A Solana card with USD fees and a physical option, but the paperwork disagrees with itself

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Solayer is a crypto card that spends stablecoins through a Visa card, issued under a Third National card programme and used mainly from a Solana balance. It looks, on paper, like a straightforward crypto card: a virtual card for online spending, a physical card you can order, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and spending limited to whatever you have loaded. What it is not is a card with clean, single-source terms. I went through Solayer’s public pages and card terms and found the same fee stated three different ways, the same product described as both digital-only and orderable in physical form, and the US question answered one way in the eligibility rules and the other way in the card terms. On top of that, the stablecoins you can load are not named, the crypto conversion fee is not stated, and the legal entity behind the brand and its licences are not disclosed.

That does not make the card unusable. It makes it a card you have to read the terms of yourself, with a calculator open, before you trust it with money you cannot afford to lose track of. My score is 6.2 out of 10 — a solid everyday-use score dragged down by cost ambiguity and by a company structure that is hard to see.

Conditions checked as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict

6.2 / 10. The card works well if you already hold stablecoins on Solana and live somewhere Solayer will have you, and if you mostly spend in dollars inside one country. It is a poor fit if you need a clear answer on fees, if you live in a country that needs to be checked against a long exclusion list, or if the absence of a named legal entity is a deal-breaker for you.

The card suits stablecoin holders on Solana who are outside the restricted countries and who treat the card as a spending convenience rather than a banking relationship. It does not suit someone who wants to know, before the first payment, exactly what a purchase will cost — because the conversion fee is not published, the top-up fee is given as 1%, as 0.5% and as $0.10 on three different official pages, and international spending can pick up a cross-border fee of up to 3% on top of the 1.5% currency fee.

Who will give you the card

The card goes to people over 18 who pass KYC — but only from eligible countries, and the exclusion list is long enough that you have to check it rather than assume. The rule as Solayer states it covers both residence and citizenship: residents or citizens of the listed countries are “not eligible to sign up for the Solayer Card, regardless of their current place of residence”. So moving abroad does not help if your citizenship is on the list.

The exclusions include Russia and Belarus, and also Georgia, Turkey, Serbia, the United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, Moldova, Montenegro, most EU member states, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The terms also name a set of restricted US states: Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin.

Here is the part that should stop you for a second if you are American. The card terms separately ask you to attest that you are not a US citizen and describe the card as “intended for those outside of the United States”, while the eligibility list names individual US states rather than the whole country. Those two documents do not agree, and I cannot resolve the conflict from public pages. If the US matters to you, ask support directly and get the answer in writing before you upload documents — and note that a US citizen who answers the attestation truthfully may be turned down at KYC rather than at the list stage.

The other side of the coin matters just as much. Armenia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are not on the exclusion list, and the page says plainly that it does not set out the eligible countries. Not being excluded is not the same as being accepted — the KYC provider decides — but at least these are not ruled out on paper. A third-party count puts it at 120 available countries and 94 restricted; treat that as a rough map, not a decision.

How to get it

The route is a normal fintech signup: download the app, create an account, work through identity verification, wait for a decision, then order a card. The verification step is a Sumsub flow that asks for your country of residence, address, occupation and annual salary, then an email code, then your ID, then a face liveness check. Accepted ID documents are a passport, a driver’s licence or an Aadhaar card, both sides, as JPG, PNG, HEIC, WEBP or PDF up to 50MB. You must be 18 or older. The approval review takes 3–5 business days after KYC is complete.

What the card does not say is as informative as what it says. Whether a separate proof-of-address document is required: not stated. Whether verification is tiered or what the rejection reasons are: not stated. So you may be asked for more after the first upload, and you should keep a phone number and a reachable email for the duration of the review.

On the card itself: it is a Visa, “issued by the Issuer under license from Visa”, in both virtual and physical form, denominated in USD — spending in another currency is converted to USD. The physical card is ordered in the app and shipped tracked by Express: $24.99 for US delivery in 2–5 business days, or $59.99 for international delivery in 5–11 business days, that international price including card production. Shipping is the only charge for the card itself. New users pay a one-time $20 account activation fee, which covers the virtual card for the first year. Two details to note before you order: the delivery address cannot be changed after the order, and if the card is lost or stolen you freeze it in the app and order a replacement — the replacement fee is not stated. No country list for delivery is published beyond the eligibility restrictions themselves.

