KAST card review — a stablecoin Visa with generous top-ups and a thin company file

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

KAST is a Visa payment card that spends directly from a stablecoin balance. If you already hold USDT or USDC and want to use them in shops, online, or at the ATM, the pitch is straightforward: top up, swipe, done. In practice the card works as advertised on the spending side. What makes a review necessary is everything around the edges: who can actually get one, what it costs in the small print, what happens if something goes wrong, and the fact that the company behind the card is unusually hard to pin down.

This review is based on the card’s own pages, its terms, and what customers report. I have not used the card. I have read the documents so you don’t have to.

Conditions current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict

KAST earns 6.1 / 10. That score reflects a real tension. The product is excellent for the narrow job of “spend stablecoins anywhere Visa is taken, with low fees.” The top-up coverage is the strongest part: USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD across five networks, with 0% deposit fees and no bank account required. The everyday experience is also strong, with Apple Pay and Google Pay support and a virtual card that issues instantly. Where the score drops is on access and trust: the country list is hidden behind KYC, the card issuer is never named, the operating entity sits in Anjouan, and the user reviews on Trustpilot cluster around frozen accounts, repeated document requests, and a 0.50 USD fee charged on every declined transaction that has pushed some balances negative.

Score breakdown

Who it suits: stablecoin holders with USD balances who want to spend across multiple networks, who don’t mind a young company with a thin regulatory footprint, and who won’t be badly hurt if their card gets paused for review at an awkward moment.

Who it does not suit: anyone who needs a card from a named, regulated bank with a public licence number; anyone whose country may not be on the eligibility list (you can’t check before signing up); anyone planning to live off ATM withdrawals; and anyone uncomfortable with the company’s arbitration clause in Singapore and governing law in Seychelles.

Who will they give you the card

KAST does not publish a country list. The supported countries are only shown at the KYC step, which means you need to install the app, enter your phone number, set a PIN, give an email, and pick your country of residence before you learn whether you qualify. The Terms describe a separate “Restricted Locations” list but do not name the countries on it. If your country isn’t listed during KYC, KAST says “it means KAST is not available there.”

Two things matter beyond residence. First, even if you live in a supported country, the ID you present has to be accepted; KAST says “If you currently live in a supported country but only hold an ID from a restricted region, you may still be ineligible to pass KYC.” Dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass. Second, only the account holder’s own ID is accepted, and using a VPN does not bypass the checks.

There is a curious half-step: you can create an account in an unsupported country and the app will work, but KYC stays locked and you cannot get a card or move money. This is the practical version of “geofenced” in a crypto card: the gate is at verification, not at sign-up.

If your country is supported and your documents pass, you can hold up to 10 cards on one account. The cards are Visa-branded. The standard tier gives you a Visa Platinum, Premium gives a Visa Infinite in metal, and Private gives a gold-plated Visa Infinite. There are also themed designs (Pengu, Solana, Bitcoin) that you can pick from in the app.

How to get it

The path is the same for everyone: app, KYC, card. There is no web sign-up and no paper application.

KYC has three levels. Level 1 is just account creation: phone and one-time code, PIN, email, country of residence. This unlocks the app only. Level 2 requires a government ID (passport, national ID card or driver’s licence, valid and unexpired) plus a selfie or liveness check; this unlocks cards and the ability to send and receive funds. Level 3 is proof of address and enhanced checks, with citizenship requested; this unlocks USD and EUR accounts and global payouts. US residents also give an SSN at some stage. The legal age in your country applies (so 18 in most places).

Source-of-funds documents can be requested at any time, and KAST says these checks are part of the normal compliance flow. Expired IDs are rejected, as is anyone from a country KAST doesn’t support. The Terms do not give official processing times or a list of rejection reasons beyond those two.

After KYC, you can order a virtual card immediately and a physical card for an extra 40 USD shipping. KAST says physical cards arrive in 7–10 business days. The countries KAST ships physical cards to are not stated in the public pages, and neither is the cost of a replacement.

Fees

KAST is cheap for the common case, but it is not free for the unusual ones, and the small print is where you get caught.

