The cards stopped working in July and the replacement has not arrived — here is what that means for your money

Updated October 2026

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Solflare spent years as one of the better-known names in crypto cards: a self-custody Solana wallet with a Mastercard attached that spent USDC straight from the wallet, at checkout, without a loading step. In July 2026 that stopped. Cards were paused on 28 July 2026 after the issuer behind them wound down, and as of the date I checked there is still no relaunch and no named replacement partner. The score I give it is 3.2 out of 10 — not because the product was badly built, but because a card you cannot use is not a card.

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

This page is written for someone who is choosing where to spend crypto, or who already has a Solflare wallet and is wondering what to do next. If you are in the second group, the “If you already have the card” section is the one that matters. If you are shopping, skip to the comparison and the recommendation.

Verdict: 3.2 out of 10

The headline number is low for one specific reason: eligibility. Solflare cards are not being issued. The pause notice on the official site says cards are suspended while the project transitions to a new issuer, and no restart has been confirmed. Everything else about the product — the self-custody design, the direct USDC spending, the instant in-app verification — still reads well on paper. Paper is the problem.

Who this suits right now: nobody looking for a card to spend from this month, and nobody whose spending depends on a card that has to work at a checkout tomorrow. Who it does not suit: essentially everyone else too, because there is nothing to sign up for.

The audience the product was aimed at is still waiting: Solflare wallet holders awaiting the card relaunch. That is a real group with money already in the app, and the rest of this page is largely for them.

The shape of that table is the whole review. Cost scores well because a free annual fee is genuinely good — that 7 is the highest mark anywhere in it. Top-up options score badly for a structural reason rather than a temporary one: the card only ever spoke one language, USDC on Solana, and that has not changed. Reliability and everyday use score near zero because of the pause, and those are the marks that decide the total.

What happened to the programme

On 28 July 2026 Solflare paused both its virtual and its physical cards. The stated reason was that the issuer behind them, Kulipa, had wound down; a Solflare co-founder cited solvency issues at Kulipa. The pause notice promised a replacement card “in August” 2026, bringing Apple Pay and Google Pay, higher limits and cashback back. As of late August 2026 the project roadmap still listed the relaunch as a future item, and I found no relaunch by 2026-10-20.

Three months of “August” with no card is the single most useful fact on this page if you are waiting. Promised dates in this industry slip; the pattern here is not a launch that overran by a week.

What the pause does not touch is the wallet. Staking, swaps and the wallet itself were unaffected, and open Borrow positions stay accessible in the Cards tab. Only the card stopped. Subscriptions tied to the card by auto-renewal also stopped, which is worth knowing if you had a streaming or service subscription riding on it — you may find out at the next billing cycle rather than now.

One oddity to be aware of: the main solflare.com pages still carry the old “Get Solflare Card” marketing with no pause notice on them. So if you land on the site from a search or a link, the first thing you see may be a sales page for a card that does not work. The pause notice is a separate page. That mismatch is a reasonable source of confusion, and it is a fair question to ask of any project whose marketing outruns its status.

On the identity and verification side, what the official pages actually say is thin. KYC verification in the app is described as instant. The documents required, whether proof of address is needed, and the age threshold are not stated on the public pages. Cards were offered in the EEA, the UK and “other countries”, decided case by case, with eligibility checked by requesting a card in the mobile app — no country list is published, and whether the test is residence or citizenship is not stated. A third-party read says re-enrolment with a new KYC round is “likely” for the replacement card; that is not an official statement.

What the card was, according to the site: a self-custody Mastercard that deducts USDC from the wallet at checkout, accepted at “100M+ merchants”. The issuer is not named on official pages — the footer names Solrise Finance Ltd, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, and marketing may be handled by an affiliate, Blockadopt d.o.o., Zagreb, Croatia. Licences are not stated. The third-party name for the wound-down issuer is Kulipa; no new partner has been named. Existing cards do not carry over to a replacement.

Cost and fees are where official silence is loudest. The card price and fee schedule are not stated on the official pages at all. What circulates is third-party and unconfirmed: an annual fee of free, a card price of “TBD” to confirm in the app, a 1% service fee, and an FX fee quoted variously as 0.7% in a fee table, 0.40–0.70% for the UK and EEA in body text, 1% elsewhere, and 0.55% on another site. One source describes a Solflare help article as specifying a fixed 1% FX fee. These figures come from third-party sites, not from the card, and they contradict each other on the number that matters most to anyone actually spending abroad. Delivery was never published either; unofficially the virtual card is instant in the app and a physical one is optional with no shipping time or fee stated.

Wallet-wise, Google Pay works. Apple Pay is described as “coming soon” and tied to the card relaunch — which is an odd thing to read now, since Apple Pay has been available on devices for years. It tells you something about how far behind the marketing copy is.