There is a wrinkle here that you should know about. The fee page says the cards are digital only with the physical card “coming soon”, while a separate Physical Card page describes the ordering flow in full. Both are on Solayer’s own site. If the physical card is what you are buying, confirm at the point of ordering that the app is actually offering it — and expect the $59.99 rather than the $24.99.

Fees: what it really costs

The headline numbers are not terrible. The problem is that the fee schedule is assembled from pages that disagree, and the two largest costs for a crypto card — the conversion fee and the top-up fee — are respectively unpublished and triple-stated.

Now three everyday payments, so you can feel what the table means.

A $60 lunch in dollars, in the US. Membership aside, this is the simple case: $0.15. No conversion, no cross-border element. This is where the card is cheapest and where the 8 out of 10 for everyday use comes from.

A €40 dinner in Europe. The card converts to USD at the card-network rate, then charges $0.10 plus 1.5% (fee page) or $0.10 plus 1.75% (FAQ) on the dollar amount — and the terms add a cross-border fee of up to 3%. Whether you pay the fee page rate or the FAQ rate depends on which document governs, and the terms add a cross-border fee of up to 3% on top of that. That spread is not academic on a card you might use daily.

A $200 online subscription billed in another currency. Same structure, larger base: the percentage fees scale with the amount, and if the merchant charges a small fixed fee for foreign cards, the ratio worsens. Note also that address verification is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, so a decline here has nothing to do with your balance.

There are no tiers to think about. One product, one $20 annual membership, and a points system that accrues from spending and referrals and unlocks benefits without any tier structure. The unofficial spending figures you will find — $10,000 daily and $30,000 monthly, $500 at the ATM — come from a Chinese-language listing on cryptocards.so, is undated, and may predate the current structure. Treat them as a hint about order of magnitude, not as your limit.

Top up: how the money gets in

Topping up means transferring stablecoins to the card’s Solana address from the app: Card tab, Deposit, then approve in your wallet. Stablecoins are the funding route; the specific coins are not named on the pages I read, and that matters more here than in most cards, because a wrong token or a wrong network is not recoverable by you. Supported chains are Solana plus other networks added at the issuer’s discretion — so Solana is the one to plan around.

Two things are not stated and both are ordinary things to want to know: the minimum top-up, and whether there is any fiat on-ramp at all. From what the card publishes, this is a crypto-to-card route, not a bank-to-card route. If your plan was to load money from a bank account, I cannot confirm from public pages that the card supports it.

Then the fee, which is the awkward part:

• The fee page says 1% per top-up.
• The FAQ says 0.5%.
• The top-up tutorial says $0.10 per top-up transaction.

Three official pages, three numbers, and they behave very differently depending on your behaviour. A percentage fee punishes frequent small top-ups; a flat fee punishes large infrequent ones. If you top up $50 twice a week on the 1% reading, you pay that percentage fee on every transfer — which adds up quickly compared to the membership. If you batch your loads into one large transfer, the flat reading is the cheaper one. Ask support which figure is live before you commit to a rhythm.

Two further mechanics worth knowing. Your cards deactivate after 6 months of inactivity, and getting back going requires a new card issuance — so an unused card is not a dormant card, it is a card you re-order. And how to withdraw the card balance back to your wallet is not covered: neither the top-up page nor the terms describe it. The terms do say the balance can be repaid at any time without penalty, that chargebacks resolved in your favour are credited to the Solayer Account, and that on termination the card must be surrendered. That is a promise about repayment, not a described withdrawal flow — a gap to raise before you hold a large balance.

