A Visa on Solana that works well day to day, on paper that contradicts itself

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Solayer card is a Visa that spends a stablecoin balance, issued under licence from Visa and operated on the Solana network. For someone who already holds stablecoins, moves money on Solana anyway, and cannot open an ordinary bank card, that combination is genuinely useful: you get a virtual card quickly, a physical one by post, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and spending limits you can adjust. What I could not settle after reading every public page is who is actually behind it. The card’s own terms name the issuer — Third National — and the documentation describes a custody provider running hot and cold wallets with multi-signature approval and “circuit breakers”. The marketing describes the same product as non-custodial and fully on-chain. Those are not two ways of saying the same thing, and you are the person who has to decide which one to believe before you put money in.

So: 6.2 out of 10. Not a card for everyone, and not a card for anyone in a hurry. It suits a stablecoin holder on Solana who lives outside the restricted country list, treats a spending card as a convenience rather than as their main financial account, and reads terms before depositing. It does not suit someone who needs published spending limits, a named custody model, or a support line that answers.

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

Will they give you the card

Here is the first gate, and it is stricter than most people expect. Eligibility is refused if you are a resident or a citizen of a listed country — “not eligible to sign up for the Solayer Card, regardless of their current place of residence”. One rule, two triggers: moving abroad does not free you if your citizenship is on the list, and holding a passport from a listed country does not protect you if you live somewhere else.

The list runs to Russia, Belarus, Georgia, Turkey, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, Moldova, Montenegro, most EU states, the UK and Switzerland. In the United States the card names restricted states specifically: AZ, DE, GA, ID, LA, MD, MT, NV, NM, ND, OH, OR, RI, SD, VT, WA and WI. Separate card terms say you attest that you are not a US citizen, that the card is “intended for those outside of the United States”. So the two official documents disagree about Americans: one says certain states are blocked, the other says US citizens are out. If that describes you, you are guessing, and you should ask support before applying rather than after.

Armenia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are not on the exclusion list — which is not the same as being eligible. The page states plainly that it does not list the eligible countries. So for anyone in those five, the answer is not “yes”, it is “ask”. CryptoCardHub’s count of 120 available and 94 restricted countries is useful as a rough map of the shape of the list, and unofficial in the sense that it is not confirmed by the card.

You also have to be 18 or older and pass KYC. Beyond that: what documents you need, whether proof of address is separate, how many verification levels exist and why an application can be refused — the public pages do not say. I would treat that gap as the first thing to resolve in a support ticket before you send anything.

How to get it

Apply through the Solayer Pay app, then clear identity verification. The sign-up flow runs through Sumsub and asks for your country of residence, address, occupation and annual salary, then an email code, then an identity document — passport, driving licence or Aadhaar card, both sides of it, in JPG, PNG, HEIC, WEBP or PDF up to 50MB — and finally a face liveness check. Review and approval take 3 to 5 business days after that. Aadhaar in the document list tells you the flow is built with India in mind as well as with Europe and the US in mind.

Two practical points before you start. The address you enter cannot be changed after you order the physical card, so get it right the first time. And approval is not instant: three to five business days is the number the card itself gives, on top of the time the identity check takes.

The virtual card comes with the membership rather than as a separate purchase. New users pay a one-time $20 account activation fee that covers the virtual card for the first year; after that the $20 a year membership continues. If you lose the card or it is stolen, you freeze it in the app and order a replacement — the replacement fee is not stated anywhere I could find.

One more oddity worth knowing before you order. The documentation says the card is digital only with a physical version “coming soon”, while a separate Physical Card page describes ordering one with real prices and delivery times. Both pages are live. I would plan on the fee page being out of date rather than the ordering page, but I cannot prove it.

Fees: what a Solayer payment actually costs

The honest summary is that the card publishes more different fee figures than a fee schedule should hold, and that you need to check the specific number before each transaction type rather than assume one rule.

Now three ordinary payments, so the numbers mean something.

Coffee in your own country, in dollars. A $4.50 purchase in the US on a USD card costs $0.15 in fees. That is the clean case.

The same coffee in euros. The fee page says $0.10 plus 1.5%, the FAQ says $0.10 plus 1.75%, and the terms add a cross-border fee of up to 3% on top. Take the middle figure: on $4.50 you are paying somewhere between roughly $0.07 and $0.11 in the stated conversion fee, and potentially another few cents from the cross-border line. Nobody publishes a worked example, so the honest answer is that the total on foreign spend is assembled from three components and I cannot give you the final number.

Anything you buy with crypto in the balance. Here the card does not say what the crypto conversion fee is. Your stablecoin is converted somewhere in the chain between your wallet and the merchant, and the terms say the conversion happens at the card-network rate for non-USD spend. Whether a separate crypto conversion charge exists on top is not published. This is the gap that matters most, because it is the fee you pay on every purchase, not only the foreign ones.

