A free Visa debit card for pesos, with a long list of things it does not say

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

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18+ Only

Wallib is a Colombian fintech that issues a rechargeable Visa debit card you fund with bitcoin, USDT or Colombian pesos and spend like an ordinary card. The card costs nothing to create and nothing to keep, and buying things in Colombia costs nothing at the point of sale. That is the whole sales pitch, and in the market it targets — Colombian residents paying in pesos from BTC or USDT — it is a coherent one.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

It is also a small, young operation whose public pages leave a lot unsaid. The issuing bank is not named. Licences are not named. Cash withdrawals are not described. The physical card is mentioned once and never explained. For a product whose entire purpose is to hold and move money, those silences matter more than they would for a product with a long public track record.

My score is 5.4 out of 10. That is not a rejection. It is a card that does one thing cheaply and clearly for one country, and asks you to take the rest on trust.

Read the table as two halves. The right-hand criteria — cost, everyday use — are genuinely good. The left-hand ones, who can get it and reliability, are where the information simply is not there.

Will they give you the card?

The short answer: yes if you are a Colombian resident, after identity verification and a first deposit. Anything beyond that is undocumented.

Wallib launched in Colombia. Domestic purchases are aimed at merchants in Colombia, which is the market the product was designed around. International purchases work at any merchant that accepts Visa — that part is straightforward, because it follows from the network rather than from anything Wallib decides.

The site also names Mexico. And it says transfers go to “cualquier banco, billetera o tarjeta en Latinoamérica” — any bank, wallet or card in Latin America. Whether that sentence describes a sending feature that is live for you, or an aspiration, is not something the public pages settle. Mexico, meanwhile, appeared in the original 2024 expansion plan as a target, not as a confirmed launch, and I found nothing since that changes that.

So: Colombian residents, clearly. Latin America, plausibly. Everyone else, on trust rather than on the card’s own statement.

One structural point worth understanding, because it explains why an “is it available in my country” question often has a murky answer. Every Visa card carries a BIN — a six or eight digit issuer identification number at the front of the card number. Merchants can look it up and see which institution and country issued the card, and some apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from the billing address on the payment. A Colombian-issued card used in another country can look, to a merchant’s system, like a foreign card. That is a property of how card networks work, not of Wallib, but it shapes how “international purchases work anywhere Visa is accepted” feels in practice.

How to get it?

Three steps, in the card’s own order: create and verify a Wallib account, activate the virtual card in the app, then recharge from BTC, USDT or COP.

Before any of that, there are two conditions. Identity verification (KYC) must be approved before the card activates — not after, and not as an optional extra. And a first deposit of at least 20,000 COP is required. That deposit floor is not unusual for this kind of card, but it is the point at which you are committing real money before you have seen whether the card behaves the way you need.

What is not stated is as important as what is. The documents you will be asked for, whether proof of address is required, what the minimum age is — the public pages do not say. There is a mention of “first-level verification,” which suggests more than one tier exists, but the levels themselves, how long processing takes, and the reasons a verification might be refused are all absent.

You should read this section as a skeleton with the important parts filled in and the important parts you would want for your own decision left blank. Go in knowing that you will be asked to prove who you are, that the process may take time you cannot predict from the website, and that the card does not arrive before it clears.

Fees: what it really costs

The headline is genuinely good. Creating the card costs $0, activating it is free, and no monthly or annual fee is listed. There is no annual fee to remember to cancel, and nothing that creeps up at the end of a year.

After that, the fees split into three that apply to almost everyone and one that catches out people who spend outside Colombia.

Let’s run three ordinary payments through it.

A 10,000 COP grocery shop in Bogotá. You spend Colombian pesos from your COP balance. The purchase fee is 0%. Nothing else applies, because no conversion happens — the balance is already in pesos. This is the cleanest possible use of the card and it costs effectively nothing.

A 15 USD subscription service. The balance is in COP, so the card converts at its own rate, and then Visa adds 1.2% of the purchase value on top. Two separate costs, one from the card and one from the network, and only one of them is listed in the card’s own fee table. The 1.2% on a recurring charge is the one that adds up, because it applies every month for as long as you keep the subscription.

