A self-custody Visa line that only exists in your phone

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Exa card is a virtual Visa Signature that spends against crypto you already hold in your own wallet. There is no plastic, no branch, and no money sitting in a bank account in your name. If that model is what you have been looking for, Exa does one thing and does it plainly. If you were hoping for an ordinary card with crypto as a side feature, this is not that, and you will notice the difference at the till.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

I scored it 6.2 out of 10. The mid-range number is not a shrug — it is a card with real strengths in one narrow lane and real gaps in everything else. Below I walk through who gets issued, what it costs to actually pay with it, how the money arrives, and the parts I would not rely on. The conditions described here are current as of 2026-10-20.

Verdict: 6.2 / 10, and it suits a very specific person

Exa is for someone who already holds crypto, already understands self-custody, and wants to spend it against collateral without selling first and without handing over a seed phrase to a platform. If that is you, the card does its job cleanly and the 1.5% foreign-exchange fee is the honest price for that convenience. If you are applying because you cannot get an ordinary bank card, the appeal fades fast: there is no physical card, no branch relationship, and the app’s public reputation is thin.

Read those rows together rather than separately. The card scores well on access and cost, poorly on day-to-day convenience and on how much independent evidence exists about it. That combination is the honest shape of this product.

Will they give you the card

They will, if you live in the right place — and the rule is by residence, not citizenship. Exa issues in 45 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa and the UAE, with Nigeria available conditionally. In the United States it covers 31 states. Eighteen countries are ineligible, and the named ones include Belarus, China, India, Iran, Israel, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam and Russia.

Two restrictions are worth reading separately, because they bite in different places. First, the card itself: Russian residents cannot be issued a card. Second, spending: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela are blocked for transactions regardless of where you hold the card. So a card obtained legally somewhere else will still be declined at a merchant in those countries.

That is what the card’s public pages state. What they do not state is anything about whether a specific bank in your country of residence will treat a self-custodial crypto card differently, so if you are in a market where crypto is restricted, check locally before you commit.

How to get it

The process is short by design. You download the app, add funds, and complete a KYC check. The card request itself runs a single validation step the site caps at “no more than 3 minutes”.

Then there is the part the marketing copy does not dwell on. Above $10,000 in weekly purchases, an automated source-of-funds check begins: a form plus supporting documents. Raising limits requires proof of address and proof of funds. What documents qualify for the initial check, what proof of address means in practice, and what gets a request rejected — none of that is stated on the public pages. The three-minute figure describes the happy path, not the worst case.

You receive a virtual Visa Signature Exa Credit Card once you are through. It is accepted “at over 150 million merchants in more than 150 countries”, and the card currency is USD. The help centre carries an article titled “Is there a physical card?” — I have not read its contents — but the site’s own direct answer to the question is unambiguous: “No, there are no physical cards available at the moment.” The card lives in Apple Pay or Google Wallet, which also means delivery and replacement are not things you need to think about.

Fees and what a payment actually costs

Exa markets the card as free and lists no amounts on the main page; a help article on associated fees and costs exists that I have not read. So the picture below mixes what the card states with what third parties report, and I mark which is which.

Now let us run three ordinary purchases through that table, because the abstract fees tell you less than the arithmetic does.

Coffee in a euro country, $4.50. The card is USD, so this is a non-USD purchase: 1.5% on top, roughly seven cents. No other fee applies on the official record. That is the card at its cheapest and most useful.

A $200 online order from a retailer in yen. Same 1.5%, about $3. The rate is embedded rather than shown as a separate line. Also expect the merchant’s own behaviour to matter: a virtual foreign-issued card number can be declined by sites that check the issuer country against your billing address, and the address verification service that catches fraud in the US and UK generally does not work for foreign-issued cards.

Anything bought on installments. This is where the credit side shows up. Interest depends on the installment terms and the protocol, the card states, and a credit-opening fee may be charged and folded into that percentage. What the percentage actually is, and what instalments are offered, is not stated.