Paying with it every day

This is the strongest part of the card. The Solayer Pay app is on the Apple App Store and Google Play. You get a virtual Visa immediately and can add it to Apple Pay and Google Pay for contactless payments; Apple Pay keeps the card number as a device-specific number in the Secure Element with a one-time code per payment, which is a materially safer way to hand over a card than a magnetic stripe. Spending draws on the loaded balance, so the card cannot overdraw it.

On the physical card, ATM use is described as available wherever Visa ATMs are, up to $250 per withdrawal including surcharges and three attempts per rolling 24 hours. Standard ATM and network fees may apply. The terms, though, say cash advances are not available and do not describe ATM use at all — the same disagreement that runs through the physical card itself. I would plan on spending, not withdrawing.

Rewards are thin and loosely specified. No cashback rate is stated. The card’s points come from spending and referrals, along with ecosystem perks and yield on eligible balances. A widely quoted 1% cashback and a 10% first-purchase offer appear in coverage as a 2025 campaign — that is a past promotion, not a standing rate you can plan around.

The app’s reputation is too thin to lean on. App Store US rating 5.0 from just 2 ratings, and 500+ downloads on Google Play per CryptoCardHub as of 11 August 2026, which was not read from the stores directly; a third-party report from 3 March 2026 showed 0.0. Two ratings is not a signal in either direction. It does tell you the user base is small, which matters when you weigh the section below.

If something goes wrong with a purchase, the route is: try the merchant first, then start a chargeback through the Solayer Account if it is unresolved or unauthorised. You must report within no more than 60 days of the charge appearing on the periodic statement. The card network may ask for extra documents, and the disputed amount may remain due while the case is pending. If you win, the money is credited to the Solayer Account — not necessarily back to your wallet.

What can go wrong

The company is hard to see. The issuer named in the card terms is Third National. Solayer’s own legal entity and its licences are not stated. That is not a disqualifier on its own, but it means you are trusting a brand whose regulatory footing you cannot read off its own pages. Where you live changes what that means: in the EU, an electronic money institution must safeguard customer funds in dedicated accounts or by insurance, and those funds are not bank deposits and may not sit under a deposit guarantee scheme; a crypto card often depends on two licences, one on the payment side and one on the crypto side, and MiCA rules for asset-referenced and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024, with the transitional period for existing providers running until 1 July 2026 or until they are authorised or refused, whichever came first. ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised providers you can check.

Custody is described two ways. The documentation describes provider-operated hybrid custody: hot wallets holding a small operational balance, cold wallets holding most assets offline with multi-signature, and “circuit breakers that freeze suspicious activity”. The marketing calls the card non-custodial and fully on-chain. Those are different products with different risk profiles, and for you the difference is simple — under provider custody you are trusting a company with your money, and under self-custody the losses from a stolen key are yours alone, because blockchain transfers are irreversible and a network cannot freeze or return funds. Providers holding funds have failed before, repeatedly and at scale. Whether two-factor authentication, spending controls or insurance exist for this card: not stated.

Two-factor on the money side is unstated. You have app-based controls for the card — freeze and unfreeze instantly in the Solayer Card Dashboard — but 2FA on the account and any insurance are not described. Do not assume either.

Nobody has complained, which is not the same as nobody has been affected. No official incidents are stated and I found no user reports, no Reddit or forum complaints, and no Trustpilot page for the card; coverage is launch news and a Coin Bureau protocol review, with Blockmedia reporting more than $15M in cumulative top-ups and Solana-wallet-only top-ups early on. CryptoCardHub noted on 11 August 2026 that independent feedback is minimal. Absence of complaints from a very small user base tells you little.

It is a young product. It launched in April 2025 as the Emerald Card and was later renamed Solayer Pay, per a May 2026 press release; the physical card was introduced by a press release dated 14 May 2026. Programmes do close — Visa terminated its agreements with FTX in November 2022 and WaveCrest’s Visa programmes were shut down in Europe in 2018 — and the typical closure sequence is a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then a request to withdraw remaining balances. That history is the reason the issuer question and the withdrawal question both matter more here than they would for an established card programme.