The app itself is a separate question from the card. The Solflare wallet app is on iOS and Android; a third-party page verified on 6 Oct 2026 gives the App Store listing 4.8 out of 5 from 9.6K ratings. That is a third-party read of the store listing, and I did not read the Play Store listing.

If you already have the card

Here is the part that should calm most people down. There is no card balance. The money was never on the card — it was in your own wallet, under your own keys, and it still is. The official line is that there is nothing you need to do. Open Borrow positions remain accessible in the Cards tab.

Concretely, that means:

• Your funds are in your self-custodial wallet, not with an issuer. Self-custody is the reason this went as well as it did.
• Your card stopped working on 28 July 2026. It will not come back on its own.
• Auto-renewal subscriptions that were billed to the card have stopped; check what was on it.
• Support is described officially as a “24/7 human support team”, reachable by message in the app.

Two things are genuinely not settled, and I would rather say so than dress them up. Disputes and chargebacks are not stated — the help centre has a single card article about the pause, and that is all. If you had a disputed payment in flight when the card stopped, there is no published procedure for it. The second is ATM fees: unofficially 2% per one review, with another site listing free ATM withdrawals, and the review page itself saying “confirm in app”. Whether you can even reach an ATM is a separate question from what it costs, and neither is stated officially. Limits are likewise not stated officially; one third-party site shows daily, monthly and ATM limits as unlimited, while another says no limits are published, and the pause notice says higher limits return with the new card.

The honest summary: your money is fine and reachable; your card is gone; the paperwork around it is thin.

What can go wrong

The pause itself is the main risk that has already materialised, so let me be specific about the shape of it rather than generic. A crypto card sits on three legs: the crypto brand you have an account with, the issuer that holds the card programme, and the network that routes the payments. When the issuer leg breaks, everything above it stops, even though your crypto never moved. That is exactly what happened here.

What that teaches, and what to check in any similar card:

• Check whether you hold a balance on the card or in a wallet. A stored balance on a card is an exposed balance; a self-custody wallet is not.
• Check whether the issuer is named anywhere public. Solflare’s official pages do not name one; a third party named Kulipa. An unnamed issuer is a thing you cannot verify.
• Check whether the card brand has a licensed e-money or bank issuer behind it, and whether that entity appears in a regulator’s register.

On the regulatory side, a card is a payment service regulated separately from the crypto side, so a crypto card often rests on two licences. Under the EU’s MiCA regulation (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114), which ESMA says took legal effect in June 2023, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. Its transitional period let providers operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026 or until they received or were refused a MiCA authorisation, whichever came first — which lands squarely in the middle of this programme’s collapse. ESMA maintains an interim register of authorised crypto-asset service providers that you can check a provider against. Solflare’s licences are not stated.

Self-custody cuts one way and the other. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key; a seed phrase is typically 12 to 24 words in unencrypted form, and anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend its funds. Transfers are typically irreversible, with no built-in recovery — the network cannot freeze or return funds. Custody is not automatically the safe choice either: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018) and Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022) are the standing reminders. What self-custody gives you is that the pause could not touch your balance.

What the security claims actually cover: the official page names biometric protection, 3-D Secure authentication, partner fraud defences and instant spending notifications. Insurance is not stated. On 3-D Secure, it is worth knowing the direction of travel — under 3-D Secure, liability for fraudulent online payments can shift from the merchant to the cardholder’s bank, and some critics argue as far as to the cardholder.

Complaints are worth a paragraph because they are easy to misread. A user report on Trustpilot for solflare.com, per Coin Bureau with no date given, shows 3.9 out of 5 from 66 reviews, with about 45% critical, citing lost funds, failed transactions and suspicious token approvals. Read carefully: no card-specific complaints were found, and the reports concern the wallet rather than the card. I did not read the live page.

One more risk that is not this card’s fault but belongs in your checklist: merchant category codes. MCC 7995 covers gambling, and many issuers block it by policy rather than by law, with the blocked list varying by issuer — and Solflare does not state its gambling or merchant blocks. Declines are also common for reasons that have nothing to do with you: a prepaid or foreign BIN can be declined outright because the BIN lookup reveals the card type and issuer country, and address verification is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards. A declined authorisation can also leave a hold on funds for several days.

What to take instead

Three alternatives came up in my comparison, and they are not equivalent to each other — I would rather show you the shape of each than rank them into a false order.

Cardex is the broadest on paper: cards on VERVE, VISA, Mastercard and UnionPay, virtual and physical, one card for 200+ countries, spending from USDT, USDC and BTC wallets. The catch is that its App Store listing is Naira-focused and the card currency is Naira per that listing. That does not make it wrong — it makes it a different product for a different user. The conversion claim is worth reading twice, because “scans global exchange rates and picks the best one” is a marketing sentence and no fee percentage is published anywhere.

MSX scored highest of the three at 6.4, and that is the uncomfortable part of writing this section: I could not read an official page stating who can get it, what the card is, what it costs, what it spends from, or whether there are rewards. A higher number next to almost no verifiable detail is not something I would act on. Treat it as a name to check later, not an option to plan around.

