SORA is shut: a review of a dead card, and what is left for the people who still hold one

Updated October 2026

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If you landed here searching for a SORA card, the single most important thing to know is that the programme no longer issues cards. Issuance is closed, and the card, the app’s card functions, and everything that made SORA a usable payment card stopped after 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT. That is not a rumour from a forum; it is what the card’s own notice said, dated 10 January 2026. So there is no version of this review in which you apply, pick a tier, or start spending. What I can do is tell you what happened, what it means if money is still sitting in there, and where you might go instead if a card that converts crypto to spendable balance is what you actually need.

The conditions described on this page are current as of October 28, 2026.

I am going to be blunt about the rating: 2.2 out of 10. That is not a judgement of what the product was when it ran. It is a judgement of what you are looking at now, which is a closed programme where the only open question for many users is how to get money back out.

Verdict: the score, and who this is for

Let me put the numbers on the table first, then explain what they mean.

The cost mark is the only one above zero and it is worth being fair about why. On 17 September 2024 the published schedule had card issuance at €0 for both the virtual and the physical card, a €0 monthly fee, and a client membership of €39 a year charged after the first year. International card payments were €0.90 + 1.1%, domestic was free for the first 10 online and 10 point-of-sale transactions, top-up was €0, and cash withdrawal in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway was €1.20 + 3%, with international withdrawals at €1.75 + 3% and a free balance inquiry once a month. Those are not predatory numbers. They are simply irrelevant to a decision you might make now, because you cannot open one.

Everything else scores low for a structural reason. Top-up sat at 2 because funding ran through conversion of XOR to EUR or a SEPA transfer, with no way to load crypto directly onto the card. Everyday use got 3 for the physical and digital card and the ATM, minus the fact that Apple Pay and Google Pay were only promised for a “Phase 2” that never arrived in a form the pages described, and the card is now closed. Reliability got 1, which is the honest ceiling: this is the criterion that measures whether the thing works when you need it, and for anyone still holding a balance the answer is currently no.

So who is this page for? Two groups, and only two.

• Existing cardholders with a balance still in the SORA card. This is where the practical work is. I go through it step by step below, including the one route that actually exists and the several that do not.
• People who were considering SORA because ordinary bank cards are hard to get where they live. If that is you, the closure settles the question and you should read the alternatives section, where I compare three cards that are running now.

Who it is not for: anyone shopping for a crypto card today. There is no product to shop for. If you have seen a page suggesting SORA is still open, it is out of date or wrong.

What happened to the programme

Here is the timeline as the card itself described it, because the order matters more than the individual dates.

• Before the closure. SORA could be taken out by residents of the EEA who passed identity checks — eligibility ran on residence, not nationality, with residents of Russia, Iran and the DPRK excluded, and a fuller list published at the card’s own blacklist page. KYC was required, and on the pages the card described what that meant concretely: a selfie, an ID document and proof of address. There were no stated levels and no stated processing time. The product was a physical and a digital debit card, and the network it ran on is not stated on the pages I read. Funding was either converting XOR to EUR or a SEPA transfer, with no direct crypto load, and the ledger load fee was €0 with no stated minimum. Apple Pay and Google Pay existed as promises for “Phase 2”; the blocked merchant categories were not stated. Rewards were not stated at all. There was one product, no tier ladder — the €39-a-year membership charged after the first year was the only paid level.
• 10 January 2026: the notice. SORA published notice of termination of its card services, stating that the card, the app and the card functions would stop after Friday 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT. Crypto held in GateHub wallets had to be emptied before that cutoff. SORA Wallet itself was to continue.
• Before that notice. Unlimit, the issuer, had already suspended some accounts.
• After 30 January 2026 18:00 GMT. The app gives no access to balances. The only stated route is Unlimit support. SORA says it cannot submit release requests on users’ behalf.

Two of those points deserve emphasis because they are the ones people get wrong. First, the closure is of the *card programme*, not of the whole company: SORA Wallet was stated to continue. Second, Unlimit is a separate company from SORA, and Unlimit is the one holding the money and the one that suspended accounts. When the app stopped showing balances, you were not dealing with a bug in the SORA app; you were dealing with an issuer’s system.

