A USDC card with a Delaware company behind it and almost no published numbers

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Kontigo card is pitched as the first international credit and debit card in USDC that earns yield, with spending drawn straight from your USDC balance and an app running on the Base network. That is an attractive pitch for someone who holds dollars in stablecoins and would rather not move them back to a bank account. But when I went through the card’s own pages, the ones a reader would check before applying, the pattern was consistent: the product is described in adjectives, while the numbers — fees, limits, issuing countries, ATM access, card network — are simply not published. Kontigo, Inc. is a Delaware corporation that says assets are held in user custody and that it does not take deposits, and no card issuer or licence is named on the pages I read. That combination puts it at 4.7 out of 10 on my scale, and it tells you exactly how I would use this page: not as a recommendation to sign up, but as a map of what is confirmed, what is claimed, and what you must ask before you send money.

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

Verdict: 4.7 out of 10

Total: 4.7 / 10.

Who this suits, in plain terms: a Latin American user who is already holding USDC, who wants to spend it without converting it back to a bank balance, and who is comfortable reading the app’s own screens for fees rather than a published schedule. The audience the card is clearly written for is Latin American users saving and spending in USDC.

Who it does not suit: anyone who needs a card number tomorrow, anyone who wants to know the monthly fee before opening an account, anyone who depends on cash withdrawals, and anyone who is uneasy about a financial product whose issuer and licences are not named anywhere on the public pages. If your problem is that a bank will not give you an ordinary card, the appeal here is obvious — but the gap between “an ordinary card with published terms” and “a card whose terms live in an app” is exactly where the risk lives.

I also want to flag one piece of noise early, because you will meet it if you search: a Spanish-language article claims users can get a stablecoin card with Bitcoin cashback and 10% USDC yield (an unofficial figure, not confirmed by the card). It is promotional, it is not from the card’s own pages, and I could not verify it. Treat it as marketing rather than as a feature.

Will they give you the card?

Short answer: probably not without asking first, because the card’s own public pages never name the countries it issues in.

What the site says: availability depends on your country of residence, and sanctioned or high-risk jurisdictions are not permitted. That is the whole eligibility rule as published. The site footer lists ten countries under the heading “Paises” — Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Spain, the United States, Mexico and Peru — but that list is not tied to the card. It reads like the company’s markets or general presence, not a statement about where the card can be issued to you.

If you are in one of those ten countries, that is a hint, not a promise. If you are somewhere else, the terms give you no basis to assume a yes. The honest position is that the card countries are not stated, and that the one thing you should not do is guess and apply blind.

A background point that explains part of why this is murky: merchants can look up the first six or eight digits of a card number and see which institution and country issued it, and some apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from the billing address. A card issued in one country therefore often behaves like a foreign card in another. That is normal for this category, but it means the issuing country is not a detail — it shapes how the card behaves at the till.

What to check first: open the app or contact support before you commit time, and get a straight answer on which residence countries are actually issuing. If support cannot answer that clearly, treat the uncertainty as a warning rather than as a formality.

How to get it

You verify your identity first, and that is stated. The terms require identity verification before using the services, covering name, date of birth, address and nationality, with ID documents, financial information, sanctions screening and credit checks potentially involved. One account per user. That is the standard shape for this category: under anti-money-laundering law, regulated businesses must verify customers and assess risk, including ongoing transaction monitoring and suspicious-activity reporting.

What the terms do not describe: any card-specific steps. How you request the card, how long it takes, whether you get a physical card, a virtual card, or both, and what gets you refused — none of it is stated. The card’s help centre lists topics called “Niveles Kontigo” (levels), Kontigo Cash, Kochinitos and Kontigo Credit, but the content behind those headings is not something the public pages spell out. The developer documentation mentions that deposit methods depend on your KYC level, without giving amounts, so verification level clearly affects what you can do — you just cannot see the map from outside.

The card itself: the site describes “the first international credit and debit card in USDC that earns yield”, and the footer names hybrid, credit and debit cards. Network (Visa or Mastercard), and virtual versus physical, are not stated. Delivery terms are not stated either.

The pattern to notice is that the marketing sentence is confident and the operational details are absent. That gap is the single most important thing on this page.

Fees: what a Kontigo payment really costs

The honest answer is that the public pages do not give you a fee schedule, so the only true cost figure available to a reader is what the site says about USDC transfers and what the terms say about where fees appear.

The terms state that fees, commissions and spreads are shown in the app and may change. The home page says you can send, receive, top up and save in USDC “without commissions”. That claim is about the crypto side. What a purchase at a shop costs depends on the conversion and currency fees, and those are exactly the numbers not published.

