A self-custody USDC card with a strong everyday score and a few soft spots

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Banqa card is a Visa Infinite payment card that spends USDC you hold in your own self-custody wallet. There is no annual fee on the Standard tier, USDC top-ups are free, and Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported — which puts everyday spending on a par with an ordinary premium card. The trade-offs are specific and worth naming before you apply: the physical card costs $39.00 including delivery, non-USD transactions carry a 1.99% conversion fee, and Banqa does not publish the country list, the verification tier names, or the limit amounts. So the question is not whether the card is good, but whether it is good *for the way you actually spend money*.

This page is written for people who have trouble getting an ordinary bank card — because of where they live, what documents they hold, or how long a traditional application takes. If you already have a mainstream Visa or Mastercard and your bank works, read the cost section first and be honest about whether switching is worth it.

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

The score: 7.1 out of 10

The shape of that total matters more than the number. Five of the six marks sit between 6 and 7 — the card is competent rather than exceptional. The 9 in everyday use is the one place Banqa clearly leads, and it is exactly the place most card reviews spend the least attention, because tapping a phone is the thing you do most often. The 6 in eligibility is the one place it lags, and that is the one that can disqualify you before any fee matters.

Who it suits: you already hold USDC, you are comfortable keeping your own recovery phrase safe, you spend mostly in USD or want the 1.99% FX rate to be a known quantity rather than a surprise, and you value Apple Pay and Google Pay over a rewards programme. Who it does not suit: anyone who wants a bank account relationship, a published schedule of tier limits, a referral scheme worth relying on, or a card they can hold in a wallet they did not have to fund themselves.

Will they give you the card

Short answer: they will tell you during the application, and you cannot pre-check it from the public pages. Banqa does not publish a country list. Its stated position is that eligibility depends on residence and applicable rules, and that this is confirmed during the application and identity checks. A supported-countries page is linked from the site but was not readable at the time of checking, so treat the list as something you discover by applying rather than something you verify beforehand.

That is a genuinely different onboarding experience from a bank. With a bank you can usually read a country table on the website and know in thirty seconds whether to bother. Here, the realistic planning assumption is that you may be declined, and the cost of finding out is your time and your documents rather than your money — the physical card fee is not charged until issuance, which happens after approval.

If you are outside the euro area, the United Kingdom or the United States, the “applicable rules” language is doing a lot of work. It leaves room for the issuer’s own risk policy, which typically weighs citizenship and country of birth as well as country of address. A resident of a supported country holding a passport from a restricted one may or may not be admitted. The public pages do not say, and no amount of reading will resolve it.

One practical note: this is not a workaround for sanctions rules, and it should not be approached as one. Eligibility screening is a legal obligation on the issuer, not a discretionary preference. If your circumstances are unusual, the honest answer is that you will only learn your status by submitting documents and completing the checks.

How to get it

The path is a standard identity-check application. You supply a government ID — passport, national ID card or driver’s licence — plus proof of address dated within three months. Higher verification tiers may additionally ask for source-of-funds documents, which means a bank statement or similar showing where your money comes from.

The timing splits two ways. Automated checks usually complete within minutes. A manual review takes 24 to 48 hours. If a check fails, you can retry from the dashboard rather than starting over — a small mercy that saves the most common kind of application frustration.

The card itself comes as a Visa Infinite, offered both virtual and physical. Business customers receive both as well. The card currency is USD, which is why every non-USD transaction carries the conversion fee described below. Physical card issuance and shipping is $39.00. Which countries it ships to, and how long delivery takes, is not stated.

Two things are worth flagging because their absence changes how you should think about the product. First, age is not stated. Second, and more consequentially, the daily, weekly and monthly limits depend on your verification tier, but the tier names and amounts are not published. The only limit you can set yourself is a per-transaction ceiling. So you cannot answer “how much can I spend at a hotel on day one?” before you sign up — you can only find out afterwards, in the dashboard, once the tier is assigned.

Fees: what it really costs

The headline is attractive and the details are ordinary. There is no annual fee on the Standard tier, and USDC top-ups are free. Everything else is a normal payment-card cost structure, plus the entry price of a physical card that many people forget until they order one.

Now the part people actually want: three ordinary payments, with the fees that apply.

A $60 grocery shop in the US. You spend in USD, so there is no conversion fee. No cashback is stated, so the effective cost is zero beyond the balance you have already committed to USDC. This is the cleanest transaction the card supports, and if your spending looks like this, Banqa is comfortable.

A €45 restaurant in Berlin. The $45-equivalent purchase is not in USD, so the 1.99% FX fee applies — roughly $0.90 on a $45 spend. The card does not state which exchange rate is applied or with whom the spread sits, so treat 1.99% as the floor rather than the total cost. Compare that to a mainstream card: many no-annual-fee bank cards charge close to 0% on FX, which means several dozen euro purchases a year can add up to more than the $39 the physical card cost you. If you travel or buy in non-USD currencies often, this is the number to run against your own spending before deciding.