I want to be careful about one thing I could not establish: no cause was stated. The notice said the services were ending without giving a reason, and I found no official statement explaining why. Anyone who tells you they know the real reason is going beyond what the card’s own pages say.

If you already have the card

This is the section I would read twice if the balance is yours.

What is actually available now. After 30 January 2026 18:00 GMT the app gives no access to balances, and the only stated route is Unlimit support at [email protected]. That is the whole of it. There is no withdrawal flow left in the app, and no alternative I found on the official pages.

The trap that catches people. If your account was one of the ones Unlimit suspended, the app or a statement may still *show* you a balance while the money stays unreachable until Unlimit completes its review. A visible balance is not a claim you can act on. Do not treat a screenshot of a balance as evidence that you can get the money.

What will not work. SORA stated that it cannot submit release requests for users. That is not a technicality — it means any request has to come from you, to Unlimit, not through your old SORA contact route. And SEPA outgoing and SEPA Instant outgoing, each €0.50 while the card functioned, are history: there is no account behind them for the money to leave through.

What to send Unlimit. I am not going to give you a template or tell you how to phrase anything, because that would be legal and procedural advice I am not qualified to give. What I will say is the practical shape of the situation: you are asking an e-money institution to release funds from an account it holds, and the entity that holds them is not the brand you remember. Keep your own records — your account identifier, the dates and amounts you loaded, any confirmation emails — because you may be asked to evidence that the balance is yours. Note that disputes were not stated on the pages I read, so do not assume any particular process is running in parallel.

On the parts that had nothing to do with the balance. Limits were said to be at the card’s fees page but the amounts were not present there, so I cannot tell you what they were. Closure fees and replacement-card cost were not listed. Support ran through soracard.com/support, soracard.com/contact and [email protected], alongside Discord, Telegram, X and Reddit; the site was in English and Español, Russian was not offered, and hours were not stated. All of that describes a service that has closed.

The honest bottom line for a holder: the situation is unresolved, it is being handled by the issuer rather than the brand, and your leverage is time and paperwork, not an in-app button.

What can go wrong

Some of these risks are about crypto cards in general and will apply to whatever you switch to. Some are specific to how this one ended. I am separating them because that distinction matters when you decide what to check first.

The closure-specific risks, which are live now:

• Your money sits with an e-money institution, not a bank. SORA Biome (Bulgaria) ran the site and apps; the card was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd (Cyprus), an electronic money institution licensed by the Central Bank of Cyprus under licence 115.1.3.7. That licence means customer funds must be safeguarded, segregated in dedicated accounts or insured — but e-money funds are not bank deposits and are not covered by the Cyprus Deposit Insurance scheme. If Unlimit failed, your recovery route is a claim to an e-money institution, not a deposit guarantee.
• Suspension is normal in this industry and is usually not personal. KYC rules require regulated businesses to verify customers and assess risk as part of anti-money-laundering law, including ongoing monitoring and reporting of suspicious activity. In the EU, due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documents, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether you are a politically exposed person. If due diligence cannot be completed, the rules require the institution to hold off on the transaction or relationship and, where necessary, end it. That is why accounts get frozen pending documents. It is also why the US runs its own customer identification programme requiring name, date of birth, address and an identification number.
• Country and citizenship are screened separately from residence. Sanctions screening and issuer policy are often applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as address. A card can be open to residents generally and still refuse you on the basis of the document you hold.
• Networks can end a programme without your consent. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves; they license issuers and can suspend a programme. In November 2022 Visa said it had terminated its global agreements with FTX, and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa card issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme. SORA’s own page for a Trustpilot review existed, but I found no Reddit or Trustpilot reports to draw on.
• Card networks and issuers are separate from the crypto side. A card is a payment service regulated separately from crypto-asset services; under EU rules a crypto card often rests on two licences. That structure is why a crypto brand can be operating normally while its card programme is dead.

