A card aimed at businesses, with terms that never say the numbers

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Wasabi sells a crypto-funded payment card in two forms — a virtual card you can bind to Apple Pay, and a physical card — and it presents itself for “businesses and users wanting stablecoin virtual and physical cards”. That framing matters more than it first appears. On the one complaint I could find, dated 8 Jul 2026, a reviewer describes the provider as aimed at businesses, charging high setup fees of “$15,000 and up”, with restricted cards. That is a single unverified user report, not a published tariff, but it is the sharpest signal the public pages give you.

My score is 6.4 out of 10. Not because the product looks bad — it looks like a competent stablecoin card with a virtual and a physical option and instant Apple Pay binding. It is because almost every number a buyer actually needs is absent from the pages I read. The terms list fee *types* — issuance, foreign exchange, cross-border transactions, ATM withdrawals, chargeback handling, replacement cards — and attach not a single amount to any of them. The monthly fee is not stated. The conversion rate is not stated. The card currency is not stated. The card network is not stated on those pages.

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

Who this suits. Someone who already holds stablecoins, knows which network to send them on, is comfortable with an issuer they cannot name, and wants a card that binds to Apple Pay instantly. If you need to see a price before you commit, this is the wrong card to evaluate blind.

Who this does not suit. Anyone who treats an unnamed issuer and unnamed licences as a dealbreaker. Anyone whose budget depends on knowing the ATM allowance, the FX markup, or whether a monthly fee exists. And anyone who reads “businesses and users” as a promise of a consumer-grade onboarding flow — the only public evidence on that point points the other way.

Will they give you the card?

They say yes to almost everywhere, with one published carve-out. The starting data says 200+ countries and regions are covered, though no country list appears on the pages I read. The terms say you must not be located in or residents of “any prohibited or sanctioned jurisdiction”. Note the wording: it is residence-based, and it is written in the negative — the rule tells you what is excluded without telling you what is included.

That gap is worth pausing on. “Prohibited or sanctioned jurisdiction” is a category that shifts with sanctions lists, and the pages do not name the countries in it. So the honest position is: the coverage claim is broad and the exclusion list is unpublished. For most readers this will not matter. For a reader in a region under active sanctions pressure, it is a question you would have to ask support before applying, not after.

There is also a structural reason a card can decline you regardless of where you live. A card number begins with an issuer identification number — a 6 or 8 digit BIN/IIN — that identifies the issuing institution, and the rest is an account identifier and a check digit. Merchants look up that BIN and can apply extra scrutiny when the issuer’s country differs from the billing address. This is the general reason a card issued in one country can look “foreign” to a shop in another, and it is not something the Wasabi terms address at all.

How to get it

The application path runs through KYC, and the terms describe it in the standard regulatory vocabulary: “Successfully complete any required identity verification (KYC/KYB) procedures”. What may be requested is a government-issued ID, proof of address, and a selfie verification. For corporate applicants the list extends to registration documents and beneficial ownership. Your age requirement is not stated on the pages I read — a gap that matters, since prepaid and debit cards in this category are generally available to adults 18+ and some issuers set higher limits.

Failure to complete verification is not a neutral outcome. The terms say it may lead to suspension or termination of your relationship. That is the same outcome EU rules require when due diligence cannot be completed: the institution must refrain from the transaction or relationship and, where necessary, end existing relationships. This is why accounts get closed or frozen pending documents — it is the rule working, not a judgement about you.

Two practical notes on what comes after. There is a KYC guide article in the help centre, but the number of verification tiers is not stated, so do not expect to find a named tier system. And delivery is not stated: the pages I read do not say how or where the physical card ships, or how long it takes. If a mailed card matters to your plan, that is a question for support before you pay.

Why the checks exist at all: KYC rules require regulated businesses to verify customers and assess risk as part of anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing law, including ongoing monitoring and suspicious-activity reporting. In the EU that covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether you are a politically exposed person. In the US the customer identification programme requires name, date of birth, address and an identification number. Nationality is screened separately from residence, which is the general reason a citizenship question can appear even when your address is fine.

Fees: what it really costs

Here is the honest position: I cannot tell you what this card costs. The terms name six fee categories and attach no amounts to any of them, and no monthly fee is stated. That is not a trick of presentation — the amounts are simply not on the pages I read.

Let me take three everyday payments through that table, because a fee you don’t know about only hurts you at the moment you meet it.