Three everyday payments, and what I can honestly say about each:

Buying coffee in your own country. Say the coffee costs 5.00 in local currency and your balance is in USDC. What happens is a conversion at a rate you cannot check in advance, plus whatever spread the app applies. The card does not publish either. Your worst case is that you pay materially more than the headline USDC price, and your only way to know is to read the app before you commit.

Buying something priced in US dollars from a shop that charges in your local currency. Here the terms note that liquidated balances may be held in a fiat currency Kontigo chooses, for example USD, and that card currency is not stated. So a purchase can involve two conversions in sequence — crypto to a chosen fiat, then that fiat to the currency the till wants. Each step is a place where a fee lives, and neither step is priced publicly.

Withdrawing cash at an ATM. Nothing is stated: not the fee, not whether there is a daily or monthly cap, not which ATMs. Cash access is one of the main reasons people want a card, and here it is simply an open question.

Two things worth knowing from the wider category, since they shape what you should ask. On-chain network fees for a deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider — so a top-up from a self-custody wallet can cost a network fee that has nothing to do with Kontigo. And a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to seven, which is worth remembering if you are living off a card balance.

The reward claim deserves a separate line, because it is the headline. The card is marketed as one that “earns yield”. The rate, how it is paid, and in what form are not stated, and no cashback figure appears anywhere I could verify. A yield that is not quantified in writing is not something to plan a budget around.

Top up: how money gets into the card

Topping up is the part the card describes most clearly, and even here the published detail stops early.

Card purchases are paid directly from your USDC balance — that is the wording in a customer testimonial, not a technical specification, but it is consistent with how the product is described. The app runs on Base, according to a Kontigo article. The home page says you can top up in USDC “without commissions”. Beyond that: which other coins, and which other networks, are not stated.

So the minimum viable version is: you hold USDC, you send it in on Base, and the balance backs your card spending. That is workable for someone already set up for Base. For everyone else it is a wall.

The network question matters more than it sounds. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or sent to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost outright or need manual support recovery with no guarantee attached. Circle lists USDC as natively supported on 38 networks as of 16 September 2026, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon PoS, Avalanche, Arbitrum and Stellar, which means the set of networks in the world is much wider than the one this card names. Getting this wrong is expensive, and no in-app control can undo it.

A separate note on stablecoins in general, because it bears on what you are holding: stablecoins aim to hold a stable value against a fiat currency but, in the regulator’s own phrasing, are not necessarily stable. TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, and USDC lost its peg temporarily in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. Circle says USDC is redeemable 1:1 for USD and fully backed by cash and cash equivalents, mostly in an SEC-registered government money market fund, with monthly reserve attestations. That is a strong claim about the asset; it says nothing about a card provider’s obligations to you.

Withdrawing back out is where the terms are actually specific, and the specificity is worth reading. Digital assets can be transferred to external wallets “when that feature is available” — note the conditional. After you close your account, you have a reasonable period, for example 30 days, to instruct a withdrawal. If you do not, Kontigo may sell the assets and hold the proceeds in a fiat currency of its choosing, with no interest. Closing requires no pending obligations and no positive balance, or a withdrawal already instructed. That is a fair set of rules, and also a reminder that the exit path depends on the provider continuing to operate.

Paying with it every day

Here the card’s own silence is most annoying, because day-to-day spending is the entire point.

Not stated: the card network, whether you get plastic or a virtual card, whether Apple Pay or Google Pay work, whether any merchant categories are blocked, and whether there is an ATM network. The site writes about hybrid, credit and debit cards. That is three words for three quite different products — a credit card lends you money, a debit card takes it from an account, a hybrid does both — and the pages do not say which one you would actually receive.

The app is on Google Play and the App Store, and the site cites “over 10,000” user reviews. The store rating itself is not stated. Support runs through an FAQ centre with a WhatsApp channel; the terms say communication happens through in-app messages, push, email, SMS and messaging apps, and no direct phone, chat or email address is listed. Help centre pages are in Spanish, with English article pages also existing.

Two mechanisms explain why cards like this get declined at the till, and neither is the provider’s fault. First, the BIN lookup — a merchant category code is a four-digit number classifying a business by goods or services, and some categories are blocked by policy rather than by law, with the list differing by issuer; gambling, MCC 7995, is the classic example. Second, address verification: AVS compares the numeric parts of the billing address you typed with issuer records, it is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK, and it is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines. If you are outside those markets, declines at checkout are a known risk of the design, not evidence that anything is wrong with your account.