There is no tier structure to speak of. One product, one $20 membership, and a points system fed by spending and referrals that unlocks ecosystem perks — benefits without published tiers. Unofficial figures circulate for the limits, including $10,000 daily and $30,000 monthly spending and $500 at the ATM, but they come from a Chinese-language listing on cryptocards.so, are undated, and may predate the current structure. Treat them as a hint about the order of magnitude, not as your ceiling.

Top up: getting stablecoins onto the card

Top-up runs through stablecoins. Which stablecoins is not stated — no coin is named on the public pages — and that is a bigger question than it sounds, because a stablecoin you hold on one network is not the same asset as the same stablecoin on another.

Supported chains: Solana, plus other networks added “at the issuer’s discretion”. Solana first is the design intent, and Blockmedia reported early top-ups were Solana-wallet-only. But the discretion clause means a network you use today may not be one you can use next year, so if your funds live elsewhere, the network question is worth settling before you plan around this card.

The app flow is short: Card tab, Deposit, approve in the wallet. The fee is published three ways — 1% per top-up on the fee page, 0.5% in the FAQ, $0.10 per top-up transaction in the top-up tutorial. For a $50 top-up that is the difference between 50 cents, 25 cents and 10 cents. For a $2,000 top-up it is $20, $10 or $0.10. I cannot reconcile those three numbers and would not guess; treat the worst of them as your planning number until a support answer says otherwise. Minimum top-up is not stated, and no fiat top-up route is stated — this is a crypto-to-card card, and if you need to buy the stablecoin first, that is a separate process with its own counterparty.

Two things that will surprise you if you miss them. The card deactivates after six months of inactivity, and getting back to life requires a new card issuance — so a card you use seasonally is a card you will have to reissue. And there is no documented way to withdraw the card balance back to your wallet: the top-up page and the terms both leave it uncovered. The terms do say the balance can be repaid at any time without penalty, and that a chargeback you win is credited to the Solayer Account, but neither is the same as a withdrawal route I can point you to.

Paying with it every day

This is where the card scores best, and it is the section with the fewest hard edges. You get a virtual Visa issued under licence from Visa, a physical one you can order, Apple Pay and Google Pay for contactless, and a currency of USD — non-USD spend is converted to USD. The Solayer Pay app is on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific number in the phone’s Secure Element and a one-time code per payment, so using it on a phone is genuinely a different thing from handing over the plastic.

The app’s reputation is thin in both directions. CryptoCardHub reported an App Store US rating of 5.0 from 2 ratings and 500+ Google Play downloads on 11 August 2026 — that is unofficial, not read from the stores directly, and 2 ratings is not a signal. A third-party report dated 3 March 2026 showed 0.0. With a launch in April 2025, this is a young product with a small public footprint, which is worth remembering when you weigh both the ratings and the silence on complaints.

Rewards are points rather than a stated cashback rate. You earn from spending and from referrals, plus ecosystem perks and yield on eligible balances. A 1% cashback and a 10% first-purchase offer were widely reported, but those were a 2025 campaign and I would not plan a budget around them.

Some transactions are refused. Gambling-related activity is restricted, and so are cash-like transactions: travellers cheques, foreign currency, money orders, wire transfers and cryptocurrency. That last one matters for how you think about this card — buying crypto with the card is off the table, so the card is an output rail for your crypto, not a bridge back into it.

If something goes wrong, the route is: ask the merchant first, and if it is unresolved or unauthorised, start a chargeback through the Solayer Account. You have no more than 60 days from the charge posting on the periodic statement. The card network may ask for extra documents, the disputed amount can stay due while the case runs, and a chargeback you win is credited to the Solayer Account.

One category fact worth knowing, because it explains declines nobody warned you about. Merchants can look up the issuer BIN and see which institution and country issued a card, and may apply extra scrutiny if the issuer country differs from your billing address. Address verification is also mostly a US, Canada and UK mechanism and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards. Some shops decline prepaid or foreign BINs for exactly that reason. A decline at the till is often about your card’s paper trail, not about your balance.

What can go wrong

Four risks, in the order I would weigh them.

Who holds your money. The documentation describes provider-operated hybrid custody: hot wallets hold a small operational balance, cold wallets hold most assets offline with multi-signature approval, and there are “circuit breakers that freeze suspicious activity”. The marketing calls the card non-custodial and fully on-chain. Underneath, control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key, so “non-custodial” and “our provider’s cold wallets” cannot both be the operative description. A seed phrase is an unencrypted form of the private key, blockchain transfers are typically irreversible with no built-in recovery, and custodians have a record: Mt. Gox, Coincheck and Ronin Network between them lost hundreds of millions of dollars. I am not predicting failure here. I am saying the marketing gives you a different mental model from the documentation, and that gap is the risk.