A coffee in a local currency. You tap the physical card or your Apple Pay. What you pay depends on a conversion rate that is not published. If the card holds a balance in a currency other than the shop’s, the conversion step applies — and the terms say rates “may apply” without a number, so the spread between what the network rate is and what you are charged is the part you cannot see. This is the single most common way a reader of this page gets hurt, and it is the one the terms describe most vaguely.

A subscription bought online from your laptop. Same conversion exposure if the merchant prices in another currency, plus the possibility that the merchant looks at the BIN, sees a foreign issuer, and declines or challenges the payment. Address Verification Service, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address you type with issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards — which can cause declines. That is a general property of cross-border cards, not a Wasabi policy, and no Wasabi-specific block list is published either.

Taking cash out of an ATM. The site advertises “competitive rates” and “millions of ATMs worldwide”. The fee is listed as a category and unpriced; the allowance is not stated. So you know the machine exists and you do not know what one withdrawal costs you or how many you get. On-chain network fees are a separate matter and are charged by the blockchain for your deposit, not by the card provider — but that saving does not apply to an ATM fee.

Two limits are worth reading twice. The virtual card carries a limit “up to 10,000 USD”, and the physical card is described as having “flexible spending limits” with no values attached. The site also mentions sending money in 7+ currencies. What none of this tells you is which currency the card itself spends in, and if you are planning a card for a country where the local currency is volatile, that is the gap that will bite.

Top up

The funding route is stablecoins. The product is described as “Spend with Stablecoin”, and the coins and networks are not stated on the pages I read — unofficial starting data names USDT on TRC20 and BEP20. Anything beyond stablecoins, including whether you can fund from a bank account or from a spot balance held elsewhere, is not stated.

This is the part of the card I would think about hardest, because the failure modes are silent. Blockchain transfers are irreversible: 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 support recovery with no guarantee. Getting the network wrong is the classic expensive mistake, and it is why I would not act on a chain name I read in unofficial starting data without confirming it in the app.

Two technical details make this more likely than it sounds. Fees on Ethereum-based transfers are paid only in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT with no ETH cannot send it. Tron-based transfers are paid through bandwidth and energy resources, often by burning TRX. And the networks are genuinely different systems: USDT has been issued on Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche and others, so “USDT” alone does not identify where your money is going.

One more caution about the coin itself. Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option — if a chain pairing sounds plausible to you, it may not exist. Stablecoins can also lose their peg: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022 and USDC briefly lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. And Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity, so stablecoins are not censorship-proof in either direction.

Paying with it every day

Day to day, this is the strong part of the card. The virtual card supports “instant binding” to Apple Pay, and the physical card can be added to Apple Pay too. How that works matters: Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific Device Account Number stored in the Secure Element, never on Apple’s servers, and each payment uses a one-time dynamic security code. So the phone-based path is the well-supported one. Google Pay is not stated, and neither are blocked merchant categories — a page you will want to find before you try to pay for something unusual.

On the security side, Wasabi describes “Security by Design” as creating, deleting and isolating funds per card, and states custody as non-custodian. Whether two-factor authentication is offered is not stated. Isolating funds per card is a real design choice rather than a marketing line — it means a compromised card is a smaller problem than a compromised balance — but I would want to know what a lost or frozen card actually stops.

There is a cashback product (“Get Cashback on your card purchases”) and a referral programme. Neither the rate nor the conditions are stated, so treat both as unquantified. The web app lives at app.wasabicard.com; no store listing was found and ratings were not read, which is a thin signal about how the product feels in daily use.

If a payment goes wrong, the terms say refunds may take up to 30 business days to be reflected, chargebacks need supporting documentation, and recovery is not guaranteed. On top of that, a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to 7. Plan your balance with those two facts in view: money can be tied up for a month through no fault of yours, and a decline is not the same as a reversal.

What can go wrong

The issuer is not named. Wasabi Ltd says it is a financial technology company and explicitly “not bank or custodians”. Over-the-counter trading and card issuing are “provided in partnership with licensed institutions or banks” — but neither the issuer nor the licences are named on the pages I read. A “Licenses & Compliance” page exists at /en/licenses-compliance, so the information may well be published; it simply was not on the pages I could read. Still, this is the largest single unknown here. A card’s regulatory home follows its issuer, not its brand.

A programme can end. Card programmes close. 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. Closures typically run in a predictable order — a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then a request that you withdraw remaining balances — though the exact timetable varies and one 2026 closure reported by a secondary source gave new loads ending 8 July 2026 and spending stopping 8 August 2026, which is a single unconfirmed source. The lesson generalises: hold the balance you need elsewhere, and read closure notices.