Prohibited activity. Gambling-related transactions are restricted, and so are cash-like ones: travellers cheques, foreign currency, money orders, wire transfers and cryptocurrency. A merchant category code is what defines most of this — a four-digit code assigned when a business starts accepting cards, with MCC 7995 covering gambling — and issuers block these by policy rather than by law, with the list varying by issuer. If the merchant declines the card for looking foreign or prepaid, that is the BIN lookup working as designed, not a fault in your balance.

Support. The FAQ points to the Solayer Discord; the terms list [email protected] and the phone number +1 (734) 510 1402.

What to take instead

I looked at three cards that a reader in the same situation might be choosing between. All four of us are in the same category, so the differences that matter are fees, networks and how plainly the rules are written.

MetaMask Card — 7.1 / 10. Sign-ups are open in 45 listed countries and territories (Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay are among them), with other regions on a waitlist; proof of residency is required, the citizenship rule is not stated, and US and UK sign-ups were temporarily closed per the FAQ. It is a Mastercard: a virtual card issued instantly by Monovate, with a Metal card you can pre-order after approval, one card per user. The virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee; Metal is $199 a year. Fees are described as a minimal per-transaction amount, with no additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee — the amount itself is on a linked table rather than the pages. It spends directly from the connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, with mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT named. Cashback is 1% on Virtual in mUSD into the Money Account; Metal’s headline is 3% but the footnote caps it at 3% on the first $10,000 spent, then 1%. Choose it if a written, single-page fee table and a $199-or-free price ladder matters more to you than Solana-native top-ups.

KAST — 6.1 / 10. Its eligibility rule is the sharpest of the four: residence is checked at KYC, and holding an ID from a restricted region can make you ineligible even if you live in a supported country — while dual citizens with a supported ID may pass. You can create an account in an unsupported country, but KYC stays locked, and a VPN does not help. It offers virtual and physical cards up to 10 per user, on Visa Platinum (Standard), Visa Infinite metal (Premium) and Visa Infinite gold plated (Private), with USD balances. Membership is 0 USD for Standard, 1,000 USD a year for Premium and 10,000 USD a year for Private, billed annually upfront. Stablecoin top-ups are 0%, USD card spend is 0%, transaction fees are 0%, Apple and Google Pay are 0%, and the non-USD FX fee is 0.5%–1.75% depending on your country, the transaction country and the programme; a declined transaction costs 0.50 USD. USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD are named, on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and Tron. Cashback is 1.5% on the first $2,000 a month (Standard), 2% on the first $10,000 (Premium), 3% on the first $40,000 (Private). Choose it if you want your spending fees at zero and can afford the tier that matches your spend.

Zeal — 6.1 / 10. Spending in 150+ countries, with issuance depending on eligibility and regional availability; the card programme is live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. A Visa card: virtual for online use, addable to Apple Pay, with accounts in EUR, USD and GBP through Gnosis Pay. Zeal charges no additional FX fee and converts at the Visa wholesale rate, though Gnosis Pay fees such as ATM charges may still apply. It spends from balances in the card Safe on Gnosis Chain and Celo per the docs. Cashback goes up to 4%, paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain, and you must hold GNO in the card Safe to qualify — so the headline rate and the qualification are two different numbers. No fee schedule is published on zeal.app or in the App Store, and whether a physical card exists is not stated. Choose it if you want multi-currency balances and no FX markup, and are willing to read Gnosis Pay’s terms instead.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Solayer to someone who already holds stablecoins on Solana, lives in a country that is not on the exclusion list, and wants a card that taps at the till without first converting anything in a banking app. If you spend mostly in dollars in one country and you have read the terms and decided the fee ambiguity is tolerable for the convenience, this is a reasonable card and the everyday-use side of it is genuinely good.

I would not recommend it to someone whose main question is “what will this cost me”. If that is your question, the honest answer today is that you cannot get it from Solayer’s pages — the conversion fee is unpublished and the top-up fee has three values. I would also hesitate if you need to know who is behind the card and under which licence, if you want to withdraw your balance back to your wallet on demand, or if you are a US citizen, because the terms and the eligibility list say different things about you and only support can settle it.

