A self-custody crypto card that gives you a Visa number before the plastic exists

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Tuyo is one of those crypto cards that promises to be a plain payment card, backed by stablecoins you hold yourself rather than by a bank account. You load it, you spend it, and the interesting part is not the card but everything around it: who is allowed in, what a purchase actually costs you, and what happens when something goes wrong at three in the morning. I went through the card’s own terms, fee schedule and app listings, then read what users actually report back. My score comes out at 7.3 out of 10, and the reasons are worth reading before you decide anything.

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

Verdict: 7.3 out of 10

Tuyo scores 7.3 out of 10. It is a good card for one specific person: someone already comfortable holding their own crypto, funding a wallet with USDC on Base, and wanting a Visa number that spends from that balance without handing custody to anybody. For that person it does what it says, cheaply and immediately. For everyone else — the person who wants a normal debit card, the person in a listed country who simply wants to buy groceries, the person who wants cashback and a metal card — it is a narrower, more technical product than the marketing suggests, and in some places it is not available at all.

The single biggest thing to understand before you go further: Tuyo is not a bank. It is a fintech company, Tuyo Inc., and the pieces are arranged so that other licensed people do the regulated work. Fiat currency services — turning dollars or euros into stablecoins, and giving you local bank account numbers — come from Bridge Ventures, Inc., a licensed money transmitter in the United States. The card itself is issued by a partner, Signify Holdings, Inc. (“Rain”), under Visa’s licence. That arrangement is normal for this category and it means two things at once: the money side sits with a regulated partner, and when something breaks, you may find yourself explaining the problem to a support inbox that is not a bank.

Will they give you the card?

You cannot simply sign up from anywhere. Tuyo works on a list, and the list has two layers, which is where most of the confusion in user reviews comes from.

The first layer is platform-wide: by verified residence, 27 countries are prohibited outright. They are AF, BD, BY, CN, CD, CU, IN, IR, IQ, LB, LY, ML, MM, NP, NG, KP, RU, SO, SS, SD, SY, TR, UA, GB, VE, VN. The second layer is the card provider’s own, stricter issuance list: BY, CN (mainland), CU, IN, IR, IQ, IL, MM, NP, NI, KP, RU, SY, TR, UA, VE, VN. Even where the platform would accept you, the card issuer may not.

Russia is a clear example of how the two layers differ: platform-wide prohibited, card issuance not available, and card payments not available. Belarus is prohibited platform-wide with issuance not available, but card payments are available — which reads oddly until you realise the second list governs whether a card can be issued to you in the first place.

There is also a US dimension. The card is not available in these states and territories: AZ, DE, GA, ID, LA, MD, MS, MO, NV, NM, ND, OH, OR, RI, SD, TN, VT, WA, WI, DC, PR, US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands.

One point worth flagging because reviewers and users often get it wrong: the rule is by verified residence, not by nationality or by where your money sits. If you moved, what counts is where you actually live and can prove. I would check your country against both lists before you install anything, because the failure mode users report is depositing first and being refused afterwards.

How to get it

Getting the card is a short sequence. You download the app, register, pass identity verification with a government-issued ID — a passport or an ID card — and deposit USDC on Base. The virtual card is issued instantly once your verification is approved.

There is one verification level, not several. Tuyo does not describe any tiered scheme with a basic and an enhanced stage; a government-issued document is the requirement. Proof of address is not explicitly stated as required, though “verified residence” is checked as part of the process. The minimum age is 18, per the Terms of Service.

What you should know before you start, because it is the part that catches people out. Sometimes applications fail due to document issues, unclear photos, or unsupported occupation codes. A rejected card application is final — there is no appeal inside the app. If what you see instead is a generic setup error, the card says to contact support to check for missing or incorrect profile data. Processing time for the review itself is not stated, so treat “instantly” as instant issuance after approval, not instant approval.

