The crypto card made for people who already keep their coins on a Ledger

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The CL card is not a bank account with crypto attached. It is a payment card, issued by a regulated e-money institution, that you fund from a crypto balance you hold yourself. That single sentence explains most of what follows — the good parts and the awkward parts. If you already keep your coins on a Ledger hardware wallet and want to spend them at an ordinary shop without selling first, this card does exactly that, and it does it cheaply. If you are trying to get your first bank card, or you want a card that behaves like a normal debit card with a salary paid into it, this is probably not the tool for you, and the reasons are specific rather than vague.

I scored it 6.9 out of 10. That is a middling-good card with one very strong feature (cashback paid in crypto), one very weak spot (a complaints profile that has got worse through 2026), and a great deal of quiet where you would want clarity.

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

The score, in full

Total: 6.9 / 10

The highest mark goes to everyday use, and it is deserved. This is a card you would actually use: free virtual card, tap to pay with your phone, take cash out abroad. The lowest is reliability, and that is where a reader should slow down and read before committing money.

Will they give you the card

Yes, in eight regions. The card is currently available in the EEA, the UK, the US, Canada, Switzerland, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. That is a broad map — most of Europe, the UK, North America’s two large markets plus Switzerland, and four Latin American countries.

Two things the card’s own pages do not say, and I would want to know before I applied. First, the list of excluded countries is not stated, so you cannot check from the public page whether your country of residence is one of them. Second, and more awkwardly, the citizenship-versus-residence rule is not stated. Plenty of services in this category screen on nationality as well as address, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy often follow the passport rather than the postcode. This one does not say which it uses. If you are a citizen of one country living in another, you cannot tell from what I read whether that is a problem.

There is also a difference between regions that the card does describe unevenly. The US card is described as a Visa debit card. For other regions, Visa or Mastercard is not specified. In practice that means the network you get — and therefore which merchants accept you and which online checks behave how — may differ depending on where you live.

How to get it

The application itself is not described in detail on the pages I read, and I am not going to invent steps. What is stated: the card page lists a free virtual card, and conversion of crypto to fiat happens at the moment of purchase.

Whether identity checks apply, and at what level, is not stated on the card page. That is a genuine gap rather than a hint that none exist — any regulated e-money operation will run checks. Unofficial information, and unofficial it stays: the identity check is handled by Veriff, according to a company-side reply on Trustpilot and a one-star reviewer, as shown in 2026. Official documentation does not specify what documents beyond an ID are needed. Reviewers in October 2026 report being asked for utility bills and tax returns *after* an account was already restricted, which is a pattern worth knowing about before you open one.

The US has its own disclosure documents and cardholder terms, and I did not read them, so I cannot tell you the US-specific onboarding steps or what verification levels exist there.

Fees: what it really costs

The card’s own fee table lives in a separate fee information document, not on the card page. So the honest starting point is that the headline numbers come from a document dated 03/11/2023, issued by UAB Monavate, plus what third parties report. Where those two disagree, I flag it.

Two things stand out. There is no monthly fee and no foreign-exchange surcharge in the official document — a rare combination in this category. And the cash machine costs are the ones to look at, because they are the fees you can actually trigger by accident.

The unofficial figures pull the other way, and you should not ignore them. Conversion of crypto to fiat when you spend, reported at 1.75%, plus 2% on crypto-funded card spend, and FX of 1.75% on non-base-currency transactions — all from one third-party site dated 3 August 2026. That directly contradicts the official document, which shows 0% foreign currency fees, but the official document is from 2023 and a 1.75% FX number is more typical of this category than 0% is. Another aggregator lists a 1.5% FX surcharge. So: assume you pay something on the crypto side, and find out which.

There are no tiers. One card, free, virtual. There is also no published schedule of spending limits on the card page. Third-party sources disagree sharply: one says $15,000 monthly spend and $500 daily ATM; another says EUR 15,000 daily point-of-sale, EUR 2,000 daily ATM, an initial cap of EUR or $1,000 until extra proof of funds is approved, and manual review for single top-ups or withdrawals of EUR 10,000 or more. That last one matters. If you are moving real money through this card, a manual review threshold exists somewhere, and it is not where the official documents say.