Two everyday patterns are also worth knowing. A purchase is placed on hold at authorisation and usually settles 1 to 3 days later, and the final amount can differ — tips, hotel holds, exchange-rate moves. And a declined authorisation can leave a hold on funds for several days, up to about seven. If you are spending tight collateral, timing matters more than it does with an ordinary debit card.

Top up: collateral first, card second

Nothing works until your account holds funds. The site’s own sentence is the whole rule: “You will need to have funds in your account to enable your Exa Card.” Funds and collateral sit in the self-custody Exa app, and the card spends either through Pay Now or in installments against that collateral, which forms a credit line.

The assets the documentation names are USDC, ETH, wstETH, WBTC and OP, used as collateral in the Exactly Protocol markets. The networks are not named anywhere in what I read, and this is the single most consequential gap on this page. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network Exa does not support, or to an address belonging to another network, can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee. Before you send anything, confirm the network and address in the app, not from memory.

On fees: the associated-fees article lists only the FX fee and the loan origination fee, and no deposit fee, minimum top-up, or fiat on-ramp options are stated in the help articles I read. Third parties report no stated fee on crypto deposits and say fiat on-ramp fees vary by third-party route and country (CryptoCardHub, August 2026 — unofficial). Withdrawing is possible: funds can be sent to a bank account or digital wallet and taken out at ATMs. Fees, limits, timelines, and what happens to a balance on closure are not given.

The asymmetry is worth naming plainly. Getting money in is where you must be precise, because errors cost you the money. Getting it out is where the card is vaguest, because the numbers are simply absent.

Paying with it every day

The mechanics are thin, which is both the limitation and the reason the card is small. It is virtual only, with no plastic. It can be added to Apple Pay and Google Wallet — the help centre has articles for both — and restricted merchant categories are not stated.

What works:

• Apple Pay and Google Wallet, both documented
• Virtual Visa accepted at over 150 million merchants in more than 150 countries
• A mobile app via QR-code link, plus a web version at web.exactly.app, with iOS and Android documentation
• Visa Signature benefits listed in the help centre, including 20% off Airalo eSIMs and a US activation reward — spend $100, get $20 in XRP via Uphold
• An unofficial note about ATM access through a contactless NFC card with a PIN from the app

What does not:

• No physical card at all, which rules out any till that still wants to dip, and any place that hands you a card back
• “Earn while you spend” refers to yield on assets, not cashback on purchases
• Store ratings on official pages: not stated. Third parties report Apple App Store 5.0 out of 5 from 4 ratings and Google Play 2.7 out of 5 from 58 ratings (CryptoCardHub, August 2026 — unofficial). Four iOS ratings is not a signal; 58 Android ratings at 2.7 is a small but real signal about the Android experience

What nobody has written down: disputes, refunds and chargebacks are not stated anywhere on the pages I read. That is a genuine hole. A chargeback is a refund the issuer orders to settle a dispute, and US rights come from Regulation E for debit and Regulation Z for credit; prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed. If you use this card on a large purchase and the goods never arrive, you are relying on a policy you have not been shown.

The other structural point is what happens before you ever reach a terminal. Merchants can look up the issuing institution and country from the card number and may apply extra scrutiny when that country differs from your billing address. A US-issued Visa spending with a non-US billing address is exactly the profile that gets extra questions at some merchants. Nothing about that is Exa’s doing — it is how card acceptance works everywhere.

What can go wrong

Nobody’s money is behind it in the way you might hope. Exa Labs SAS runs the platform; the site’s own footer says cards are “issued by licensed third parties”, and Exa Labs does not issue payment instruments. The issuer bank is not named. The help centre says “The Exa Card is issued in the United States”, and a US legal address in San Juan, PR is “provided by Rain”. You are therefore trusting Exa Labs, an unnamed issuing bank, and Rain, in that order, plus whatever happens on-chain.

