a small operation, and its 3.3 out of 10 reflects that rather than any fraud.

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