A top-up from USDT. Here you pay 0.1% under the card’s “tasa venta” wording, plus 1,000 COP, plus IVA — Colombian VAT. That fixed 1,000 COP component is small in percentage terms on a large top-up and comparatively heavy on a small one, which is another reason the 20,000 COP minimum first deposit matters.

Two things the table cannot tell you. The card balance is always in COP — you do not hold a dollar balance to spend — so every purchase in another currency involves a conversion whose rate is not published. And ATM withdrawal is not stated at all: not the fee, not whether it is possible. Given the daily purchase limit of 10,000 USD or its COP equivalent, cash access would matter to some people, and this is one of the gaps I would want filled before committing.

There are no tiers. One card, one set of fees, no premium version with a higher limit.

Top up: where the money comes from

Three sources: BTC, USDT, or a COP balance already in your account. Whatever you send arrives in the card as Colombian pesos — conversion happens at the moment of reload, not at the moment of purchase. The fee is the same one from the table: 0.1% + 1,000 COP + VAT per recharge. The first deposit must be at least 20,000 COP.

The word that matters here is “networks”, and it is missing. Which chain your USDT has to be sent on, whether a transfer from one network to another works, and who pays the on-chain network fee — the card does not say. That is not a technicality. Blockchain transfers are irreversible by design, so a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost outright or need manual recovery with no guarantee of success. On Ethereum, for example, fees are paid in ETH rather than in the token itself, so a wallet holding USDT with no ETH cannot send at all.

This is where I would be most careful if I were you. The safest habit is to send a small test amount first, confirm it has landed in the Wallib balance as pesos, and only then move anything you would miss. If the card’s own help centre will tell you the supported networks directly, that is a much better source than a guess.

Withdrawal goes the other way: from the card back to your Wallib balance at 0% with no fixed fee. Whether the closing balance can then be sent to a bank account, and what that costs, is not stated.

Paying with it every day

The virtual card is ready immediately, and Apple Pay and Google Wallet work at no additional cost — which in practice means most of your card-shaped spending needs never touch the physical object. Apps exist for iPhone and Android, and the site is in Spanish with some help articles in English.

The card is described for online merchants, for subscriptions, and for anything that accepts a COP payment by Visa. In other words, the intended daily life of the card is a phone you rarely take out.

There is also a bitcoin cashback: 1% on eligible purchases over 10,000 COP, capped at 20 cashback transactions and 3,000,000 COP of eligible purchases per month, paid into the Wallib bitcoin wallet once the payment is confirmed. On a monthly spend of 3,000,000 COP that is a meaningful return in BTC terms — though, like any crypto-denominated reward, it moves with bitcoin’s price and tells you nothing about your card fees having been lower.

What is missing here: blocked categories are not stated, so you do not know in advance which merchants are off-limits. For context, gambling sits under a specific merchant category code (MCC 7995), and many issuers block it by policy rather than by law — with a different list per issuer. Without a published blocked list, finding out means finding out. Likewise, dispute handling is not described: what happens when a payment goes wrong is exactly the thing you would want written down in advance.

And one more everyday gap: a physical card is mentioned in passing, with no ordering steps, no delivery timing, no cost. The virtual card is instant; what happens after that is not documented. If you are someone who needs a card that sits in a wallet, this may be the first thing to ask support about.

What can go wrong

Wallib is small, and you should treat it that way. It is a Colombian fintech based in Bogotá, a member of Colombia Fintech, with Cristian Peñaranda as CEO and a legal entity given as Wallib SAS. The issuing bank is not named. The licences are not named. Those two facts together mean that when I say “who stands behind this card”, the card’s own public pages do not answer.

To be fair to the complaint side: I found no official incidents, and a search across Trustpilot and Reddit returned no pages about Wallib at all. That is genuinely neutral information — no complaints is not the same as a good record, it is an absence of data, and for a company of this size that is what you would expect. The company’s own site shows a 4.5/5 rating from its own testimonials, which I mention only to note that it is self-reported and carries no independent weight.