The category risks that do not go away when a card closes:

• Reversibility. Crypto transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen private key has no built-in recovery — the network cannot freeze or return funds. Blockchain transfers are irreversible too, so a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address on another network, can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee.
• Custody. With a custodial wallet the provider holds the credentials, so you must trust it completely. Custodial platforms have a record: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022). SORA’s self-custody side was a real design point — you kept the keys in SORA Wallet — but self-custody puts the sole responsibility for key loss, phishing and clipboard-hijacking malware on you.
• Stablecoins are not what they sound like. A stablecoin aims to hold a stable value, but despite the name it is not necessarily stable: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022 and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity, so stablecoins are not censorship-proof.
• Payments can decline for reasons that are not you. Merchants can look up the card’s issuing institution and country from the number and apply extra scrutiny if it differs from the billing address — which is why a card issued in one country can look “foreign” in another. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards for that reason. Address Verification Service is mostly a US, Canada and UK mechanism and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which causes declines. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on funds that remains for days, typically up to seven.
• Blocks you did not know about. Gambling sits in merchant category code 7995 and many issuers block it by policy rather than law, with the blocked list varying by issuer. The SORA pages did not state which categories were blocked, so I cannot tell you what would have been refused.
• Taxes follow the payment. If your jurisdiction treats digital assets as property — as the IRS does, generally producing a taxable gain or loss on exchange for goods, services or dollars — then each card payment funded from crypto may be a separate disposal measured at the fair market value on the date. I am not giving tax advice; I am telling you the rule exists so you check it yourself.

What to take instead

If what you wanted from SORA was a card that turns crypto into everyday spendable balance, three running programmes are worth looking at. I am not endorsing any of them and I am not telling you they fit your rules — your country, your documents and your spending are yours to judge. Read the eligibility lines carefully; that is where most applications fail.

Who each one suits, and where each one can hurt you.

MetaMask is the one I would look at first if your priority is spending directly from a wallet you control, because it takes no fiat balance — it draws on the connected wallet across Linea, Base, Monad and Solana. The catch is eligibility: 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 the citizenship rule is not stated. The framing is reassuring — “ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending” — but US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ. Two small traps: Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit, and the Metal card’s 3% is capped at the first $10,000 spent, after which it drops to 1%.

KAST has the richest card lineup and the most aggressive cashback, but the cost structure is a different order of magnitude: €0 is not the number to look at, $10,000 a year is. Its eligibility is unusually explicit — the residence list is shown at KYC and if your country is not listed it is not available, the country list itself is not published, and citizenship matters separately from residence: living in a supported country while holding an ID from a restricted region may still make you ineligible, dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass, only your own ID is accepted, and a VPN does not bypass any of it. You can create an account in an unsupported country but KYC stays locked. One inconsistency to note: the app lists PYUSD and RLUSD, while the Terms say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”.

Zeal is the simplest of the three: spend in 150+ countries, Visa, no additional FX fee, conversion at the Visa wholesale rate, and up to 4% cashback in GNO — but only if you hold GNO in the card Safe, and rates can change. Issuance depends on eligibility and regional availability, and the card programme is live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand per the Gnosis Pay docs, with Zeal’s own updates mentioning Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia. Physical availability is not stated, and no fee schedule is published, so you cannot model the cost from the site alone.

One thing all three illustrate: the card brand is often just the front. The network routes the messages and sets the rules, the issuer holds the programme and your balance, and the crypto name is frequently a programme manager. When something goes wrong, the entity you contact is the issuer.

Who I would recommend it to

Nobody, as a new card. I would not recommend SORA to anyone who is choosing a card today, because the programme is closed and there is nothing to apply for. That is not a close call and it is not a judgement of the old product.

What I would recommend, depending on which of the two groups you are in:

• If you have a balance, treat it as a claim against Unlimit EU Ltd, not as a feature of a crypto app. Write to [email protected], keep your own evidence of what you loaded and when, and do not accept a displayed balance as proof that funds are reachable. Accept that the process may be slow and that you may need to show your identity again, because the legal requirements behind that are the same ones that closed the accounts in the first place.
• If you were blocked from ordinary banking, the card you actually wanted — crypto converted to a spendable balance, usable at shops — is a live category with running alternatives. MetaMask if you want to spend straight from a self-custodied wallet; KAST if you want the widest card lineup and the best cashback and can justify the membership; Zeal if you want simple multi-currency spending with no FX markup. Check eligibility first in each case, because that is where the real rejection risk sits.
• If you are just curious, read the closure as the lesson it is: crypto cards depend on two licences and on a network partner who can end the arrangement, and the brand you trust with your money may not be the company that holds it. Under the EU’s MiCA regulation, which took legal effect in June 2023 with stablecoin rules applying from 30 June 2024 and the remaining provisions from 30 December 2024, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. E-money institutions must safeguard customer funds, but those funds are not bank deposits and may not sit under a deposit guarantee. ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised crypto-asset service providers, and that register is the first place I would look before trusting a name — including this one.
• If you are in the EEA and were mid-application, it is over. The eligibility rules that applied before 30 January 2026 18:00 GMT do not help you now.

