A virtual Visa funded from a multi-chain balance, with real gaps in what the card publishes

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Scallop is a virtual Visa card that you top up from a crypto balance held in the Scallop app, and it is one of the more interesting designs I have come across in this category for one specific reason: the account supports assets across many chains at once. If you already hold stablecoins spread over Ethereum, Tron, Base, Solana, BSC, Bitcoin, XRP and Sui, you can move them into one balance and spend from a single card. That is genuinely more flexible than the single-network products that have crowded this market.

Everything else about it reads thinner. The card exists only in virtual form. Apple Pay, Google Pay and ATM withdrawals are not described on the pages I could read. The name of the company behind it does not appear on the documentation I looked at. The card currency, the foreign-exchange fee and the daily spending limits are all absent from the public material. Some of those absences are normal for a young product; a few of them are the kind you would want answered before you move money you care about.

If you have trouble getting an ordinary bank card and you are comfortable holding your balance inside someone else’s app rather than in your own wallet, this card has a real use for you. If you want a physical card, a mobile wallet, or a clear answer about who is holding your funds, it is not the right tool.

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

Will they give you the card?

Yes, for a wide range of countries — with seven named exceptions you may well care about.

Scallop says it can onboard customers from “most countries that are not sanctioned by OFAC”. That is a broad door. But the same documentation carries a Prohibited Countries & Regions list, and virtual cards are not available anywhere on it. That list contains Russia and Belarus, and also Ukraine, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and the United Kingdom.

So the honest summary is this: if you are in the United Kingdom, or in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Iran, North Korea, Cuba or Venezuela, the virtual card is not available to you. If you are in most other countries, you are in scope — though you still have to pass identity checks, which I cover below.

There is also a middle category the card calls high-risk countries. China, Turkey and Vietnam are given as examples, and applications from those places are reviewed case by case after an additional questionnaire. That is not a refusal, but it is not a straight path either. Expect more questions and expect a decision that takes longer than the normal route.

One thing the page does not say, and I would want answered before I applied: whether eligibility turns on citizenship, on residence, or on both. For you, that matters if you live in one country and hold a passport from another. Sanctions screening in this industry is usually applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as to the address, so a mismatch between the two is exactly the situation that can turn a straightforward application into a manual review. The card states the country rules as I have set them out; it does not state which document decides.

How to get it

The application is a standard identity check, and it is stricter than the country list makes it sound.

For individuals, the card accepts a passport or national ID (non-US), or another form of ID plus a tax ID number such as an SSN or TIN. For the virtual card specifically, a valid passport is required for individuals, with two exceptions: users from Hong Kong or China. If your earlier identity check did not include a passport, you are asked to upload one during the card application itself.

Proof of address is not normally required. The exception is a specific one: if you show a government ID issued in a high-risk region but your residence is elsewhere, you must supply proof of address issued within the last 90 days, and it cannot be a PO box or a virtual address.

There is one age rule you should read twice: “Individuals over 65 years of age at the time of submission will not be accepted.” That is a hard cutoff on the day you submit. If you are 65 or older, this card is not for you, and no amount of documentation will change it.

The document you receive is a virtual Visa card, usable “wherever VISA is accepted”, with a maximum of three active virtual cards at any time. Physical cards are not part of what is documented, and the card currency is not stated anywhere I could find.

Two more things the public pages leave out. The tier structure that shows up elsewhere in the documentation — Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 — is never defined for the reader; the only hint is that HKD pay-in and payout are not available for Tier 1 or Tier 2, and that Tier 3 is for businesses. And the card does not say how long processing takes, or why an application might be refused. If you are refused and want to know why, you will be asking the same people who did not tell you in advance.

Fees: what it really costs

Three plans, three price levels, and one fee you cannot look up.

The headline is that Voyager is free to hold, and that is genuinely attractive for a light user. The $2 issuance per virtual card is the entry cost, and it is not waived on the free plan.

Now let me take three ordinary payments and walk the fees across them, because that is where the plan choice actually bites.