Three everyday payments show how this plays out. Buying a 60 USD coffee subscription in New York from a card in USD: 0% conversion, 0% transaction, no FX. That is the free case. Booking a 700 EUR hotel in Paris from the same card: 0% on the spend, then a non-USD FX fee between 0.5% and 1.75% depending on the mix of your residence, the merchant’s country, and your card programme; on 700 EUR that is somewhere between 3.50 EUR and 12.25 EUR on top of the Visa wholesale rate. Withdrawing 200 USD from an ATM in Thailand: 3 USD flat + 2% (4 USD) plus the FX fee on the conversion to THB, so 7 USD in fees before you count the ATM owner’s own surcharge.

One fee is easy to miss and is responsible for a lot of bad reviews: the 0.50 USD declined-transaction fee. If your balance is too low, or the merchant’s pre-authorisation hold is larger than expected, you pay 0.50 USD per attempt. Several Trustpilot reviewers say this has run repeatedly and pushed their balance negative.

The 1 USD/month inactivity fee starts after 12 months with no use. If you are a seasonal user, set a calendar reminder.

Top up

Top-up is the part of KAST that genuinely excels. The card accepts four stablecoins: USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD. USDT and USDC can be sent on five networks: Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and TRON. The app lists the current network options and the address to send to; the Terms mention only USDT and USDC as currently acceptable, which is a small inconsistency worth knowing.

The deposit fee is 0% on the stablecoin side, and there is no minimum stated. Network fees (gas on Ethereum, bandwidth or energy on Tron) are charged by the blockchain itself and are not KAST’s fees; if you fund from a wallet with no native token to pay gas, your transfer will not move. On Ethereum that means holding a small amount of ETH; on Tron, a small amount of TRX or staked resources.

You don’t need a bank account. This is the practical reason a stablecoin card exists: it gives a person without a bank, or with a bank that won’t issue a card, a way to spend a USD balance. Once stablecoins are deposited they sit in your account as USD (the conversion to the balance is 1:1 at 0% spread), and each card purchase deducts from that balance immediately. It is not credit; the card cannot overdraw because the funds have to be there first.

If you do want to fund by bank, the options are narrower and more expensive: USD ACH 2 USD per deposit, FedWire 15 USD, SWIFT 30 USD, and EUR SEPA 0.5%.

To take money back out, stablecoin withdrawal fees are:

• Solana (USDT, USDC): 1 USD + 0.1%
• Arbitrum (USDC): 0.20 USD + 0.1%
• Ethereum (USDT, USDC): 6 USD + 0.1%
• Tron (USDT): 5 USD + 0.1%

Minimum withdrawal is 5 USD. What happens to any balance left in a closed account is not stated.

Paying with it every day

A KAST card works wherever Visa is taken, which KAST puts at 150 million+ merchants across 170+ countries (a Visa network claim, not KAST’s). The virtual card is instant and can be added to Apple Pay or Google Pay from the app, with no fee. The physical card can be added to mobile wallets too. Samsung Pay is not mentioned in the pages I read.

Each card transaction is authenticated in real time, and funds are taken from your USD balance at the moment of authorisation. The card is, in effect, a prepaid Visa that holds USD; this is the same model most crypto cards use, and it is why declined transactions are not “rejected later” but “tried and failed at the till” — and that 0.50 USD fee applies.

Rewards are paid in USD cashback. Standard gives 1.5% on the first 2,000 USD of eligible spend per month; Premium gives 2% on the first 10,000 USD; Private gives 3% on the first 40,000 USD. Premium and Private also add KAST Points (1% and 2% of eligible spend respectively), and the Points system includes a separate “Reserve” yield on balances and 0.25 to 0.5 SOL per 1 SOL staked every two days, depending on tier. Premium and Private get Visa Infinite perks (travel, purchase protection, lounge, eSIM) but you have to register on the Visa Benefits portal first.

The Terms prohibit a list of merchant categories: weapons, controlled substances, Ponzi / pyramid / MLM, counterfeit goods, Darknet / Tor purchases, adult content, and pseudo-pharmaceuticals. Gambling (MCC 7995) is not specifically listed, which is unusual — many issuers block it by policy — but any MCC can still be declined by the partner.

A few practical wrinkles. Merchants can place a pre-authorisation hold larger than the final bill (a hotel or car rental, for example); holds can stay on the balance for up to about a week, which means your available balance may be lower than you expect. If you dispute a transaction, the Terms say contact within 90 days, and the company’s liability is capped at USD 500 per claim. The chargeback process itself is not described in detail.