$200 from an ATM in a foreign city. Here two fees stack. The percentage fee for end users is 1% of the amount plus $1, and the fixed fee is $1.50 — so about $4.50 on a $200 withdrawal, before any network or conversion cost the ATM operator adds. You also do not know what the free allowance is, because the limits follow Visa partner standards and the allowance is not stated. Treat ATM use as a last resort rather than a feature, which is the opposite of how the marketing tends to present it.

A note on the crypto side: there is no manual conversion step and no conversion fee, because USDC is spent directly against collateral. That is a real structural advantage over cards that convert through two or three hops. It is also why the card is USDC-only in practice, and the reasons for that sit in the next section.

Top up: moving USDC in and out

The funding model is the most distinctive thing about Banqa, and it is not complicated once you accept one rule: USDC, on the right network, into your own wallet.

You hold USDC in a self-custody smart-contract wallet — you hold the keys, not Banqa. The site says to hold USDC on Base and Arbitrum, and to send only USDC on Base. Both Base and Arbitrum and Ethereum are named as the supported chains. USDC top-ups carry zero deposit fees. Other assets and other networks cost anywhere from free to 1% depending on the route. No minimum deposit is stated.

Getting money back out works the other way round: the withdraw page moves USDC from your card collateral to your self-custody wallet through an on-chain authorisation. The example offramp fee shown is 1% plus $3.00, and closing the account costs $10.00.

Here is the part that deserves a pause. Irreversible transfers mean a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee of success. The way to protect yourself is unglamorous: copy the network and address from the dashboard rather than from an old message, and check that the asset is USDC and the chain is one of the three named before you sign anything. Network fees for your deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by Banqa, so a small transfer on a busy network can cost more in gas than you expect.

One piece of background worth having, because people ask about it constantly: USDC is not natively available on every network people expect. Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option — if a guide tells you to send TRC20 USDC, it is describing something that no longer works by default. That single fact prevents a large share of the avoidable deposit mistakes.

Paying with it every day

This is where Banqa scores highest, and it earns the 9 honestly. You get a virtual and a physical Visa Infinite, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and a card currency of USD. The frozen-card feature and instant card freeze in the app mean a lost card is a two-tap problem rather than an afternoon.

Tokenised mobile wallets are worth a specific mention because of how they work under the hood. Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific number stored in the Secure Element on the phone, never on Apple’s servers, and each payment carries a one-time dynamic security code. Practically, that makes phone payments harder to skim than a physical card, and it means your card number is not the thing that touches the terminal.

What is missing: blocked merchant categories are not stated, so you cannot know in advance whether gambling, adult content or crypto-related merchants will decline. Cashback is not stated. The referral programme pays 0.15% of a friend’s spend plus a $10 bonus once that friend reaches $500 of spending — a real structure, but one that depends on people you know actually signing up, so treat it as a bonus rather than a return. The dashboard is available on web and app, though the supported platforms and store ratings are not stated.

On disputes, the honest reading of the fee schedule is that chargeback handling appears as a disclosed fee, with no description of the process or the time frames. In the US, debit card reversal rights come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z, with prepaid coverage varying; in the EU, strong customer authentication shapes what a bank can and cannot push back. If a purchase goes wrong, expect to do the work yourself and expect the handling to cost you a fee.

What can go wrong

The largest risk here is not a bad payment. It is a sudden stop.

The programme can end. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves; they license issuers and can suspend a programme. 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 every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme. Neither of those was fraud; both were a sponsor relationship ending. Closures typically follow a pattern: a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then you are asked to withdraw your balance. Plan for that sequence, and do not treat your card balance as a permanent store of value.

You are your own security. Self-custody means control sits with whoever holds the private key, and your recovery phrase is shown once and cannot be recovered by Banqa. Anyone who obtains those words can restore the wallet and spend the funds, and blockchain transfers have no built-in recovery — the network cannot freeze or return anything. Watch for clipboard-hijacking malware that silently swaps a copied address, and for phishing pages that imitate the dashboard.

The counterparty is still there. Banqa is a brand of Codego Group, and its cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member pursuant to a licence from Visa. Banqa states plainly that it is not a bank, and it does not name the issuer or its licences. Codego operates under SOC 2 controls and runs penetration tests, and you have instant freeze plus two-factor options including email one-time codes, Google 2FA and passkeys rolling out. That is a reasonable security posture. It is not the same as a deposit guarantee.

Deaths and holds. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on funds that stays for several days, in practice up to about seven. So a payment that fails can keep your balance committed longer than you expect.

Trustpilot tells you almost nothing. The profile stands at 3.7 from a single review — a five-star review from July 2026 — and Trustpilot notes the company has not invited reviews. One review cannot tell you anything about how disputes, freezes or closures are handled at scale. No complaint themes emerged because there is nothing to draw themes from. Read that row in the score table as an absence of signal, not as a clean record.

Support is email, with replies usually within 24 hours, plus a help centre and contact pages. Reasonable, and slower than you want when a card is frozen while you are abroad.

What to take instead

None of these are better than Banqa at being a card. They are better at being *legible* — which, when you cannot get an ordinary card, often matters more.