A $30 coffee shop. On Voyager, the 1.50% swap fee on the converted amount applies, plus whatever the card-load conversion spread is. On Mariner, the 0.75% swap fee applies. On Admiral, the 0.40% swap fee applies. Nothing else is documented as applying, but note what is missing from that sentence: the card FX fee. If you are spending in a currency other than the card’s, there is an undisclosed component, and you cannot calculate your true cost from these numbers alone.

A $120 online subscription in euros. Here the missing FX fee matters most. If Scallop charges a foreign-exchange markup on top of the swap, the difference between a 1.50% and a 0.40% conversion fee is small next to it. Since the FX fee is not published, I would not choose a plan on this example — I would find out what the real cost is on a small transaction first.

A $500 transfer to someone, on Mariner. At $14.99 a month with a 0.75% swap, the fee on $500 is $3.75, so about $18.74 in total for the month. If you make one such payment a month, the paid tier has cost you $15 to save roughly $3.75 against the free plan. Admiral’s $49.99 only makes sense at a genuinely high volume, and it also brings what the card calls priority corridors and a 1.5% APR yield feature marked “coming soon”.

The Mariner tier is described as giving access to 50 or more local fiat currencies and the ability to send and receive with anyone. Admiral adds priority corridors. Neither of those is a number I could verify, so treat them as the card’s own description of its own tiers.

One conversion rate is published and worth memorising: when loading the card with USDT, the reference rate is “1 USDT = 0.9975 USD”. Other rates are shown in the app before you confirm. So you can see the rate you are getting at the moment of loading, which is better than being told afterwards.

Top up: where the money comes from

This is the part Scallop does best, and the part with the sharpest edge.

The card is funded only from a balance already sitting in your Scallop account — either fiat or stable digital assets. There is no direct bank transfer into the card, no card-to-card top-up, no paying a card bill from an outside wallet. The account holds tokens on Ethereum (ETH, USDT, USDC), BSC, Solana, Bitcoin, Tron (TRON, USDT, USDC), Base (USDT, USDC), XRP, XDC, Sui and others, and the page does not say whether these are deposit-only.

The mechanics are straightforward. You bring value in, the minimum card top-up is $15, and you can set an auto top-up with a threshold of at least $20, paid from whatever balance is available — fiat or stable digital assets. Once loaded, those funds are reserved for card use.

Here is the edge. Loaded funds “cannot be withdrawn, transferred, or refunded”, and the card is even blunter: virtual card loads “cannot be refunded, withdrawn, or reversed under any circumstances”. Not usually. Not in most cases. Not under any circumstances. Once the money is on the card, it is spendable money and nothing else. The top-up fee and who pays the network fee are both not stated.

For you, this is the single most important line on this page. It means the card is a one-way valve in the direction of spending. If you are loading money you might need back within a month, this is the wrong instrument.

Paying with it every day

A virtual Visa card that spends a pre-loaded balance, and almost nothing else documented around it.

The model is the prepaid one. You convert or top up a balance first, and the card spends only that balance, so it cannot overdraw. Payments work “wherever VISA is accepted”, and you can hold up to three virtual cards at once.

Beyond that, the everyday details are thin, and the gaps are all in the direction you would actually use the card. There are no connected wallets described. No cashback is mentioned. The app’s App Store and Google Play listings are not covered by what I read, so I cannot tell you how well the app is reviewed or how many people use it. Apple Pay, Google Pay and ATM access are not disclosed at all.

That last point is worth a pause. A virtual card with no stated mobile wallet support and no stated ATM access is a card for online payments and for terminal purchases where you can type the number. It is not a replacement for the physical card in your wallet. If the reason you are looking at a crypto card is that a shop needed a number, this works. If it is that you want to tap at a café, this does not tell you it can.

Some practical context that belongs to this category rather than to Scallop, and that will affect your day-to-day: a card number starts with an issuer identification number of six or eight digits, and merchants can look that up to see which institution and country issued it. If the issuer country differs from your billing address, the merchant may apply extra scrutiny — which is why a card issued in one country can look foreign to a shop in another. Address Verification Service, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address a buyer types against issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards outright for the same reason. And a declined authorisation may leave a hold on your funds that can remain for several days, typically up to seven.