Three everyday payments, and what each one costs

A EUR 30 lunch in a eurozone city, paid by phone. You tap with Apple Pay or Google Pay. The card converts your crypto to fiat at the point of sale. Official foreign-currency fee: 0%. Unofficial conversion figure: 1.75%, and possibly another 2% on crypto-funded spend. So the range for this lunch is somewhere between nothing extra and roughly a fifth of it, depending on which schedule is current.

A EUR 40 booking site in dollars. Same mechanics, but now a currency conversion is involved. The official document says zero. Third parties say 1.75%. This is the single number I would ask support about before you travel.

Taking EUR 100 out of a machine in Lisbon. Official: EUR 3.00 plus 1.5% of the transaction value — so EUR 4.50 on EUR 100, plus whatever your own bank’s ATM charges on top, which is a separate thing entirely. In the UK, EUR 2.50 flat. Also remember that a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your balance for days.

Card currency is not stated on the card page, and the fee document itself mixes pound and euro wording in places — a small thing that tells you the document is not maintained with great care.

How to top it up

You fund the card from a Ledger signer through the Ledger Wallet app, and the assets named are BTC, ETH, SOL, stablecoins and more. That is the whole mechanism, and it is the card’s strongest design idea: the card draws on coins you hold, and you authorise each movement on hardware.

What is not stated is which networks. The card names the assets, not the chains. That is a bigger gap than it sounds — see the warning below.

On fees, the fee information document’s “Receiving money” lines read “Not applicable”, and the crypto top-up fee and minimum top-up are not stated. The network fee for sending is charged by the blockchain, not by the card company, so it comes out of what you send regardless.

Two practical warnings that belong in this section rather than buried later. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network the card provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can simply be lost — or need manual support intervention with no guarantee of the outcome. And on Ethereum specifically, gas is paid in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT but no ETH cannot send it at all.

Withdrawal is a separate question from top-up. Withdrawing your balance to a bank or back to crypto is not stated. What is stated: you can withdraw local currencies at ATMs worldwide, monthly maintenance is EUR 0.00, and what happens to any balance when you close the account is not stated.

Paying with it every day

This is where the card earns its 9. Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported. The card is managed in the Ledger Wallet app. Cash can be taken out at ATMs worldwide. Blocked merchant categories are not stated, which matters more than it sounds — in this category, gambling (merchant category 7995) is blocked by many issuers as policy, and the list varies by issuer, so you cannot assume yours behaves like anyone else’s.

The rewards are the best thing about the card: 1% cashback in BTC or USDC in the US, and 1% cashback in BTC or USDT in other countries, calculated monthly on total card transactions. Paid in crypto, on a card funded by crypto. Nobody else in this comparison does that, and it partly offsets whatever conversion fee is actually being charged.

Everything is managed in one app, which is convenient and also concentrates the risk: the app and the card are the same front end. Two details are simply not stated — card freeze and two-factor authentication. Those are the first two things you would want from a card that touches your crypto, and the card page says nothing about either. The page does say that your crypto is “protected by the industry’s leading hardware and software” when used with a Ledger signer. Self-custody is not stated as a feature in those words.

Disputes are not stated on the pages I read. I did not read the cardholder terms PDF, so I cannot tell you how a chargeback would work here, and you should not assume it works the way it does for a bank card.

What can go wrong

This is the section I would read twice, because it is where the 5 out of 10 lives.

Officially: no incidents found. Everything below is user reports, and I am labelling it as such.

On Trustpilot, CL Card sits at 3.0 out of 5 from 263 reviews, with 35% one-star. The company replied to 31% of negative reviews. The Baanx page shows 2.5/5 from six reviews, one of them a Ledger device purchase declined twice.

The themes repeat consistently through 2026:

• Accounts disabled or restricted without warning, followed by document requests. Reviewers in September and October 2026 describe this, one case unresolved for two months, another in May 2026 with funds held for weeks.
• Withdrawals delayed — April to June 2026 saw delays from fifteen hours to a week; in October 2026 one reviewer reported about 1,990 USDT unavailable after “maintenance”, later received.
• Card and app failures, including UK customers unable to get replacement cards in September and October 2026.
• Slow, templated support, May to October 2026.
• A self-inflicted loss: in July 2026 one reviewer lost 15,300 XRP to a memo/tag error.