The independent record is thin and not flattering. No Trustpilot page exists for exactly.app, and no Reddit reviews were found. The third-party aggregator cryptocards.so rates it 5.7 out of 10 and cites KYC failures for users in African markets, Nigeria especially, no documented support SLA, and exclusion of 24 US states — note that the card’s own pages say 31. I have not independently confirmed any of those. What I can say is that the volume of public, checkable user experience is close to zero, and that is itself a finding: you are early.

There is history in the protocol underneath. The Exactly Protocol, the lending protocol Exa’s collateral sits in, was hit by a $7.3M exploit in August 2023, per cryptocards.so. I have not verified the figure from a primary source, but the event is the kind of thing that belongs in your risk assessment, not in a footnote.

Self-custody cuts both ways. The account is self-custodial, secured with passkeys, with an optional second account owner, and borrowing and spending run on non-custodial smart contracts. Audits and insurance are not mentioned on the page. Freeze-in-app controls and spending controls are not stated either. Control of your crypto depends on whoever holds the private key — anyone with your seed phrase can restore the wallet and spend from it, transfers are irreversible with no built-in recovery, and no network can freeze or return stolen funds. Custodial platforms have their own version of this risk: Mt. Gox (about $350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about $400 million, 2018), Ronin Network ($625 million, 2022). Exa’s design pushes that risk to you; the fees and the 7/10 cost score are what you pay for the privilege.

And the ban list is not empty. 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 its programmes. Programme closures typically mean a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw. One 2026 closure reported by a secondary source ended new loads on 8 July 2026 and spending on 8 August 2026 — single source, unconfirmed. The category’s structural risk is that your card programme can be switched off and your balance left waiting for a withdrawal.

On taxes, one thing worth planning for rather than discovering: if you are taxed where digital assets are treated as property, each payment funded from crypto can be a separate taxable disposal measured at the fair market value on the transaction date. That is a planning question for a qualified adviser in your country, not something this review can answer.

What to take instead

Three comparable cards, all also virtual-first and crypto-funded. The scores below are on the same scale as Exa’s 6.2.

Read the table as one trade-off, not a ranking. Nexo scores marginally above Exa and gives you a physical card and much cheaper foreign-exchange spending inside the EEA and UK — but it is custodial, it demands residency in Europe, and its cashback only pays above $5,000 in digital assets. For a US or Japanese holder of self-custodied crypto, that is the wrong shape. Its own recent history is a reminder to read the fine print: Cointelegraph reported a 2025-era Bulgarian police raid on the Sofia office over alleged Russia-sanctions and AML violations, with no official Nexo statement on Russians found.

Xplace scores 7.7 and is the strongest on paper: named assets, a named network (Solana), tiered cashback from 0.5% to 2% in USDC, no borrowing origination fee, 0% FX on Platinum. Against that, the tiers cost real money — Silver $99/year, Gold $249/year, Platinum $999/year — and its country list is not stated. A user who cannot even confirm eligibility should weigh that heavily.

Sponge scores 4.9 and is the thinnest of the four: nothing about costs, fees, or who qualifies is stated, and the funding path is a single command with USDC. Useful as a comparison point, not as a recommendation.

The honest summary: if your problem is a card at all, Nexo or Xplace answer it more completely. Exa is the one to look at when the actual constraint is that you refuse to give a platform your keys.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Exa to three kinds of person. You already run a self-custodial wallet and understand that a seed phrase must never touch a support chat. You want to spend crypto without a market sale at the moment of payment — that is what the collateral credit line is for. And you can tolerate a product with no physical card, an unnamed issuer, and a three-minute claim that applies only to the clean path.

I would steer you away if any of these describe you: you need a card that works at a till that wants to dip; you need one in your hand in case your phone dies; you want cashback, because there is none current; you want a documented dispute process, because disputes, refunds and chargebacks are not stated; or you are in one of the 18 ineligible countries, or you are a Russian resident anywhere.