You can set your own spending limits in the app, which is a real safeguard. You can also block and unblock the cards instantly, or terminate one permanently, and see real-time transaction tracking.

What can go wrong

The company behind the card is not named in the documentation I read. That is the finding that stayed with me longest.

I looked for official incident reports and found none. I searched for reviews and complaints and found nothing relevant. The Trustpilot page for Scallop, read on 2026-10-21, has zero reviews and no TrustScore — which is not the same as a clean record, it is an absence of one — and it carries the note “This company may be associated with high-risk investments.” That note is Trustpilot’s own flag on the page, not a finding of mine. There were no complaint themes to read, because there were no complaints. Nothing dated turned up in the news either.

Set that against the structure of the product and a few things become clearer. Card details are revealed only after you authenticate. Your balance sits in the Scallop account rather than in your own wallet, so whoever holds the credentials controls it — and a seed phrase, typically twelve to twenty-four words, is the unencrypted form of the private key, which means anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend its funds. Crypto transfers are typically irreversible, with no built-in recovery on the network: the chain cannot freeze or return money.

This is a category with a documented history, and it is worth knowing it. Custodial platforms have failed before: Mt. Gox, about US$350 million reported stolen between 2011 and 2014; Coincheck, about US$400 million in 2018; Ronin Network, US$625 million in 2022. Card programmes have been shut down too. 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 crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Programme closures typically run in a fixed order — a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. Combined with Scallop’s rule that loaded funds cannot be withdrawn, the sequence matters a great deal.

Support is offered “through the app or official support channels”, with no languages and no hours given. If the answer to every operational question is an asynchronous ticket in an app, plan your own timeline accordingly.

On errors, one thing is at least stated. Virtual card loads cannot be refunded or reversed. If you send crypto on the wrong network, or fiat to the wrong account, recovery runs through a support ticket, costs an extra fee, is not guaranteed, and “may take several days”. Card chargebacks and dispute time frames are not addressed at all.

There is also a tax point that is easy to miss and not one I am qualified to advise on. The IRS treats digital assets as property, so exchanging them for goods, services or dollars generally produces a taxable gain or loss, measured in local fiat currency at fair market value on the date of the transaction. That would make each card payment funded from crypto its own disposal event. Please check this with a professional in your own jurisdiction rather than taking my word for it.

What to take instead

Three comparable products, none of them a clean win either.

Whop Cards is the odd one out geographically: it is a US-state product, and if you are not in one of the 31 listed states for consumer use, it does not apply to you at all. Where it does, the funding model is close to Scallop’s, and it offers a concrete reward that Scallop does not. Its weakness is disclosure: no fees are quantified, and its unsupported-country list is long.

Stella is the nearest neighbour to Scallop on paper — crypto deposited in-app, custodial, auto top-up, and it offers both virtual and physical cards, which Scallop does not. Its terms bar users under economic sanctions programmes and route US and European users through affiliates, which is a different kind of clarity from “most countries not sanctioned by OFAC” because it tells you the entities you are contracting with. But its fees are not stated officially, and the “Earn” product is separate yield rather than card rewards.

UniFi Card is the one with a stated issuing bank, which matters for regulatory questions, and the only one with Apple Pay support described. Its App Store listing claims “3% rewards on balances”. Against that, its country coverage is not confirmed from official pages, fees are not stated, and its funding model (ACH, wire, SEPA, SPEI) is a banking model rather than a crypto one.

If your priority is a card that is physically in your hand, Stella is the only one of these four that documents a physical card. If your priority is Apple Pay, UniFi. If your priority is being able to move money across several chains into one balance, Scallop. None of the four publishes everything, and that is the honest headline of this comparison.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Scallop to someone who already has stablecoins sitting on more than one blockchain and is tired of moving them one network at a time. The multi-chain balance is the product’s real contribution, and the top-up section of my score reflects that honestly. I would also recommend it to someone who wants to spend in places a normal card will not reach, and who is prepared for the money they load to be gone from their control in the sense that it cannot be pulled back.