Some reviewers in May and September 2026 made insolvency claims about Baanx. Those are unverified. A third-party aggregator has claimed that Baanx and Monavate entered insolvency proceedings in April–May 2026, but that is a single unconfirmed source, and a separate site dated 3 August 2026 shows no insolvency or enforcement news. I am not going to tell you the company is insolvent, and I am equally not going to tell you the claim is nonsense. Check ESMA’s interim register of authorised crypto-asset service providers, which is where a licensed provider would appear.

None of this is unusual for the category, and it is worth knowing why. Card programme closures follow a pattern: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. Visa itself terminated its 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 its Visa programmes in the region. Two structural points about who is actually behind the card, because they matter for what happens if things go wrong:

• The card is provided by Baanx; the brand belongs to Ledger SAS in Paris.
• EU cards are operated by UAB Monavate; UK cards by Monavate Ltd.
• The US Visa debit card is issued with Cross River Bank, Member FDIC.

So in the EU and UK, your money sits with an e-money institution, not a bank. Under EU rules, electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds by segregating them in dedicated accounts or insuring them — but those are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme.

Finally, the seed phrase. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key, and a seed phrase is an unencrypted form of it that anyone who obtains can use to restore the wallet and spend the funds. Transfers are typically irreversible and a stolen key has no recovery. That is the tradeoff you accept when you keep your own keys — you carry the loss risk yourself, in exchange for nobody else being able to move your money.

What to take instead

I compared three cards that solve similar problems. Here is where each one actually differs.

MetaMask is the closest competitor and the one to look at first. It opens in 45 listed countries and territories; ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending. Proof of residency is required, and US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per their FAQ — which, given that CL is available in both, is a real reason to look at both. It needs no hardware wallet, which is either a feature or a compromise depending on how you feel about self-custody. Its cashback is 1% on the virtual card, so CL’s 1% in crypto is not obviously better in value terms — but CL pays in BTC or USDC, and MetaMask pays in mUSD.

KAST is the one to consider if you want tiers and a lot of card options. Ten cards per user, four designs including Pengu, Solana and Bitcoin. The catch is the pricing: Premium is 1,000 USD a year and Private is 10,000 USD a year, billed annually upfront with no monthly option, plus 1 USD a month inactivity fee after twelve months, and a renewal fee whose amount is not stated. There is also an inactivity fee waiting for you if you stop. Its eligibility is residence-based at KYC with a Restricted Locations list that is referenced but never named, and it is explicit that living in a supported country while holding an ID from a restricted region may still make you ineligible. CL does not publish its exclusions; KAST at least tells you the rule exists.

Zeal is the quiet one. No fee schedule is published anywhere I looked, which for a fee comparison is a problem. It charges no additional FX fee and converts at Visa’s wholesale rate, and Gnosis Pay fees may still apply. It spends in 150-plus countries. Its cashback is up to 4% in GNO, but you have to hold GNO in the card Safe to qualify, and rates can change.

Who I would recommend it to

If you already own a Ledger and use it for the thing it is best at — holding coins — and you want a spending card that draws on that balance, this is a good card. The free virtual card, the phone wallets, the ATM access and the 1% crypto cashback are a genuinely useful combination, and the fact that you authorise spending on the device you already trust removes a whole category of worry.

If you are trying to open your first bank account, or you need a card with a salary paid into it, or you want to spend money you have not converted yet, look elsewhere. This card is funded from crypto you hold, and that is the entire design.

If you are a citizen of one country living in another, in one of the eight supported regions, pause. The citizenship rule is not stated, and that is exactly the question this card’s pages leave open.

And if you are putting a large balance on it, read the complaints section first. The card’s own numbers are good. The 2026 user reports describe frozen balances, delayed withdrawals and document demands arriving after the fact. Those are ordinary risks in this category and they are worse than average here.