Online payments usually run through 3-D Secure, where the issuer assesses risk and either approves without friction or challenges you with a one-time code or biometrics. Visa’s brand is Visa Secure, Mastercard’s is Identity Check. If the issuer restricts a tokenised mobile-wallet number — blocking it on magnetic stripe, phone or web use, say — your wallet stops working for that path even though the physical card is fine.

Disputes, at least, have a stated route. The terms describe good-faith negotiation for up to 15 business days after written notice, then Delaware courts, while local consumer-protection authorities remain available to you. Chargebacks are not mentioned, which is a gap: a chargeback is the mechanism where the issuer orders a refund with a reason code such as fraud, duplicate billing or goods not received. US reversal rights for debit cards come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z, and prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed. My practical advice: report an unrecognised transaction as soon as you see it, because the 15-business-day clock is already running.

One practical warning that could sink a payment: if a card is issued under a credit structure and you spend beyond the balance, the consequences differ sharply from a prepaid balance being exhausted. The site does not say which you are signing up for.

What can go wrong

Let me split this into what I confirmed, what I heard third-hand, and what simply has no answer yet.

The confirmed picture. Kontigo, Inc. is a Delaware corporation. The site footer says Kontigo does not provide financial services and does not take deposits, and that assets are held in user custody. The terms say assets may sit in a self-custodied wallet or with third-party custodians, that Kontigo cannot access or recover your private keys, that you are solely responsible for your credentials, and that transactions are generally final. Two-factor authentication, card freeze and insurance are not stated. The card issuer, the BIN sponsor and the licences are not named.

Read that structure carefully, because it is unusual and it is the heart of the risk. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key, and a seed phrase — typically 12 to 24 words — is an unencrypted form of that key, so anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend its funds. Transfers are typically irreversible and a stolen key has no built-in recovery, because the network cannot freeze or return funds. Custodial platforms have a real record of failure: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011-2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million in 2018), and Ronin Network (US$625 million in 2022). Self-custody removes the provider from that list and puts you on it instead: key loss, phishing, and clipboard-hijacking malware that swaps a copied address are now your problems.

The third-party reports. A hack drained 340,905.28 USDC from 1,005 user accounts; the company says refunds were processed. Separately, a US$20 million seed round was reported in December 2025. Both of these come from outside the card’s own pages and I could not verify the dates, so treat them as unofficial colour rather than established fact. Even so, an event that touches more than a thousand accounts is worth asking about directly: how did it happen, what changed as a result, and why should the next one be different.

What I did not find. A search of the usual complaint channels turned up no Kontigo card complaints — but the results that came back were for an unrelated brand, which is worse than finding complaints, because it means the card has no real review footprint either way. Absence of complaints from a young product with no public track record is not evidence of a good one.

Structural risks that belong to the category, whatever the provider says. Card programmes close. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down; WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. A closure typically means a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. If you hold a balance on a card with no published issuer, the counterparty question is real: a card is a payment service regulated separately from the crypto side, so a crypto card often depends on two licences, and here neither is named.

The regulatory check you can do yourself, at least in Europe. MiCA is the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation; ESMA states it took legal effect in June 2023, with its rules on asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens applying from 30 June 2024 and the remaining provisions, including crypto-asset service provider rules, from 30 December 2024. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. The transitional period lets providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026 or until they are authorised or refused, whichever comes first. ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised providers that you can search. In the US, FinCEN guidance treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters, while people simply buying goods are not.

Taxes, stated plainly and without advice. The IRS treats digital assets as property, so exchanging them for goods, services, dollars or other digital assets generally produces a taxable gain or loss. For personal holdings that is a capital gain or loss, short-term if held a year or less, measured in local fiat currency at fair market value on the transaction date. Which means every card payment funded from crypto may be its own taxable disposal. Whether that applies to you depends on your jurisdiction and circumstances, so treat this as a flag to raise with a professional rather than a conclusion.

What to take instead

None of these three is a Kontigo substitute in a strict sense — they are the comparison set I would actually look at if I were starting from zero. I include them with scores so you can see where they land, and with the same rule applied: only what each provider publishes.

What that comparison actually tells you. The International Visa Card is the most transparent on price: a $5 issuance, named plans at $9.00 and $19.00 a month, and a stated 2% foreign exchange fee that you can plan around. Its price for that clarity is a hard country exclusion list — including India, Turkey, Venezuela and Vietnam — and a rule based on residence or registration rather than citizenship, which catches people who moved. If you are in a listed country, it is not an option at all.

Morse scores highest here at 7.5, largely on costs: zero foreign exchange fees or markups at the real Visa rate, and online and contactless spending free. It is self-custodial, accepts a wide range of deposits, and USDC, USDG and EURC over Solana are free. But it is virtual only, its card fees are not published, rewards are not stated, and the invite-code country list includes the UK, Australia, Japan, Singapore and Switzerland — so for many readers the first question is whether they are in the open beta at all.