Funds can be withheld. The terms say funds may be temporarily withheld pending investigation. Combined with refunds taking up to 30 business days and holds lasting up to 7 days after declines, the same crypto balance can be spoken for in three different ways at once.

Merchant-side friction. A four-digit merchant category code classifies a business under ISO 18245. MCC 7995 covers gambling — casinos, betting, lotteries — and many issuers block it by policy rather than by law, with the list varying by issuer. Wasabi publishes no blocked-category list, so you cannot know in advance. Some merchants also decline prepaid or foreign BINs because the lookup reveals card type and issuer country.

Custody risk in general. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key. A seed phrase is typically 12 to 24 words and unencrypted: anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds. Transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen key has no built-in recovery — the network cannot freeze or return the money. Custodial platforms have a real record: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022). Wasabi states custody as non-custodian, which places that particular risk on you instead — with a self-custody-linked card your funds stay in your own wallet until the moment of payment, but you bear sole responsibility for key loss, phishing, and malware that swaps a copied address.

Regulation is a moving floor. MiCA, the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation, 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 it, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. The transitional period runs only until 1 July 2026 or until a provider receives or is refused authorisation, whichever comes first — so a provider’s current status may not be its status later. ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised CASPs, white papers and non-compliant entities that you can check a provider against. A card is also regulated separately from the crypto side, so a crypto card often depends on two licences at once. In the US, FinCEN guidance treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters, while people merely buying goods or services are not.

The complaint on record. One Trustpilot review, 8 Jul 2026, one star: the provider is aimed at businesses, setup fees of “$15,000 and up”, low quality, heavy restrictions on the cards. TrustScore 3 from that single review, read 2026-10-21. No Reddit threads were found. I am not treating one review as evidence of a pattern — but I am treating it as evidence that the setup fees may be a business-scale number nobody has published, and that restrictions may bite harder than a consumer card’s usually do.

What to take instead

I compared Wasabi against three alternatives in the same category. The scores are mine, on the same ten-point scale, and the difference is mostly about how much each one publishes.

Card.fi is the one to look at if transparency is your deciding factor. It publishes a one-time price, an explicit fee schedule, a specific coin and network list, and cashback percentages — 0.8% on Classic capped at 10 USDT a month, 1% on Premium, and 1.2% or 2% on Metal depending on the cap, with a headline 10% at coffee shops capped at 10 USDT a month, plus variable rates on balances “up to 18%” on Metal. Its eligibility language is also more concrete: cards ship to “200+ countries”, with terms barring residents of, or orders from, a country subject to sanctions that would prohibit the service. Two cautions: it warns that sending on the wrong chain risks permanent loss, and it says cards are issued “under licence from the relevant card schemes” without naming Visa or Mastercard — so it has the same unnamed-network gap.

CardFlow is the cheapest-looking on paper, aimed at Nigeria and at “Nigerians and global users”, with no country list or exclusions stated. A virtual USD Mastercard in minutes and no creation fee is a genuine advantage if you only need a virtual card. The reason it scores lowest is that everything after that is silent: no fees, no networks, no rewards, no monthly fee.

HyperCard describes itself as working in “more than 176 countries” on its App Store listing — note that is acceptance, not eligibility, and the official pages state no country list at all. It is a prepaid card with a balance in USD or EUR, funded by depositing crypto such as USDT, BTC or ETH and converting on arrival. Networks are not stated, no fees are stated, and its 4.7 is the lowest here.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Wasabi to someone in this specific situation: you already hold stablecoins, you know exactly which network you will send them on, you use Apple Pay as your main tap-to-pay, and you have decided that the unnamed issuer is an acceptable trade for a card that isolates funds per card and binds to your phone instantly. In that shape, it is a good everyday card, and 8 out of 10 for everyday use is where the score comes from.

I would not recommend it to you if any of these are true. You are budgeting a fixed monthly amount and need a published monthly fee. You plan to live on ATM withdrawals and need a stated allowance. You are spending in a currency other than the card’s and need to know the conversion rate. You are a resident of a jurisdiction under sanctions pressure and need to see the exclusion list. Or you simply dislike handing verification documents to a provider that will not tell you which bank issued the card.

Ask support three things before you commit: which institution issues the card and under what licence; what the conversion rate and the full fee schedule are; and what happens to your balance if the programme is wound down. The answers to all three exist, or should. If they do not come back in writing, that is your answer.