Three things to check before you commit: what the current conversion and FX fee actually is, because the official 2023 document and the third-party sources disagree; what your daily and monthly limits are, because they are not published and the third-party figures differ; and what happens to a remaining balance if you close the account, because that is not stated either.

Frequently asked questions

What is the CL card?

The CL card is a payment card that spends a crypto balance you hold yourself, rather than a bank account. It is a Visa debit card in the US and is operated by the e-money institution UAB Monavate in the EU and Monavate Ltd in the UK, with the brand owned by Ledger SAS in Paris. The card is provided by Baanx. You fund it from a Ledger signer, and it converts crypto to fiat as you spend.

How does the CL card work?

You hold crypto in your own wallet and authorise it from a Ledger device through the Ledger Wallet app, which loads a balance the card then spends. Crypto is converted to fiat at the moment of purchase. You get 1% cashback in BTC or USDC in the US and in BTC or USDT elsewhere, calculated monthly on total card transactions. A free virtual card is listed, Apple Pay and Google Pay work, and you can withdraw local currencies at ATMs worldwide.

Is CL a bank?

No. The EU and UK cards are issued under e-money rules by UAB Monavate and Monavate Ltd, not by a bank. Under EU rules such institutions must safeguard customer funds by segregating or insuring them, but those funds are not bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. The US card is different: it is a Visa debit card issued with Cross River Bank, Member FDIC.

Who owns CL?

The brand belongs to Ledger SAS, the French company behind the hardware wallet. The card programme itself is provided by Baanx. EU cards are operated by UAB Monavate, UK cards by Monavate Ltd, and the US Visa debit card is issued with Cross River Bank. So there are several companies between you and the money, and knowing which one holds your balance matters if something goes wrong.

Is the CL card available in my country?

The card’s pages say it is currently available in the EEA, the UK, the US, Canada, Switzerland, Colombia, Mexico and Brazil. The list of excluded countries is not stated, so you cannot check the map from the public page. More awkwardly, the rule on citizenship versus residence is also not stated — if you hold one nationality and live in another country, that is the first thing to ask support about before applying.

Does the CL card require KYC?

The card page does not say. Any regulated e-money operation runs checks, so some form of identity verification is certain; unofficial information says Veriff handles it. Documents beyond an ID are not stated. What is documented by users is the pattern after the fact: accounts restricted in September and October 2026 followed by requests for utility bills and tax returns, one case unresolved for two months.

How much does the CL card cost?

Officially: issuing a debit card EUR 0.00, monthly maintenance EUR 0.00, payment in a foreign currency EUR 0.00 plus 0%, replacement card EUR 5.00, and cancellation EUR 3.50 within 14 days of ordering. Cash withdrawal is EUR 2.50 in the UK and EUR 3.00 plus 1.5% abroad. Unofficial sources add a 1.75% conversion fee, 2% on crypto-funded spend, and 1.75% FX — contradicting the 2023 official document.

How do I top up the CL card?

You send from a Ledger signer through the Ledger Wallet app, in BTC, ETH, SOL, stablecoins and more. The card’s pages name the assets but not the networks, which is a real gap — send on a chain the provider does not support and the transfer is irreversible and may simply be lost. There is also no stated minimum top-up, and the network fee is paid to the blockchain, not to the card company.

Is the CL card safe?

I would not call it unsafe, and I would not call it risk-free. The design is sound for its audience: you keep your own keys and authorise spending on hardware. But self-custody is not stated as a feature, and card freeze and two-factor authentication are not stated at all. Trustpilot shows 3.0/5 from 263 reviews with 35% one-star, including frozen accounts and delayed withdrawals through 2026. Keep modest sums on it.

Is the CL card worth it?

For someone already holding crypto on a Ledger, yes: free virtual card, phone wallets, worldwide ATM access and 1% crypto cashback are hard to argue with, and the scores reflect that with 9 out of 10 for everyday use. For anyone else, the appeal is thinner. Consider MetaMask if you want a wallet-based card without hardware, or KAST if you want tiers — though Premium there costs 1,000 USD a year and Private 10,000 USD.

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