The background context matters here more than the specific record. Card programmes close. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down. Visa suspended WaveCrest in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. And networks can act even when nothing is wrong: in November 2022 Visa said it had terminated its global agreements with FTX — the pattern being that a programme can be ended by the network, not just by the company that markets it. When that happens, the usual sequence is a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then you are asked to withdraw what remains.

On safeguards, the good and the missing. The app offers two-factor authentication and freeze, block and unblock controls on the card. That is a sensible baseline. But custody and safeguarding are not stated — who holds your bitcoin between reload and spend, and whether those funds are segregated, is not on the public pages. This is the standard question to ask of any custodial product, and it has no published answer here.

Regulatory framing, since the card does not frame itself. In the EU, e-money institutions must safeguard customer funds in dedicated accounts or by insurance, and those funds are not the same as bank deposits. A crypto card often depends on two licences at once: one covering the crypto side and one covering the payment service. Colombia’s own framework is not something the card’s pages discuss, and I am not going to guess at it.

Spending behaviour. A prepaid-style balance cannot overdraw, which is one of the safer properties of this card design. What it does not stop you doing is losing the device, or approving a fraudulent transaction. Declined authorisations can also leave holds on your funds for several days — typically up to seven — which is worth knowing if a large payment bounces and you then wonder why your balance looks short.

What nobody tells you about the numbers. Because your balance is pesos and your source may be crypto, tax treatment follows your jurisdiction and this is not advice. What is true generally: in the US the IRS treats digital assets as property, so exchanging them for goods or services generally produces a taxable gain or loss, measured in local currency at fair market value on the date of the transaction. Each card payment funded from crypto can therefore be a separate disposal. Check your own position with someone qualified in your country.

What to take instead

None of these is a straight swap for Wallib — they serve different countries and different needs. I include them because the comparison is useful precisely where Wallib is thin: on disclosure, on who is eligible, on what the card is legally backed by.

Whop Cards — 5.2 / 10. Aims at 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, Wyoming) and businesses in 41 states; explicitly unsupported consumer countries include Belarus, China (Mainland), Cuba, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam. The page says “No extra fees” without listing amounts. It is built for spending from a Whop balance, so it suits someone earning there rather than someone holding crypto.

Stella — 6.5 / 10. The highest-scoring option here. Virtual and physical, on Visa, which the site puts at “over 40 million VISA merchants globally”. You deposit crypto and the account tops up the card automatically. Its terms bar users under economic sanctions programmes and route US and European users through affiliates. Countries served, exact fees and any cashback are not stated on the pages I could see.

UniFi Card — 4.7 / 10. A prepaid Visa debit card issued by Lead Bank, card currency USD, Apple Pay supported. Funding comes in through ACH, wire, SEPA (IBAN) or SPEI (CLABE), or you can get paid to a USDC wallet. The App Store lists send routes to the Philippines (PHP), Mexico (MXN) and the eurozone (EUR), with release notes mentioning Colombia, Brazil (PIX) and the UK (GBP) — but eligibility itself is not confirmed on the official pages, and fees are simply “may apply”.

If you are Colombian and spending pesos, Wallib remains the most straightforward of these on price. If you are elsewhere, one of the others is probably the honest starting point.

Who I would recommend it to

Recommended to someone living in Colombia who already holds BTC or USDT, pays most of their bills in pesos, and wants a phone-only card with no monthly fee and no conversion cost on domestic spending. For that person the product is genuinely well matched to their life, and the 0% COP purchase fee is the feature that justifies everything else.

Recommended with caution to someone who will travel and spend abroad regularly. The 1.2% Visa fee applies on top of an unpublished conversion rate, and every payment adds a second layer of cost you cannot see in advance.

Not recommended to anyone who needs cash withdrawals, a physical card they can rely on, a blocked-merchant list, or a named issuer and named licences behind the product. Each of those is not stated, and each of those is a reason to choose something else today rather than to find out later.