Reading across the row that matters most: eligibility. Banqa and BloFin both leave you to find out. Decaf does the opposite — it publishes a restricted list including Belarus, China, North Korea, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Cuba, Ukraine, Venezuela, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico and Nigeria, plus eleven restricted US states including Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin. Whether its rule runs on citizenship or residence is not stated, but at least you can read it. SafePal’s phrasing — citizens of supported regions who live in supported areas — separates the two concepts, though its regions page came back empty.

The other row worth weighing is cost shape. Decaf charges nothing to add FX and passes Visa’s rate through, which beats 1.99% if you spend abroad, at the price of a $5 virtual card ($10 physical in the US, $90 elsewhere). SafePal’s 1% non-USD settlement sits between the two, and its top-up can be as low as 0.4% on the top tier. BloFin’s 1%-or-lower spend fee can reach zero at the top VIP tier, but it is charged at the moment of payment rather than on conversion.

None of the three publish everything either. Decaf does not say which coins and networks top the card up. SafePal does not state a card issuance fee and its swaps include an unquantified spread. All three are worth comparing against what *you* spend, not which one is safest.

Who I would recommend it to

To people who already hold USDC and keep their own keys. If you have a self-custody wallet, you understand what a recovery phrase means and what losing it costs, and you are content to check networks before sending, Banqa is a genuinely good daily card: no annual fee, a real premium network tier, phone wallets, and no conversion step between your crypto and the purchase.

I would point elsewhere if any of these describe you: you want a bank you can name and complain to; you want to know your limits before you sign up; you spend most of your money outside the US and a 1.99% FX fee matters; you need ATM cash regularly; you want cashback or a rewards programme; or you are simply looking for the simplest possible way to hold and spend crypto. In that last case a self-custody wallet plus your own exchange is less machinery, not more.

And a caution that applies to everyone reading this genre: none of these cards fixes a banking exclusion, and none of them should be reached for as a way around identity checks, sanctions or country rules. If your situation is complicated, the useful question is whether the issuer will accept you — not whether a card exists.

Frequently asked questions

What is Banqa card?

Banqa is a Visa Infinite payment card that spends USDC held in a self-custody smart-contract wallet rather than in a bank account. You get both a virtual and a physical card, and the card currency is USD. Banqa is a brand of Codego Group, states that it is not a bank, and says the cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member under a licence from Visa.

Is Banqa a bank?

No — Banqa states it is not a bank. It is a card brand and front-end; the actual issuing institution is a Visa Principal Member, and Banqa does not name the issuer or its licences. Banqa says it is not a bank, which means customer funds are not bank deposits and are not covered by a deposit guarantee scheme in the way a bank balance would be.

Who owns Banqa?

Banqa is a brand of Codego Group. Codego describes itself as operating under SOC 2 controls and running penetration tests. That is the ownership structure in one sentence: a crypto company holding a card programme through a licensed Visa issuer, rather than a bank subsidiary with your money on its books.

Is Banqa card available in my country?

There is no published country list to check against. Banqa’s stated position is that eligibility depends on residence and applicable rules, confirmed during application and identity checks; a supported-countries page is linked but was not readable when checked. If you need a definite answer before applying, you will have to ask them — and the realistic assumption should be that approval is not guaranteed.

How do I get a Banqa card?

Apply and complete identity checks with a government ID — passport, national ID or driver’s licence — plus proof of address dated within three months. Higher tiers may request source-of-funds documents. Automated checks usually finish in minutes; manual reviews take 24 to 48 hours, and failed checks can be retried from the dashboard. Physical card issuance and shipping costs $39.00.

Does Banqa card require KYC?

Yes. This is identity verification under anti-money-laundering rules, not an optional extra: in the EU, due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality, documents, a sanctions check and politically-exposed-person screening. If checks cannot be completed, the institution must refrain from the transaction or relationship, which is why accounts get frozen pending documents.

How much does Banqa cost?

There is no annual fee on the Standard tier. The physical card is $39.00 including shipping. Non-USD transactions cost 1.99% in FX fees. ATM withdrawals cost $1.50 fixed plus 1% of the amount and $1 for end users, with a $0.60 balance or authorisation check. Other tiers, monthly fees and limit amounts are not stated.

How do I top up the Banqa card?

Send USDC from your own self-custody wallet to the card’s smart-contract address, on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum. USDC top-ups have zero deposit fees; other assets and networks cost from free to 1% by route. Check the network and address against the dashboard before sending, because blockchain transfers are irreversible and USDC is not natively supported on every chain.

Is Banqa card safe?

The security controls are reasonable: a self-custody wallet, instant card freeze in the app, card details shown for 60 seconds, email one-time codes, Google 2FA and passkeys rolling out, with SOC 2 controls and penetration tests behind it. But self-custody means you own the risk of key loss and phishing, and a card programme can be wound down by its issuer without warning.

Is Banqa card worth it?

It is worth it if you already hold USDC, keep your own keys, and want a fee-free annual card with phone wallets to spend it. It is less worth it if you travel and spend in other currencies, rely on ATM cash, or want published tier limits — none of which this card gives you clearly.

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