Frequently asked questions

What is the SORA card?

It was a physical and digital debit card linked to the SORA ecosystem, meant for people who had trouble getting an ordinary bank card. Eligibility ran on residence in the EEA rather than nationality, with residents of Russia, Iran and the DPRK excluded, and identity checks required a selfie, an ID document and proof of address. The programme is now closed, so this is a description of something that no longer exists as a product.

Why was the SORA card discontinued?

The card’s own notice, dated 10 January 2026, stated that the card, the app and the card functions would stop after 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT. SORA Wallet was to continue. No cause was stated in the notice, and I found no official explanation of the reason — anything beyond that date and those facts is speculation.

Can I still apply for a SORA card?

No. Issuance is closed, and the card and the app’s card functions stopped after 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT. There is no application to complete, no tier to choose and no fee schedule that applies to a new customer. If a page is still showing you a sign-up flow, it is out of date.

Is SORA a bank?

No. SORA Biome (Bulgaria) ran the site and apps, while the card itself was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd (Cyprus), an electronic money institution licensed by the Central Bank of Cyprus under licence 115.1.3.7. An e-money institution can issue e-money, payment cards and wallets but cannot lend, and its customer funds must be safeguarded in segregated accounts or insured — they are not bank deposits and are not covered by Cyprus Deposit Insurance.

What happened to balances left in the SORA card?

After 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT the app gives no access to balances. The only stated route is Unlimit support at [email protected], because the issuer holds the funds. SORA said it cannot submit release requests on your behalf. Suspended accounts may still display a balance that stays inaccessible until Unlimit completes its review.

How did the SORA card work, and what did it cost to top up?

Funding came from converting XOR to EUR or making a SEPA transfer; there was no direct crypto load onto the card. The ledger load fee was €0 and the minimum was not stated. Fees published on 17 September 2024 had card issuance and the monthly charge at €0, membership at €39 a year after the first year, international card payments at €0.90 + 1.1%, and EU/EEA withdrawals at €1.20 + 3%.

Is SORA card safe, and are my crypto keys mine?

The self-custody design was real: with SORA Wallet you kept the keys yourself, and two-factor authentication and biometrics were mentioned. That protection covers your crypto, not your card balance, which sat with the e-money issuer. Be clear about that split — self-custody does not make a card programme unbreakable, as this closure shows. Transfers are typically irreversible and a stolen private key has no recovery.

What can I use instead of the SORA card?

Three running programmes came up in my comparison: MetaMask (7.1/10) spending straight from a connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad and Solana; KAST (6.1/10) with the widest card lineup and up to 3% cashback but memberships from $1,000 to $10,000 a year; and Zeal (6.1/10) on Visa with no additional FX fee and up to 4% cashback in GNO. Check eligibility before anything else — it is where most applications fail.

Why do crypto card programmes keep closing?

Because a card depends on more than the crypto company. The network (Visa or Mastercard) licenses the issuer and can suspend the programme — in November 2022 Visa said it had terminated its global agreements with FTX, and in 2018 it suspended WaveCrest in Europe, closing every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme. On top of that, an issuer can suspend individual accounts where it cannot complete identity or sanctions checks, and a MiCA-authorised provider on the crypto side has no bearing on the card side at all.

Is SORA Wallet still running?

SORA’s notice said the SORA Wallet continues, and crypto held in GateHub wallets had to be withdrawn before the 30 January 2026 cutoff. I would treat that as the company’s statement rather than an independent confirmation, and I could not find an official page confirming the wallet’s current status. The card programme’s closure is documented; the wallet’s present state is not.

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