Not recommended to anyone treating a crypto-funded card as their only account, or as a place to hold meaningful balances over a long period. Custody and safeguarding are unstated, transfers are irreversible, and the company is young. If you want to hold crypto across a card, self-custody-linked designs exist precisely because the alternative asks you to trust a provider completely — with no published answer here about what that trust buys you.

My own short version: if the card’s core promise — a free Visa debit in your phone, spending Colombian pesos at no point-of-sale cost — is what you need, Wallib does that. If your decision depends on who stands behind it, how to get cash, or what happens when something goes wrong, the card has not told you, and that is the gap that holds the score at 5.4 rather than higher.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Wallib card?

The Wallib card is a rechargeable Visa debit card issued by a Colombian fintech of the same name, based in Bogotá. You load it with bitcoin, USDT or Colombian pesos, the balance is held in pesos, and you spend it like an ordinary Visa card — online, at Colombian shops, or anywhere Visa is accepted internationally. It exists as a virtual card in the app and as Apple Pay and Google Wallet tokens, both at no extra cost.

Is Wallib a bank?

No — it presents itself as a fintech company, a member of Colombia Fintech, with a legal entity given as Wallib SAS. Critically, the issuing bank is not named on the public pages, and neither are any licences. That is the single most important gap for anyone deciding whether to hold a balance on it, because it leaves unresolved exactly who stands behind the card when something goes wrong.

Does Wallib require KYC?

Yes. Identity verification must be approved before the card activates, and a first deposit of at least 20,000 COP is required. The card’s pages mention a “verificación de primer nivel” but do not state which documents are needed, whether proof of address is required, how long approval takes, or why a verification might be refused — so allow more time than the site suggests.

What does it cost to open and keep a Wallib card?

Creating the card costs $0, activation is free, and no monthly or annual fee is listed. The costs come later: recharging from BTC or USDT is charged at 0.1% under the card’s “tasa venta” wording, plus 1,000 COP, plus IVA. Purchases in Colombian pesos cost 0%, while purchases in another currency carry a 1.2% Visa fee on top of the conversion.

Is the Wallib card free?

Free to open, free to keep, and free to spend at Colombian merchants in pesos. But not free to top up, and not free to spend abroad — the recharge fee is 0.1% + 1,000 COP + VAT each time, and foreign-currency purchases pay Visa’s 1.2%. If you are outside Colombia, those two figures are the ones that determine whether the card works for you.

Can I use the Wallib card outside Colombia?

International purchases work at any merchant accepting Visa, which is the network’s doing rather than Wallib’s. Two practical cautions. The 1.2% Visa fee applies to foreign-currency purchases, on top of a conversion rate the card does not publish. And a Colombian-issued card can look like a foreign card to some merchants, who can read the issuer country from the card number and apply extra scrutiny as a result.

Which networks can I use to top up Wallib?

The card says you can recharge from BTC, USDT or COP, but it does not state which networks are supported, and it does not say who pays the on-chain network fee. Because blockchain transfers are irreversible, a deposit on an unsupported network can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee. Send a small test amount first and confirm it lands before moving anything larger.

Is the Wallib card safe?

The app offers two-factor authentication and the ability to freeze, block and unblock the card, which is a reasonable baseline. But custody and safeguarding are not stated — who holds the funds and whether they are segregated is not on the public pages. Card programmes like this can also be ended by the network rather than the company, as happened with FTX in November 2022 and WaveCrest in Europe in 2018.

Does the Wallib card have cashback?

Yes, 1% in bitcoin on eligible purchases over 10,000 COP, capped at 20 cashback transactions and 3,000,000 COP of eligible purchases per month, paid into the Wallib bitcoin wallet once the payment is confirmed. Worth noting that a BTC-denominated reward moves with bitcoin’s price, and it is separate from — not a reduction of — the fees the card charges.

Can I withdraw money from Wallib, and is there a physical card?

Withdrawing from the card back to your Wallib balance is charged at 0% with no fixed fee; what happens to the closing balance afterwards, including any bank transfer, is not stated. ATM withdrawals are also not stated, nor any ATM limit — fees, availability and caps are all absent. The physical card is mentioned once without any ordering steps, delivery timing or cost; only the virtual card is described as instant.

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