The iOS app is called “KAST: Global USD Account” and is published by Troia Limited. It has a 3.97 average from 276 ratings on the App Store, with the last update I saw dated 2026-10-08. I did not read the Google Play rating.

What can go wrong

The product side of KAST is well thought through. The company side is where the risk lives, and you should know it before you load a balance you can’t afford to lose.

The company behind the card is not a bank. KAST describes itself as “a financial technology company, not a bank.” The cards, custody and on/off-ramp are, in KAST’s words, “provided by licensed partners.” The Terms put the legal entity as “KAST Tech” (registration number 16223), incorporated in Anjouan (Comoros), with governing law in Seychelles and arbitration at the SIAC in Singapore. The card issuer and BIN sponsor are not named in the public pages, beyond referring to “one of our Partner” (sic). Partners named in the Terms include Tazapay and BitGo; the homepage shows logos for Stripe, Privy, Fireblocks, Visa, Sardine and Elliptic. No licence numbers are published on any page I read. This is not necessarily a scam, but it is a thin file for a company holding customer balances, and the Anjouan / Seychelles / Singapore triangle is the offshore package rather than the EU/US one.

User reports on Trustpilot often cite these themes: frozen or restricted accounts, often soon after a deposit, with funds placed on hold while compliance reviews them; the 0.50 USD declined-transaction fee, sometimes repeated within minutes, occasionally pushing a balance negative; and repeated document requests on transfers that look like self-transfers. KAST’s replies to these reviews say accounts can be restricted by security and compliance systems; some reviewers say the issue resolved, others say it did not. Trustpilot’s regional pages score around 2.5, the main page around 2.7, across roughly 170 reviews as of 2026-10-20. Positive reviews tend to praise the low fees and the ability to spend stablecoins directly. As with all user-review aggregators, the negative skew reflects the population that bothers to write a review, but the patterns are real and consistent with what the Terms permit the company to do.

Security features the company talks about are: custody by “licensed partners,” the option to set a lower spending limit in the app, and the use of stablecoins rather than volatile tokens. Things the public pages do not state: whether 2FA is on by default, whether cards can be frozen from the app, whether any insurance is in place, and what happens to a balance if the company or its partner fails. Visa Infinite purchase protection and travel insurance are available to Premium and Private cardholders once they register on the Visa Benefits portal; Standard gets none of these.

Support runs through the KAST Concierge help center, with 24/7 cover for all tiers and a VIP Concierge for Private. Replies to negative Trustpilot reviews come from a [email protected] address. The membership page offers English only in its language selector, which is a small but useful clue about who the product is currently aimed at.

The broader crypto-card risk applies here too. Stablecoin balances at a custodian are not bank deposits. If the platform fails, recovery is not guaranteed; past failures in the wider industry (Mt. Gox, Coincheck, Ronin, and the FTX Visa wind-down) all illustrate how quickly a card programme can be paused by a network. A self-custody-linked card avoids the custodian risk, but KAST holds your balance for you, which is the trade-off for the simple top-up flow.

What to take instead

If the country list, the named issuer, or the company file is a deal-breaker, three alternatives are worth looking at. None is a perfect substitute; each solves a different part of the same problem.

MetaMask Card (score 7.1 / 10). Mastercard, virtual first, metal tier for 199 USD/year. Spends directly from a connected self-custody wallet on Linea, Base, Monad or Solana, which removes the custodian risk on the balance side. Cashback paid in mUSD at 1% on Virtual and a headline 3% on Metal (footnote limits 3% to the first 10,000 USD then 1%). Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries with proof of residency; US and UK sign-ups were temporarily closed per the FAQ. The country list is published, which is the first thing KAST should fix.

Zeal (score 6.1 / 10). Visa, virtual only (Apple Pay supported), accounts in EUR, USD, GBP via the Gnosis Pay programme. No FX markup on the card itself; conversion is at the Visa wholesale rate, with Gnosis Pay partner fees still applying for things like ATMs. Up to 4% cashback paid in GNO token, which must be held in the card Safe to qualify; rates can change. Live in EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand per the Gnosis Pay docs.