And the sequence matters. Do the arithmetic on the top-up fee before you choose a rhythm, ask support which of the three published figures is live, confirm the physical card is actually orderable today, and get the answer to your specific country question in writing. Four questions, and then you will know more than this review can tell you.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Solayer card?

The Solayer card is a Visa payment card that spends stablecoins held on Solana. It comes as a virtual card and a physical card, works with Apple Pay and Google Pay, and draws on a balance you load, so it cannot overdraw. The card is issued under a Third National card programme. Solayer’s own legal entity and licences are not stated on its public pages. It launched in April 2025 as the Emerald Card and was later renamed Solayer Pay.

How does the Solayer card work in practice?

You load stablecoins to the card’s Solana address from the app — Card tab, Deposit, approve in your wallet — and the balance becomes spending money. Purchases are converted to USD if needed and paid as ordinary Visa transactions. On top of that you pay a $20 a year membership, and the card deactivates after 6 months of inactivity, with reactivation requiring a new card issuance.

Who owns Solayer, and is it a bank?

The card terms name Third National as the issuer. Solayer itself appears to be the programme manager or front end rather than the licensed institution, and its own legal entity and licences are not stated, so I cannot tell you which regulated entity stands behind the brand. In the EU, e-money institutions must safeguard customer funds by segregation or insurance, but those are not bank deposits and may fall outside deposit guarantee schemes.

Which countries can use the Solayer card?

Both residents and citizens of listed countries are excluded, regardless of where they currently live, and the list includes Russia, Belarus, most of the EU, the UK, Switzerland, Turkey, the UAE, India and China. Armenia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are not on the list, but Solayer does not publish its eligible-country list, so not being excluded is not the same as being accepted. The decision is made at KYC.

Are US citizens eligible for the Solayer card?

Unclear, and this is the sharpest contradiction I found. The eligibility list restricts named US states rather than the whole country, while the card terms ask you to attest that you are not a US citizen and describe the card as intended for those outside the United States. The two documents conflict, so a truthful answer to the attestation may still be refused at KYC. If you are a US citizen, get a written answer from support before uploading documents.

How much does the Solayer card cost to use?

Membership is $20 a year, with a one-time $20 activation for new users covering the virtual card for the first year. A USD transaction costs $0.15; a non-USD one is $0.10 plus 1.5% on the fee page or $0.10 plus 1.75% in the FAQ, with a cross-border fee of up to 3% in the terms. A physical card is free apart from shipping: $24.99 US Express or $59.99 international Express. The crypto conversion fee is not stated.

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

Send stablecoins to the card’s Solana address from the app: Card tab, Deposit, then approve in your wallet. The fee is published three ways — 1% per top-up on the fee page, 0.5% in the FAQ, and $0.10 per transaction in the tutorial. Which one applies to you is worth asking before you settle into a routine. The specific stablecoins and the minimum top-up are not stated, and neither is any fiat funding option.

Is the Solayer card safe for my money?

That depends on which description you believe. The documentation describes provider-operated hybrid custody — hot wallets for a small operational balance, cold offline multi-signature wallets for the rest, and circuit breakers that freeze suspicious activity — while the marketing calls the card non-custodial and fully on-chain. Those are different risk models. You can freeze the card instantly in the app, but two-factor authentication and insurance are not stated.

What are the Solayer card’s spending and withdrawal limits?

The terms say spending limits are dynamic and may be modified at any time, and give no figures. Unofficial figures — $10,000 daily, $30,000 monthly, $500 at the ATM — come from an undated third-party listing and may predate the current structure. On the physical card, ATM use is described as up to $250 per withdrawal including surcharges, three attempts per rolling 24 hours, though the terms say cash advances are not available.

Is the Solayer card worth it?

Worth it if you already hold stablecoins on Solana, live outside the excluded countries, and want a card that taps without converting first. Harder to recommend if your priority is knowing the exact cost of each payment, if you need the legal entity and licences published, or if you want to withdraw the balance back to your wallet — how to do that is not covered by the top-up page or the terms.

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