One last thing that is not this card’s business but is yours. 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 — which means each card payment funded from crypto may be a separate disposal. Whether that applies to you is a question for a tax professional in your country, not for me.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Wasabi card?

The Wasabi card is a crypto-funded payment card sold in two forms: a virtual card and a physical card. It is presented as “Spend with Stablecoin”, meaning you load stablecoins and spend the resulting balance like an ordinary card. Wasabi describes itself as a financial technology company, “not bank or custodians”, with card issuing provided in partnership with licensed institutions or banks. The intended audience is stated as businesses and users wanting stablecoin virtual and physical cards.

How does the Wasabi card work?

You complete identity verification, load a stablecoin balance, and then spend it. The virtual card supports instant binding to Apple Pay, and the physical card can be added to Apple Pay too. Because a crypto card generally behaves like a prepaid card, it draws on a stored balance rather than overdrawing an account. The card’s network and currency are not stated on the pages I read, so you would want both confirmed before relying on it in a specific country.

Is Wasabi a bank?

No, by its own description. Wasabi Ltd says it is a financial technology company and explicitly “not bank or custodians”. Over-the-counter trading and card issuing are provided in partnership with licensed institutions or banks, but the issuer and the licences are not named on the pages I read. A “Licenses & Compliance” page exists, so check there. This distinction matters: a card’s regulatory protections follow its issuer, not its brand.

Who can apply for the Wasabi card?

Starting data says 200+ countries and regions, though no country list appears on the pages I read. The terms require that you are not located in or residents of “any prohibited or sanctioned jurisdiction” — a residence-based exclusion that is not itself published. Your age requirement is not stated. Expect to provide a government-issued ID, proof of address and a selfie verification, with registration documents and beneficial ownership for corporate applicants.

Does the Wasabi card require KYC?

Yes. The terms require that you “successfully complete any required identity verification (KYC/KYB) procedures” and state that failure may lead to suspension or termination. What may be requested is a government-issued ID, proof of address and selfie verification; corporate applicants add registration documents and beneficial ownership. The number of verification tiers is not stated, though a KYC guide exists in the help centre. Sanctions screening on citizenship runs alongside your address in most regimes.

What does the Wasabi card cost?

I cannot tell you from the public pages, and that is the finding rather than a gap in my reading. The terms list fee types — card issuance, foreign exchange, cross-border transactions, ATM withdrawal, chargeback handling and replacement card — with no amounts attached. No monthly fee is stated. The site says currency conversion rates “may apply”, also without figures. One unofficial user report describes setup fees of “$15,000 and up” aimed at businesses, which is a single review, not a tariff.

How do I top up the Wasabi card?

Through stablecoins, under the product name “Spend with Stablecoin”. The coins and networks are not stated on the pages I read; unofficial starting data names USDT on TRC20 and BEP20. Confirm the network in the app before sending, because blockchain transfers are irreversible and a deposit on an unsupported network, or to another network’s address, can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee. Ethereum-based fees are paid in ETH alone.

Can I add the Wasabi card to Apple Wallet?

Yes, and this is the card’s clearest everyday-use strength. The virtual card supports “instant binding” to Apple Pay, and the physical card can be added to Apple Pay as well. Apple Pay stores a device-specific number in the Secure Element rather than on Apple’s servers, and each payment uses a one-time code. Google Pay support is not stated, and no blocked merchant category list is published, so check what your usual spending includes before you rely on it.

Is the Wasabi card safe?

Define “safe” carefully. Wasabi describes “Security by Design” as creating, deleting and isolating funds per card, and states custody as non-custodian; whether 2FA is offered is not stated. What is not addressed publicly is the issuer, its licences, or an allowance. Funds may be temporarily withheld pending investigation, refunds may take up to 30 business days to reflect, and a declined payment can leave a hold for up to 7 days. Non-custody also means key loss and phishing are your problem.

Is the Wasabi card worth it?

Against alternatives, worth it if your priority is instant Apple Pay binding plus per-card fund isolation, and you already hold stablecoins on a network the app confirms. Card.fi scores slightly higher with me at 6.6 against 6.4 because it publishes actual numbers: a one-time Virtual Classic at $49 or Virtual Premium at $249, a top-up fee of 1.5% + $1.00 on Classic, and FX of 3.5% on Classic against 2.5% on Premium. If published pricing decides it, Card.fi is the easier comparison.

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