Rizon (score 6.7 / 10). Visa Platinum, virtual and physical, with a metal tier coming. Targets US and LATAM residence. Card spend in USD is free, non-USD is 1.7% + 0.10 USD on the standard tier. 2.5% back on eligible purchases. Pricing for the cards themselves is “check app for the price” rather than published.

A quick note on what the table does not show. MetaMask solves the “is the company safe” question by removing the custodian; you do, however, take on the full responsibility for your seed phrase. Zeal solves the “where can I spend it” question with a published country footprint and Visa wholesale rates, at the cost of holding GNO to actually earn the headline cashback. Rizon is the most natural fit for a US-based reader who wants the same “stablecoin card” idea without KAST’s company-file problem.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend KAST to a person who already holds USDT or USDC across more than one network, who is comfortable holding the balance at a small offshore fintech, and who wants a low-fee way to spend a USD balance at Visa merchants and through Apple Pay or Google Pay. The Standard tier’s free annual fee, 0% deposit, and 0% in-USD spending mean the everyday cost is essentially zero. If the card works, it is the cheapest end-to-end stablecoin-to-Visa flow in this corner of the market.

I would not recommend it as a primary card for someone who is not in a supported country (and you cannot find out before signing up), who needs a named, regulated issuer on the front of the card, who plans to live off ATM withdrawals, or who would be in trouble if a balance was frozen for a few weeks of compliance review. For a small, occasional top-up — say, a few hundred USD a month for online subscriptions and the occasional dinner — the trade-off is reasonable. For a salary-sized balance or a primary banking relationship, it is not the right product yet.

Before you load a balance, do three things. First, finish KYC to Level 3 so USD and EUR accounts are unlocked, and so you have a clearer picture of what your country allows. Second, set a low spend limit in the app and only raise it when you need to. Third, make your first card a virtual one added to Apple Pay, so you can test the flow end to end before paying 40 USD for shipping and waiting 7–10 business days for a physical card.

Frequently asked questions

What is the KAST card?

KAST is a Visa payment card (Platinum on Standard, Infinite metal on Premium, gold-plated Infinite on Private) that spends from a USD balance funded by stablecoin deposits. It is run by KAST Tech, registered in Anjouan, with cards and custody said to be “provided by licensed partners” whose names are not all disclosed on the public pages.

How does the KAST card work?

You deposit USDT, USDC, PYUSD or RLUSD from your own wallet to an address in the KAST app; the deposit is shown as a USD balance; the card then debits that balance at the moment of each authorisation. It is a prepaid model: the funds have to be in the balance before you can spend, so the card cannot overdraw.

Is KAST a bank?

No. KAST describes itself as a financial technology company, not a bank. Cards, custody and the on-ramp are provided by partners. The card issuer and BIN sponsor are not named in the public pages I read.

Is the KAST card available in my country?

The country list is shown at KYC, not published. If your country is not listed at the verification step, KAST says the card is not available there. Eligibility is also tied to the ID you present, not just your residence.

How do I get a KAST card?

Install the KAST app, create an account (phone, one-time code, PIN, email, country of residence), pass Level 2 KYC with a government ID and a selfie, and order a virtual card. A physical card is an extra 40 USD for delivery on the Standard tier.

Does KAST require KYC?

Yes. Level 2 unlocks the card and the ability to send and receive funds; Level 3 (proof of address, enhanced checks) unlocks USD and EUR accounts and global payouts. Source-of-funds documents can be requested at any time.

How do I top up the KAST card?

In the app, pick the stablecoin (USDT, USDC, PYUSD or RLUSD) and the network (Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum or TRON for USDT and USDC) and send to the address shown. The deposit is 0% on the KAST side; you pay the network gas in the chain’s own token.

Where can I use the KAST card?

Anywhere Visa is accepted. KAST says 150 million+ merchants across 170+ countries. The virtual card works for online and in-app payments; the physical card works in shops and at Visa ATMs.

Is the KAST card safe?

Safer than keeping stablecoins on an exchange, less safe than a regulated bank. Custody is by “licensed partners,” the company entity is in Anjouan, no licence numbers are published, and the Terms cap the company’s liability at USD 500 per dispute. For larger balances, treat the holding risk as a real one.

How do I delete my KAST account?

The app includes account closure; what happens to any remaining balance on closure is not stated in the public pages, so withdraw stablecoins first and confirm the balance is zero before you close.

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