I would not recommend it to you if you need a physical card, if you tap for coffee every morning, if you intend to load money you may need again soon, or if you want to know the name of the company holding your balance. Those are not nitpicks. Three of them are structural features of the product as documented, and the fourth is a gap in the disclosure that you should weigh yourself.

What I would do first, before loading anything you care about: confirm in writing what the card currency is and what the foreign-exchange fee is, since neither is published; ask whether eligibility runs on citizenship, residence or both; and check whether your app store listing shows an entity behind the product, because the documentation does not. Ask about the load fee and who pays the network fee too. None of these are rhetorical questions — each one has a specific number attached to it once answered, and until it is answered the true cost of a payment cannot be calculated.

One more thing, said plainly and without any hedging: this is not a bank account, it is not insured as one, and nothing here should be read as a promise that your funds are safe or your identity is protected. Treat any balance you load as spending money.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Scallop card?

It is a virtual Visa card you spend from a balance held inside the Scallop app. The account can hold both fiat and crypto assets — ETH, USDT and USDC on Ethereum, Tron, Base, BSC, Solana, Bitcoin, XRP, Sui and others — and you convert or top up from that balance to fund the card. It works wherever Visa is accepted, and you can hold up to three active virtual cards.

How does the Scallop card work?

You bring money into the Scallop account first, then load the card from that balance — the minimum card top-up is $15, and auto top-up can be set at a threshold of at least $20. It behaves like a prepaid card: it spends only what you loaded and cannot overdraw. Once loaded, those funds are reserved for card use and cannot be withdrawn, transferred or refunded.

Is Scallop a bank?

The documentation pages I read do not name the company behind the card. So I cannot tell you which institution holds your balance or under which licence it operates. What I can tell you is what the product’s own description implies: this is a prepaid-style card drawing on a balance held with a provider, not a deposit account, and the crypto you hold is custodial rather than in a wallet only you control.

Which countries is the Scallop card available in?

Scallop says it can onboard customers from “most countries that are not sanctioned by OFAC”, but virtual cards are not available in its Prohibited Countries & Regions list: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and the United Kingdom. High-risk countries such as China, Turkey and Vietnam are reviewed case by case. The pages do not state whether citizenship or residence decides eligibility.

Does the Scallop card require KYC?

Yes. Individuals submit a passport or national ID, or another ID plus a tax ID number, and a valid passport is required for the virtual card except for users from Hong Kong or China. Proof of address is required only if you show an ID from a high-risk region while residing elsewhere, issued within 90 days. Individuals over 65 at the time of submission are not accepted.

What does the Scallop card cost?

On the free Voyager plan, a virtual card costs $2 to issue and conversion costs 1.50%. Mariner is $14.99 a month, waived with a $10,000 average fiat balance, with the first card free, extra cards $1 each, and 0.75% conversion. Admiral is $49.99 a month, waived at $50,000, with multiple free cards and 0.40% conversion. The card’s FX fee is not stated anywhere.

Can I add the Scallop card to Apple Wallet?

Apple Pay support is not disclosed on the pages I read, so I cannot confirm it either way. That is a real limitation rather than an oversight in this review: the card is documented as virtual only, with no stated mobile wallet integration, so if tap-to-pay is how you would use it, ask before you commit.

Is the Scallop card safe?

There is no promise of safety I can make. There were no official incident reports and no complaints found, but the Trustpilot page for Scallop has 0 reviews and no TrustScore, with a note that the company may be associated with high-risk investments. Loaded funds cannot be withdrawn or refunded, and crypto transfers are typically irreversible. Your balance is custodial, so you are trusting the provider.

How do I withdraw money from Scallop?

You cannot, once it is loaded onto the card. The documentation states that loaded funds cannot be withdrawn, transferred or refunded, and that virtual card loads cannot be refunded, withdrawn or reversed under any circumstances. Anything sitting in the account before you load it is a different question, but the card does not describe account closure balances.

How many Scallop cards can I have?

Up to three active virtual cards at any time. How many of those are free depends on the plan: Voyager charges $2 per card, Mariner gives the first card free and $1 for each extra, and Admiral includes multiple free cards.

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