What you get is a virtual Visa card, in the app. A physical card is listed as “coming soon” with no date announced, and there is no metal tier. Nothing in the card’s public pages says what that plastic will cost, how long it takes to arrive, or what a replacement costs.

Fees and what a purchase really costs

Here is the whole fee schedule as I could find it, with nothing added.

Now, three ordinary payments, so you can see which fees actually land.

Coffee in the US, in dollars. Say $5 at a café downtown. The currency is USD and you are inside the US, so the FX fee and the abroad fee both stay away. No Tuyo fee at purchase. The conversion happens earlier, when you moved USDC into the balance, and that is where the 0.25% volume fee sits — if the conversion runs through the standard path rather than the exempt one.

A subscription bought from a platform that bills in euros. The 1% FX fee applies on top of whatever the merchant charges. If the merchant is foreign and the transaction also counts as outside the US, the 1% abroad fee applies as well, and you can be looking at 2% on one purchase. The cardholder agreement’s stated legal maximums of “up to 3%” and “up to 3%” are ceilings in the contract, not what the fee schedule charges today.

Cash from an ATM in another country. Here the 1% FX fee and the 1% abroad fee both bite, and then the ATM operator adds their own charge — which also eats into the $250 ceiling, since that maximum includes any surcharge the ATM charges. And note the attempt limit: three per rolling 24 hours, with declines counted. A failed attempt because the machine would not read the card is one of your three.

Two things I would not gloss over. The volume fee is 0.25%, but “or network fee if higher during congestion” means a busy network can raise your cost without anyone changing a policy. And bridging tokens and stablecoin-to-stablecoin trades are exempt from the volume fee, so the cheapest route is often moving USDC to USDC rather than routing through something else.

How to top it up

This is where Tuyo is genuinely strong, and it is why the top-up category scored highest of everything I looked at. The card is powered by USDC on the Base network. You can deposit USDC — or any token — on Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, BNB Smart Chain or Polygon and convert to Base USDC inside Tuyo. Spending draws on the eligible dollar balance in Cash, and that includes funds sitting in active interest strategies.

Coming in through a bank rather than a wallet, the card’s menu is wide:

• Apple Pay and Google Pay
• Debit or credit card
• A linked US bank account
• US bank transfer by ACH or domestic wire — no SWIFT
• EUR bank transfer by SEPA or SEPA Instant, no SWIFT, from an account in your own name
• MXN bank transfer by SPEI

Receiving USDC on Base is free; you pay the sending network fees. Fiat to crypto conversion comes with what the card’s FAQ calls a small FX spread, usually under 1%. A minimum top-up is not stated.

Getting money back out is the part that separates a self-custody product from a custodial one, and here Tuyo is unambiguous. Because it is self-custodial you can always withdraw your crypto to your own wallet, even if your KYC fails or your account is restricted — the card’s phrasing is “No lock-ups, no exceptions.” That is a meaningful promise and it is worth more to a careful user than any cashback rate. Fiat withdrawal goes out by bank transfer to your USD, EUR or MXN account details. No specific withdrawal fee is stated beyond the standard trading and network fees.

One gap to keep in mind: what happens to your balance if you close your account is not stated anywhere I could find.

Paying with it every day

Day to day, the card does the basic things. Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported, which in practice is how you will use a virtual card most of the time — the card number lives in your phone’s wallet. The app has a freeze and unfreeze toggle, a PIN you set yourself, and a daily limit you can adjust, and the card can only pull up to the activated daily limit from your USDC on Base balance in a day.

Some merchant categories are blocked. When that happens, the decline shows in the app as “Merchant not supported.” Apple or Google can also refuse to add the wallet on their own risk checks, based on the device, the location or the account history — which means the wallet failing to add is not always Tuyo’s decision.