The licence. The issuer is named in the terms as Third National. The Solayer legal entity and its licences are not stated. Card programmes usually depend on two licences — one for the crypto side and one for the payment side — and you need the issuer, and someone accountable for your funds, to survive a programme shutdown. That has happened: Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the card was wound down; WaveCrest, a Visa issuer supplying crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme. Closures typically mean a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw what is left.

Sanctions and country rules. This is the one I will not help you work around. Screening applies to citizenship and country of birth as well as address, and stablecoins are not censorship-proof — Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity. If your nationality or your address is anywhere near a restricted list, the honest path is to ask support, not to look for a workaround. The card’s own eligibility list exists for legal reasons, and the consequences of being on the wrong side of them are not things to test.

Small operational risks. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to 7. And a deposit sent on the wrong network, or to an address belonging to another network, can simply be lost — blockchain transfers are irreversible, so recovery means support, with no guarantee. That is why the network wording matters.

On the other side: no complaints. No Trustpilot page for the Solayer card, nothing on Reddit or forums, no official incidents reported. Coverage is launch news and a Coin Bureau protocol review. Blockmedia reported cumulative top-ups in the millions. Absence of complaints from a young product with a small user base is weak evidence — it is as likely to mean few users as few problems.

Support is thin in a specific way. The FAQ points to the Solayer Discord. The terms list [email protected] and the phone number +1 (734) 510 1402. Two-factor authentication, spending controls and insurance are not stated, though freezing and unfreezing the card instantly in the dashboard is documented.

What to take instead

Three cards I looked at with the same questions in mind, so you can see the shape of the choice rather than a ranking.

MetaMask Card is the one to look at if published fees matter more to you than Solana. It is a Mastercard, virtual first and instant, with a metal card you can pre-order after approval, one card per user, issued by Monovate with Crypto Life as card provider. Spending comes straight from your connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad or Solana, and the page names mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT. No foreign transaction fee, the Mastercard rate applies, and “no additional MetaMask fees”. The catch is that the headline 3% on Metal is limited by a footnote to the first $10,000 spent, then drops to 1% — and eligibility is 45 listed countries with a waitlist for everyone else, plus proof of residency. A citizenship rule is not stated. One thing that bites: Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit.

KAST is the one to look at if you want the fee schedule spelled out. Visa, virtual and physical, up to 10 cards, in three real tiers — Standard at $0, Premium at 1,000 USD a year, Private at 10,000 USD a year, billed annually upfront with no monthly option. Fees are unusually explicit: stablecoin top-up 0%, USD spend 0%, transaction fee 0%, Apple and Google Pay 0%, non-USD FX 0.5% to 1.75% depending on your country, the transaction country and the programme, $0.10 on non-USD transactions under $25, and $0.50 for a declined transaction. Standard physical card is $0 plus $40 delivery. Cashback runs 1.5% to 3% on capped monthly spend, paid in USD on authorisation. Two things to weigh: the top and middle tiers cost more than most people spend in a year on a card, and the terms say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC” while the app lists PYUSD and RLUSD too. Its residency rule is the sharpest of the three — living in a supported country with an ID from a restricted region can still fail KYC, and a VPN does not change that.

TokenPocket is the cheapest on paper and the vaguest in practice. Visa debit for a list of European countries and territories, Mastercard debit for Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and the UK, running on Arbitrum, with Fiat24 cards described as virtual and balances in EUR24 and USD24. Apart from a partly covered NFT creation fee, “TP Card does not charge any additional fees” — but a 1% fee is charged when depositing cryptocurrency, to be refunded later via rewards or reduced transaction fees. “Later” is the operative word. Specific coins and networks are not listed, and the Americas were “planned for Q2 2025”, which tells you how fresh the roadmap language is.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Solayer card to someone in this position: you already hold stablecoins, you move them on Solana, you are outside the restricted country list, and you want a Visa that spends that balance without you having to sell and rebuy at each till. If you also want a physical card in the post, Apple Pay for contactless, and the ability to freeze the card instantly in an app, the day-to-day case is strong — that is what the 8 out of 10 for everyday use is paying for.

I would not recommend it as your primary account. The numbers you would need to plan around are not published: no daily or monthly spending figures, no crypto conversion fee, no stated cashback rate, and a top-up fee that appears as 1%, 0.5% and $0.10 in three official places. I would not recommend it to anyone whose decision to use it depends on the word “non-custodial”, because the documentation describes provider-run hot and cold wallets with multi-signature and circuit breakers, and the issuer’s licence chain is not disclosed. And I would not recommend it to anyone who needs to move money back out: there is no documented route from the card balance back to a wallet, and there is no route described for buying crypto with the card.