And if you are reading this because you cannot get an ordinary bank card, be honest with yourself about why. A self-custodial crypto Visa is not a substitute for banking. It has no deposit guarantee, no branch, and no relationship you can walk into — it is a virtual card issued by an unnamed bank to a protocol company that keeps your keys and sends you to a help centre. The 6.2 reflects that trade being made honestly, not badly. It just is not the trade most people in that situation need.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Exa card?

The Exa card is a virtual Visa Signature Exa Credit Card that spends against crypto you hold yourself. Funds and collateral sit in the self-custody Exa app, and the card spends either immediately through Pay Now or in installments against that collateral as a credit line. It is accepted at over 150 million merchants in more than 150 countries, is USD-denominated, and exists only in Apple Pay or Google Wallet.

How does the Exa card work?

You hold the crypto, the card draws on it. Unlike a custodial card, your keys never leave your wallet; borrowing and spending run on non-custodial smart contracts, and the account is secured with passkeys. Each purchase converts at the card’s rate, and a 1.5% fee applies to any payment in a currency other than USD, embedded in that rate rather than charged separately.

Is Exa a bank?

No. Exa Labs SAS runs the platform, and its own site says cards are issued by licensed third parties while Exa Labs itself does not issue payment instruments. The help centre states the card is issued in the United States, and a US legal address in San Juan, PR is provided by Rain. The issuing bank is not named anywhere on the pages I read.

Who owns Exa, and which countries can use it?

Exa is a company behind Exa Labs SAS. Eligibility runs on residence: the card is issued in 45 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa and the UAE, with Nigeria conditional, plus 31 US states. Eighteen countries are ineligible, including Belarus, China, India, Iran, Israel, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam and Russia.

Can I use the Exa card in my country?

Possibly, if you live in one of the 45 issuing countries or one of the 31 US states — the rule is by residence, not citizenship. Spending is separately blocked in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela, so a card issued legitimately elsewhere will still be declined by merchants in those countries. A card issued in one country can also attract extra scrutiny where the issuer country differs from your billing address.

How do I get the Exa card, and does it need KYC?

Yes, it needs KYC. You download the app, add funds and complete an identity check. The card request runs a single validation step capped at “no more than 3 minutes”. Which documents qualify, and what proof of address means in practice, is not stated on the public pages — those details are the first thing to confirm in the app.

Is the Exa card free, and what does it cost to use?

It is marketed as free, with no amounts published, though a help article on associated fees exists that I have not read. Officially, a 1.5% FX fee applies to every purchase in a currency other than USD, and a credit-opening fee may be charged inside the installment interest. Unofficial sources put issuance and the annual fee at $0, and ATMs at $1 plus 0.65%, $250 per withdrawal, four a day.

How do I top up the Exa card, and which networks work?

The documented collateral assets are USDC, ETH, wstETH, WBTC and OP, held in the self-custody Exa app; networks are not named in what I read. No deposit fee, minimum top-up or fiat on-ramp details are stated. Because transfers are irreversible, confirm the network and address in the app before sending — a deposit to a wrong or unsupported network can be lost.

Is the Exa card safe to use day to day?

It depends on your tolerance. Self-custody removes the platform’s ability to lose your keys, but makes you fully responsible for key theft, phishing and clipboard-hijacking malware; a seed phrase cannot be recovered and transfers cannot be reversed. No audits or insurance are mentioned, the issuing bank is unnamed, there is no Trustpilot page, and Google Play shows 2.7 out of 5 from 58 ratings per third-party sources.

Is the Exa card worth it?

For someone spending crypto against collateral without selling, yes, at a cost that is largely just the 1.5% on non-USD payments. For everyone else, the limits are hard: no physical card, no current cashback, disputes and chargebacks not stated, and a store-rating picture that is thin at best. Read the limits section before committing funds.

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