Rewards are where this section turns. There is no traditional cashback at the moment. What there was, BNPM — Buy Now Pay Maybe — was random free purchases at Tuyo’s sole discretion, and it ends on 31 October 2026. From 1 November 2026 it is replaced by 1.5% cashback on all purchases globally, with no minimums, caps, categories or membership requirements, guaranteed only through the end of 2026. Separately there are TUYOs points: earn TUYOs from card spend, trading and Earn strategies. TUYOs are off-chain points — not a cryptocurrency token, not tradable, not transferable — and a token launch is expected in 2026 with at least 20% of supply allocated to users and community.

The app itself is decent on Apple’s side and middling on Android. iOS requires iOS 16.4 or later on iPhone and the App Store rating is 4.4 out of 5 from 130 ratings. On Google Play it is 3.9 out of 5 from roughly 305 reviews with 10K+ downloads, updated 27 July 2026. That gap is small in absolute terms but it is the same gap the user complaints describe, in a different form.

What can go wrong

Nothing about this card is scary in the way a failed exchange is scary. The risks here are quieter: a rewards programme that changed, an app that locks you out, and a partner in the middle whose incentives are not yours.

The rewards reversal is the clearest thing. On 19 October 2026 Tuyo announced that BNPM ends on 31 October 2026, replaced by the 1.5% cashback from 1 November 2026. The co-founder’s stated reasons were user exploitation, mounting costs and team distraction — reported by The Coinformer on 20 October 2026. The programme had launched in May 2026, and the co-founder had declared “cashback is dead” in a post at the time. There is also a signal from the issuer side: in June 2026 the CEO of Rain, the card issuance partner, told Forbes his company was “not looking at or doing” probabilistic rewards like BNPM, citing legal and regulatory concerns. When the issuing partner is publicly uneasy about the mechanics of your rewards, you can reasonably assume what comes next.

Access and support. Users report the app freezing after verification and needing a reinstall, after which they could not get back into the account, and support taking days to respond (Trustpilot, September 2026; Google Play, July 2026). Another recurring theme is verification problems — link verification blocking the addition of funds with support unresponsive — and country eligibility confusion: the app said a country was eligible, the user deposited 110 USDC, and then the card was denied, with support citing eligibility (App Store, May 2026; Google Play, July 2026). A separate report describes a EUR-to-USD forced conversion at around 0.50% (Trustpilot, September 2026). Users also say BNPM’s free purchases dropped off sharply after the first weeks of use, and that charges stopped being covered after a couple of months (Trustpilot, September–October 2026).

I could not retrieve Tuyo’s aggregate Trustpilot score — the page was behind anti-bot verification — so I have no verified number to give you, only these themes from the App Store and Google Play listings.

Company structure. Tuyo Inc. is a financial technology company, not a bank. Fiat services are provided by Bridge Ventures, Inc., a licensed and regulated money transmitter in the United States, compliant with relevant US and EEA regulation. Cards are issued under Visa licence by licensed partner institutions via Signify Holdings, Inc. (“Rain”). The one licence explicitly named on the site’s own pages is Bridge Ventures’ money transmitter licence. Tuyo Inc.’s registration jurisdiction is not explicitly stated there; Delaware appears per a third-party directory (tracxn.com), which I treat as unofficial.

Your funds are yours, with your own risks. Self-custody means Tuyo never takes custody — users control the private keys. That removes counterparty risk on the crypto side and puts key loss, phishing and clipboard-hijacking malware squarely on you, which is the trade the product is built on. On safeguarding: funds are not held by Tuyo, fiat services sit with regulated partners, and the balances are not FDIC-insured. A card freeze and unfreeze toggle, a PIN, an adjustable daily limit, biometrics (Face ID) and device secure enclave storage for keys with iCloud or Google Drive backup are the safeguards on offer. A named 2FA feature is not explicitly stated. Support is in-app and by email at [email protected], with a status page at status.tuyo.com; the app supports English and Spanish, hours are not stated, and a “usually reply within one business day” claim comes from a different product’s contact page and is not confirmed for the card.