UNi sits at 6.1 with a clean fee story (no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, live OTC rates) and the only stated reward in the set at up to 3%. Against that: top-up methods are not stated and eligibility is not stated, so I cannot tell you who can actually open the account.

Set against all three, Kontigo’s problem is not that its fees are high. It is that they are invisible. A 2% FX fee you dislike is a business decision; an unpublished spread you discover at the till is a trap.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend this card, as it stands, to one specific person: someone who already holds USDC on Base, who lives in one of the ten countries the site footer names, who is comfortable that their money is in their own wallet with nobody able to reverse a transaction, and who treats the app’s fee screens as the contract. If that is you, the value proposition is real — spend a stable balance without a banking intermediary in the middle.

I would not recommend it to anyone who needs certainty. If your question is “how much will this cost me per month”, “which countries can actually get it”, “can I take cash out”, “what network is it on”, or “who is the issuer and what happens if they stop” — the card’s own pages do not answer any of those, and I am not going to invent answers. That is not a disqualifier on its own; plenty of good products publish their terms in-app. It is a disqualifier when the same pages are also the ones making bold claims about yields and international credit.

The three questions I would ask support before sending a cent, in this order: which countries are issuing, what is the all-in cost of a purchase in a foreign currency, and who is the card issuer and licence holder. If those three come back with clear answers, this page’s reservations largely fall away. If they come back evasive, that is your answer.

A closing thought on the balance of risk. Self-custody is genuinely the stronger model for holding crypto — no custodian to fail, as Mt. Gox, Coincheck and Ronin Network each showed the custodial alternative can be. But self-custody does not extend to your card: the card side runs through an issuer and a scheme, and neither is named here. Take the custody win where it is real, and treat the payment side as the ordinary, unglamorous, counterparty-dependent thing it is.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Kontigo card?

Kontigo describes its card as the first international credit and debit card in USDC that earns yield. The site footer mentions hybrid, credit and debit cards, and spending draws on your USDC balance with the app running on Base. The network, the card form and whether you receive plastic or a virtual card are not stated anywhere on the public pages.

How does the Kontigo card work?

In the model this card describes, purchases are paid directly from your USDC balance, so it behaves like a stored-balance card rather than a bank-linked debit card — the balance cannot overdraw. Behind that, a card payment involves several parties: the network routes messages and sets rules, a licensed issuer holds the card programme, and the crypto brand is often only the front end.

Is Kontigo a bank?

No, and the site says so. Kontigo, Inc. is a Delaware corporation, and the footer states that Kontigo does not provide financial services and does not take deposits, with assets held in user custody. No card issuer, BIN sponsor or licence is named on the pages I read, which is the detail to press on.

Who can get a Kontigo card?

The terms say availability depends on your country of residence and that sanctioned or high-risk jurisdictions are not permitted, but the countries of issuance are not stated. The footer lists Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, Spain, the United States, Mexico and Peru under “Paises” without tying that list to the card.

How much does the Kontigo card cost?

The public pages give you no schedule: issuance, monthly, conversion, FX and ATM fees and daily and monthly limits are all not stated. Fees and spreads are shown in the app and may change, while the home page says sending, receiving and topping up USDC carries no commission.

Is the Kontigo card safe?

That splits in two. Your crypto is in self-custody, so you alone hold the keys and you alone bear key loss, phishing and irreversible-transfer risk. The payment side is the open question, because the issuer and licences are not named, and a hack reportedly drained 340,905.28 USDC from 1,005 accounts.

How do I top up the Kontigo card?

Top up in USDC and the app runs on Base, per a Kontigo article, and the home page says top-ups in USDC are commission-free. Other coins and other networks are not named, and sending on the wrong network can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee.

Can I add the Kontigo card to Apple Pay?

Not stated. Apple Pay, Google Pay and blocked merchant categories are all listed among the things the public pages do not name. Note that Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific number in the Secure Element and each payment uses a one-time code, so where a wallet is supported it does not expose your card number.

Where can I use the Kontigo card?

Anywhere cards are accepted, in principle — but expect friction abroad. Merchants can read the issuing institution and country from the first six or eight digits, and address verification is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines.

Is the Kontigo card worth it?

Worth it if you already sit on USDC and want to spend it without a banking middleman. Worth thinking twice about if you are optimising on fees, because the spread is invisible until the till, and the advertised yield comes with no rate, no payout form and no cashback figure published anywhere I could verify.

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