Gnosis Pay is shutting down its consumer card, and the crypto it holds does not wait

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Gnosis Pay built one of the more interesting crypto cards of its generation: a self-custodial card that spent straight from a Gnosis Chain Safe, charged no fee of its own on transactions, and let you hold GNO-related rewards while paying ordinary shops with ordinary money. It also had a single, real weakness that no fee schedule can fix — it depended on one company’s willingness to keep the programme running. That is what ended: the consumer card and the web app stop working on 20 December 2026, and the consumer card is being replaced by cards issued through partners.

So this is not a review of a card you can sign up for. If you are reading this to decide whether to apply, the answer is that there is nothing to apply to. If you are reading this because you already hold the card or funds inside one, the page is written for you first, because the practical questions — when does my money stop being spendable, what happens to a subscription, can I still get a refund — have dated answers, and they are not the same answers for everyone.

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

The score, and who this suits

Gnosis Pay scores 4.5 / 10 — and the number is not a judgement of how the card behaved while it existed. It is a judgement of the card as a thing you could choose today, and today there is nothing to choose. A product that no longer issues cards cannot be a good recommendation at any fee level, because the part you would be buying has been withdrawn from sale.

Read the table column by column and you can see exactly where the card was strong and where it was not. Cost and everyday use were its genuine achievements: free issue, free delivery, no per-transaction fee, no FX markup of its own, a virtual card you could get immediately and a physical one you could hold, and both mobile wallets. Those columns describe a card that worked well in the hand.

The two low columns are the ones that decide the recommendation. Availability at zero is the closure itself, which is not a defect in the design but a fact about the present. Reliability at one is the harder number to argue with: the issuer is a properly regulated, FCA-authorised e-money institution, and that part was fine, but a card programme has an existence risk that a normal bank does not, and this one exercised it.

So: who does this suit? Nobody who wants a card in 2027. What suits a reader in this position is a card whose issuer you can name, whose complaint route is documented, and whose funds sit in your own wallet rather than in someone’s balance. Who it did not suit, even while it ran, is anyone who needed support answers in days rather than weeks, anyone in a country the programme was not built for, and anyone whose priority was a card that stays alive for years.

If that is your situation — trouble getting an ordinary bank card, or a preference for holding your own keys — the alternatives below are where your attention should go.

What happened to the programme

The sequence matters, because each date cuts off something different.

On 7 September 2026 the site began pitching business-to-business card issuing, with Startup and Enterprise tiers. On 21 September 2026 the formal closure notice appeared. On 20 December 2026 at 23:59 UTC the card stops authorising payments and the web app closes, except for withdrawals. That is the hard end.

Before the closure, eligibility was residence-based: legal residents of selected European and Latin American countries, with Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus and more EEA names listed, and a waitlist for new countries. The rule was residence, not citizenship. The site now lists the corridors USD, EUR, GBP, BRL and ARS along with partner apps, which tells you where the replacement platform is aiming — but that is a new product with new terms, not the old card continuing.

Verification ran through Sumsub in a single unified KYC flow. Beyond that, the card’s public pages do not state the documents required, the proof-of-address rule, or the age threshold. Unofficial sources, which the card does not confirm, put it at 18+, government ID or passport, and proof of address issued within the last three months — with approval explicitly not guaranteed.

The card itself was a Visa, issued by Monavate Limited under a Visa Europe licence, in both virtual (instant) and physical form, settling at T+1. Gnosis Pay was never the issuer: it is the trading name of Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, a UK-registered company (No. 14919639), and it acted as technical services provider and programme manager. UK and non-EEA cardholders were served by Monavate Ltd (FCA); EEA cardholders by UAB Monavate, the Bank of Lithuania entity. That split matters for complaints, which is why the complaint addresses below differ by route.

One dated commercial detail: news reported that GNO cashback eligibility ended on 30 September 2026 with a final distribution on 7 October. The closure notice itself does not describe cashback on the current card and points to the help centre instead, so treat reward-end dates as reported rather than as terms you can rely on.

Two more things you will read about and should treat carefully. First, unofficial reporting from late September 2026 says MiniPay will handle migration and issue replacement cards on Gnosis Pay’s enterprise rails — that is not the same as your consumer card being renewed. Second, an unofficial account from June 2026 describes an exploit against the Gnosis Pay delay module, with co-founder Koppelmann saying Gnosis would cover user losses; reports about early-withdrawal advice at the time were inconsistent, and the compensation status was not verified. Also unofficial: Russia is on the restricted list, where card use is prohibited, and is not an eligible application country.

If you already have the card

This is the section that matters most, so read the dates twice.

Your balance is your own, and it stays your own. The Safe is a self-custodial smart contract account on Gnosis Chain. Neither Gnosis Pay nor Monavate can take assets out of it or block transfers. That is the single most reassuring fact here, and it is a structural one rather than a promise. It also means access does not depend on this company’s goodwill: you can reach the same Safe through third-party Safe interfaces with your existing signer key. Keep that signer key somewhere safe before anything else.