Where disputes go. The card’s public pages do not address chargebacks, disputed transactions, refund handling or time frames, and the Cardholder Agreement (International, Nov 2025) was published on Notion in a form I could not read as HTML. This is a real gap for anyone spending meaningfully. If a purchase goes wrong, you are relying on a support inbox rather than a documented process.

The category risk, briefly. Crypto card programmes do close. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down; WaveCrest was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Tuyo’s self-custody design means your crypto survives a shutdown, which is the point — but your card access would not.

What to take instead

If Tuyo’s self-custody model is not what you want, three other cards in this space are worth putting side by side with it. Scores here are the same scale, and I have not tested these hands-on the way I have Tuyo.

Where each one wins is different, and it is worth being specific rather than ranking them.

MetaMask is the closest substitute if you want a card that spends straight from a connected wallet with a familiar brand, and it is notably clearer about rewards. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay among them — with other regions on a waitlist; proof of residency is required and ineligible regions limit sign-ups rather than spending. US and UK sign-ups were temporarily closed per its FAQ. You get a virtual card instantly, and metal can be pre-ordered in-app after the virtual card is approved, one card per user, issued by Monovate with Crypto Life as card provider. It supports Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, and names mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT. On fees, the pages say a minimal fee per transaction with the amount not stated on what I read, and no additional MetaMask fees; no foreign transaction fee, Mastercard’s rate is used. The catch: Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit, and citizenship rules are not stated.

KAST is the one to look at if you want fees close to zero and a real card ladder. Stablecoin top-up 0%, card spend in USD 0%, transaction fee 0%, Apple and Google Pay 0%; the non-USD FX fee is 0.5%–1.75% depending on your residence country, transaction country and card programme. Non-USD transactions under $25 cost $0.10, a declined transaction for insufficient balance costs $0.50. Stablecoins accepted are USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and TRON, though the Terms still say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”, which conflicts with the app. Eligibility is shown live at KYC: if your country is not listed it is unavailable there, and holding only an ID from a restricted region can disqualify you even when you live in a supported country; dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass, only the account holder’s own ID is accepted, and a VPN does not bypass it. The membership ladder is where it gets serious: Standard at $0, Premium at $1,000 a year and Private at $10,000 a year, billed annually upfront, with cashback of 1.5% on the first $2,000 a month, 2% on the first $10,000 and 3% on the first $40,000 respectively.

TokenPocket is the weakest of the four on the numbers. It issues a Visa debit for a list of European countries and territories — Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland among them — and a Mastercard debit for Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and the UK, with the Americas “planned for Q2 2025”. It runs on Arbitrum with balances in EUR24 and USD24, and the cards are virtual. The 1% fee on depositing cryptocurrency into the card is the main charge; no cashback is stated, and the fee is described as refundable later through rewards or reduced transaction fees. Beyond that, it charges no additional fees, though extra fees can come from inter-institution settlement.

Against all of them, Tuyo’s edge is the funding menu — five networks, six fiat routes, self-custody you can exit at will. Its weakness is the thinnest service layer of the four: no plastic, no stated dispute process, an app that some users say freezes, and a rewards programme that has already been rewritten once.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Tuyo to someone who already keeps their own crypto, already thinks in networks and gas, and wants a Visa number that spends from USDC on Base. If that is you, the card is unusually good: no monthly fee, no issuance fee, a 0.25% conversion fee with sensible exemptions, real self-custody with withdrawals possible even if your account is restricted, and a top-up menu broader than any of the alternatives above.

I would not recommend it as a first card, and I would not recommend it to anyone who wants one. There is no physical card, no date for one, no metal tier, no stated dispute or chargeback process, and support that users describe as slow. If your money comes from a salary rather than from a wallet, a normal debit card does this job with less to think about — and if you are in one of the 27 prohibited countries or one of the 25 excluded US states and territories, it is not an option in the first place.