If you want the fee schedule published in full and can live inside a tier, KAST is the cleaner instrument. If Solana is where your money already is and the wallet connection matters more than published caps, MetaMask Card is worth reading next. If you want the cheapest structure and can wait for the refund, TokenPocket is on the table. All three have their own gaps; the reason to pick Solayer is the Solana-native balance, and the reason to hesitate is the paperwork.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Solayer card?

It is a Visa card, virtual and physical, that spends a stablecoin balance instead of a bank account. The card is issued under licence from Visa, its currency is USD, and the crypto side runs on Solana with other networks added at the issuer’s discretion. Membership is $20 a year. You top up with stablecoins from your own wallet and then pay with it in shops, online, or by Apple Pay and Google Pay. It is a spending card for crypto you already hold, not a bank account.

How does the Solayer card work?

You deposit stablecoins into the card through the app — Card tab, Deposit, approve in your wallet — and the balance is what the card spends. The card cannot overdraw because it draws on that stored balance rather than a credit line, though APR is listed as 0% and may be introduced later. Spending limits are described as dynamic and may be modified at any time, with no figures published. The card deactivates after six months of inactivity, and reactivation needs a new card issuance.

Is Solayer a bank?

Not on the evidence published. The card’s terms name Third National as the issuer, which is the institution that actually holds the card programme. The Solayer legal entity and its licences are not stated anywhere on the public pages. In this category the brand is often just the front end and programme manager while a licensed institution does the regulated work — so the useful question is not whether Solayer is a bank but which licensed company is responsible for your funds.

Who owns Solayer, and who issues the card?

Two different answers, and the gap matters. The issuer named in the card terms is Third National, which issues the card under licence from Visa. Who owns or operates the Solayer brand is not stated. The documentation also describes a custody provider running hot and cold wallets with multi-signature approval, while the marketing calls the card non-custodial and fully on-chain. Before you rely on this card, ask support directly who holds your funds.

Can I get the Solayer card in my country?

Probably, but check the exclusion list first, because the rule covers citizenship as well as residence: residents or citizens of listed countries are not eligible, “regardless of their current place of residence”. Russia, Belarus, most of the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Turkey, the UAE, India and China are among those listed. Armenia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are not on the exclusion list, but the page does not publish the eligible list, so absence is not confirmation. Send support one message before you apply.

How much does Solayer card cost, and is it free?

No, it is not free. Membership is $20 a year, new users also pay a one-time $20 activation fee covering the virtual card for the first year, and a physical card costs $24.99 for US Express or $59.99 for International Express, which is the only charge for the card itself. A USD transaction costs $0.15; non-USD is $0.10 plus 1.5% or 1.75% depending on the page, plus a cross-border fee of up to 3%. Issuance fee, crypto conversion fee and top-up minimum are not stated.

How do I top up the Solayer card, and what does it cost?

You send stablecoins from your own wallet: app, Card tab, Deposit, then approve in your wallet. Supported networks are Solana and others added at the issuer’s discretion; no specific stablecoin is named on the public pages. The fee is published three different ways — 1% on the fee page, 0.5% in the FAQ, and $0.10 per transaction in the tutorial. On a $500 deposit that is a spread of $5, $2.50 or $0.10, so ask which applies before you size a deposit.

Is the Solayer card safe?

The security description is genuinely mixed. Documented strengths are cold wallets holding most assets offline, multi-signature approval, “circuit breakers that freeze suspicious activity”, and instant freeze and unfreeze in the dashboard; mobile payments are tokenised. Undocumented: two-factor authentication, spending controls, and insurance are not stated. The real caution is the contradiction between provider-operated custody in the docs and non-custodial, fully on-chain language in the marketing — decide which description you are relying on before depositing.

Can I use Solayer card with Apple Pay and Google Pay?

Yes. Both mobile wallets are supported for contactless payments, and the Solayer Pay app is on the Apple App Store and Google Play. When you add the card to a phone wallet, the card number is replaced by a device-specific number stored in the phone’s secure hardware, and each payment carries a one-time dynamic code — so paying by phone is not the same exposure as handing over the plastic card. Note that gambling and cash-like transactions, including buying cryptocurrency itself, are restricted on this card.

Is Solayer card worth it?

For someone who already holds stablecoins on Solana and cannot get an ordinary bank card, yes — the day-to-day use is strong, with virtual and physical Visa, both mobile wallets, and instant card control in the app. For anyone else, the missing numbers hold it back: no published spending limits, no stated crypto conversion fee, no documented way to withdraw the balance back to a wallet, and a top-up fee quoted three ways. If fee clarity matters more than Solana, read KAST or MetaMask Card next.

Content created by the «cryptocardcheck» team