Whop Cards is the clearest to read and the narrowest to use. It is a Visa that works anywhere Visa is accepted online and in stores, spending from a Whop balance — pending balance is usable as soon as a payment arrives, standard withdrawals use settled funds, and the balance is backed by stablecoin collateral from a linked wallet. The page says no extra fees, with no issuance or monthly amounts listed. Rewards are 5% cashback at select merchants, currently Uber, with more planned; payout currency and conditions are not stated. The catch is geography: 31 US states for consumers and 41 for businesses, with a specific list of unsupported consumer countries. Whether the test is citizenship or residence is not stated.

If you are outside the United States, Whop is probably not for you. If you are in one of those 31 states and want predictable fees with a stated reward, it is the most legible of the three. Cardex is the one with the wider reach on paper. MSX is the one I cannot tell you about.

Who I would recommend it to

Nobody, this year, for the card. If you read the whole page and only keep one line, keep that one.

To existing Solflare wallet holders I would say: your funds are in your own wallet and there is nothing to do with them. Leave them there, keep using the wallet for what it is good at, and treat the card as paused indefinitely rather than “coming back soon”. If you rely on the card for subscriptions, move those to a payment method you control now rather than waiting for the promised August that has already passed. Watch the official pause notice rather than the marketing pages, because the marketing pages have not caught up.

To someone choosing a crypto card today, I would start from the questions in the comparison table rather than from any brand: is the issuer named and verifiable, is your balance in a wallet or on the card, is the fee schedule published in one place, and does the card work in the country where you actually spend? Solflare fails the first and fourth of those today, and its fee schedule exists only in third-party sources that contradict each other.

I would not recommend this card to anyone who needs a working card this quarter, and I would not discourage anyone from keeping the wallet. Those are separate products now, and only one of them is paused.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Solflare card?

It was a self-custody Mastercard that deducted USDC straight from your Solana wallet at the moment of payment, with no step of loading a balance first. The site described acceptance at “100M+ merchants”. The card drew on the wallet itself rather than on a stored card balance, which is why your money was never exposed to the issuer. It is no longer being issued.

How does the Solflare card work?

Because the funds live in your own wallet, the card simply spends from it at checkout: USDC is deducted when you pay, and no separate balance needs topping up. Google Pay works; Apple Pay was described as “coming soon” and tied to the relaunch. The pause notice said cashback and higher limits would also return with a replacement card.

Is Solflare a bank?

No — and it does not present itself as one. The site footer names Solrise Finance Ltd, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, with marketing possibly handled by an affiliate, Blockadopt d.o.o., Zagreb, Croatia. Licences are not stated on the official pages, and the card issuer is not named there either.

Who owns Solflare, and what happened to the cards?

Solflare is operated under Solrise Finance Ltd, with the corporate details above. Cards were paused on 28 July 2026 after the issuer behind them, Kulipa, wound down; a co-founder cited solvency issues. A replacement was promised “in August” 2026 and had not launched by 2026-10-20.

Can I still get a Solflare card?

Not at the moment I checked. Issuance is paused while the project transitions to a new issuer, and no relaunch has been confirmed. Eligibility was previously decided case by case in the mobile app across the EEA, the UK and “other countries”, with no country list published, so there was never a clear map of who qualified.

Does the Solflare card require KYC, and is it safe?

Verification in the app was described as instant, though the required documents, proof of address and age rules are not stated on the public pages. Self-custody means you hold the keys, which protected your balance when the card stopped; the same choice makes you fully responsible for key loss and phishing.

What happened to the money on my Solflare card?

There was no balance on the card. Funds stayed in your self-custodial wallet, and the official position is that there is nothing you need to do. Open Borrow positions remain accessible in the Cards tab, and wallet, staking and swaps were unaffected. What did stop were the card itself and auto-renewal subscriptions billed to it.

What are the Solflare card fees?

Officially, nothing is published — the card price and fee schedule are simply not stated. Third-party sites report a free annual fee, a 1% service fee, ATM at 2%, and an FX fee quoted variously as 0.7%, 0.40–0.70%, 1% or 0.55%. Treat all of those as unconfirmed and check inside the app.

How do I top up the card, or use Apple Pay?

There was no top-up step: the card spent USDC directly from the Solana wallet, which is why its top-up options score so poorly — no other coins and no other networks were ever supported. Apple Pay was listed as “coming soon” and tied to the relaunch; Google Pay works. Neither will help while issuance is paused.

Is Solflare card worth it?

Worth what, is the honest question. As a design, spending USDC directly from a self-custody wallet with no loading step was genuinely ahead of most cards. As a purchase today, there is nothing to buy: no card is being issued, no relaunch is confirmed, and the fee schedule exists only in unofficial sources that disagree with each other.

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