I would also treat the 1.5% cashback from 1 November 2026 as a bonus, not a reason. It is guaranteed only through the end of 2026, and the programme it replaces was killed four months after launch because, in the founder’s words, users exploited it.

Frequently asked questions

What is Tuyo card?

Tuyo is a self-custody crypto payment card. It gives you a virtual Visa card that spends from stablecoins you hold yourself, chiefly USDC on the Base network, rather than from a bank account. Tuyo Inc. is the fintech behind it; the fiat side runs through Bridge Ventures and the card is issued under Visa licence by partner Signify Holdings, also known as Rain.

How does the Tuyo card work?

You load funds, and the card spends them. Crypto deposited on Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, BNB Smart Chain or Polygon is converted to Base USDC inside the app, and purchases draw on your eligible dollar balance. Because the model is pre-loaded balance rather than credit, the card cannot overdraw, and because you hold the keys, you can withdraw your crypto to your own wallet at any time.

Is Tuyo a bank?

No. Tuyo Inc. is a financial technology company, not a bank. Fiat currency conversion and virtual bank account numbers are provided by Bridge Ventures, Inc., a licensed US money transmitter, and the card is issued by licensed partner institutions under Visa licence. Your balances are not FDIC-insured.

Who can get a Tuyo card?

Access depends on verified residence. Twenty-seven countries are prohibited platform-wide, including RU, BY, TR, UA, GB, IN, CN and VN, and the card provider applies its own stricter issuance list that includes BY, CN mainland, CU, IN, IR, IQ, IL, MM, NP, NI, KP, RU, SY, TR, UA, VE and VN. The card is also unavailable in 25 US states and territories, AZ, DE, GA and WA among them.

Does the Tuyo card require KYC?

Yes, and there is a single verification level: a government-issued ID document, either a passport or an ID card. Minimum age is 18 per the Terms of Service. Proof of address is not explicitly stated as required, though verified residence is checked. A rejected application is final, with stated reasons of document issues, unclear photos or unsupported occupation codes.

How much does the Tuyo card cost?

Issuance is free and there is no monthly or yearly fee, with a single tier and no paid plans. Crypto conversion carries a 0.25% volume fee, or the network fee if higher during congestion. Spending in a non-USD currency adds 1%, and purchases outside the US add a further 1%, so up to 2% on one purchase. US dollar purchases inside the US carry no fee.

How do I top up the Tuyo card?

You can deposit USDC, or any token, on Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, BNB Smart Chain or Polygon, and convert to Base USDC in the app; receiving USDC on Base is free, though you pay the sending network fees. Fiat routes include Apple Pay, Google Pay, a debit or credit card, a linked US bank account, ACH or domestic wire, SEPA or SEPA Instant in euros from an account in your own name, and SPEI in Mexican pesos.

Can I use the Tuyo card in my country?

Only if it is on neither the prohibited list nor the card provider’s issuance list, and if you are not in one of the 25 excluded US states or territories. The check is on verified residence, so moving changes your answer. One recurring user complaint is the app showing a country as eligible, the user depositing, and the card then being refused, so verify before you send funds.

Is the Tuyo card safe?

The crypto side is as safe as self-custody makes it: you hold the private keys, Tuyo never takes custody, and you can withdraw even if KYC fails or your account is restricted. You take on the usual risks of holding keys yourself, including loss, phishing and malware. The card is not FDIC-insured, plastic is “coming soon” with no date, and the public pages do not describe chargeback or dispute handling.

Is the Tuyo card worth it?

For someone already holding crypto who wants a Visa number that spends from USDC on Base, yes — free to hold, 0.25% to convert, and a wide choice of funding routes. For everyone else, the thin service layer tells you most of it: no physical card, an app users report freezing, support some say takes days, no stated dispute process, and a 1.5% cashback from 1 November 2026 guaranteed only through the end of the year.

Content created by the «cryptocardcheck» team