Withdrawals stay open after 20 December 2026, at app.gnosispay.com/withdraw, with no withdrawal deadline stated. Blockchain network fees may apply. The card’s own recommendation is to withdraw before 20 December 2026, and I would take it: a withdrawal page that still works is a fact about today, while a withdrawal page that still works for years is a hope. Unofficial reporting agrees that the web app stays in limited capacity after the cutoff for withdrawals only, with no deadline for funds sitting in Safe accounts, though the official help centre page is looser, saying the web app is deprecated “by end of 2026” and that migration paths stay open “for as long as possible”. Trust the official page for what it says, and plan as though it will not be there.

Recurring payments will simply fail. They cannot be moved to another card for you. Cancel subscriptions, direct debits and standing orders yourself, with a date comfortably before 20 December, and do not wait until the week of the shutdown. Authorised-but-unsettled transactions will still complete after the cutoff. Refunds arriving after deactivation cannot be used on the card — so chase any pending refunds early, and note that support for refunds, disputes and chargebacks ends on 12 June 2028.

Your dispute rights survive. Rights for unauthorised or incorrectly executed transactions, and your card-scheme chargeback rights, are unaffected by the closure. Raise disputes promptly through [email protected] or the help centre; scheme time limits apply and they are much shorter than most people assume. Statutory rights against Monavate are not limited by the June 2028 date. Keep your receipts, and export your transaction history while the web app is alive, noting the last four digits and expiry date of the card.

Support is on a runway too. General cardholder support ends 18 June 2027; help centre at help.gnosispay.com and [email protected]; complaints at [email protected] — precisely, [email protected], which is forwarded to Monavate, or [email protected]. Complaints to Monavate can be made in English or Lithuanian; hours are not stated. Questions about a partner app go to the partner, not to Gnosis Pay.

Before you do anything else, capture the record: export transactions, write down the last four digits and the expiry, list every recurring payment, confirm you can reach your Safe independently, and move your balance out.

For context on what life was like with the card: the ATM terms were free up to five times a month or 200 EURe/GBPe/USDCe, then 2% with a minimum of 1 EUR/GBP, with a EUR 250 per-transaction and EUR 500 per-day ceiling. Spending limits were EUR 5,000 per regular transaction and up to EUR 8,000 per day. Top-ups came from a self-custody Safe, in EURe, GBPe and USDCe, with the site also naming USDC and EURC on Ethereum, Polygon and Gnosis Chain. Top-up fees and minimum top-ups are not stated on the card’s pages; unofficial sources say there was no Gnosis Pay percentage fee on top-ups, but that funding from another network may need a swap or a bridge with network or DEX costs, and that on-chain transfers pay gas. There was no gas fee for card transactions themselves — gas applied only to on-chain transfers, such as moving funds from your Safe to another wallet.

Card currencies were EURe, GBPe and USDCe, spent 1:1, so a EUR 10 purchase uses 10 EURe, with no Gnosis Pay conversion fee and Visa’s exchange rate applied automatically; the page advises choosing the local currency at terminals. A lost or stolen card replacement cost 4.99 EURe/GBPe/USDCe including shipping. Note the tension in the record: the help centre, possibly outdated, still listed a EUR 30.23 card purchase fee, while the current page says card order and shipping are free — treat free as correct and the 30.23 figure as a leftover.

There was no native iOS or Android app named by the official site; the card was managed through the web app at app.gnosispay.com, with Apple Pay and Google Pay supported, and no App Store or Google Play listing was found when checked. Rental-car agencies and automated fuel dispensers were restricted, usage was prohibited in certain countries, and unofficial sources report gambling blocked as a card category and excluded from cashback. Delivery time for the physical card is not stated officially; unofficial sources say about 2 weeks, up to 4.

What can go wrong

Some of this has already gone wrong, so it is worth reading the complaint record without flinching. On Trustpilot the score was 2.3 out of 5, labelled “Poor”, from 38 reviews, 21 of them in the last twelve months, with 58% one-star and 21% five-star, read on 20 October 2026; other regional pages showed 2.5. The recurring themes in user reports were these, and they are unusually specific:

• Support that did not answer. Chat, tickets and email unanswered for one to several weeks, reported across March to July 2026.
• Missing or blocked funds. Balances dropped after a failed payment or top-up, withdrawal attempts failing, transactions pending for two weeks or more, May to July 2026.
• KYC rejections without reasons, and “country not supported” for countries the site had listed, including Italy and Mexico, from April to August 2025 and May 2026, plus account deactivation and login problems in June to July 2026.

That is a support and operations picture, not a theft picture. Nobody’s money story here reads as an exit scam; it reads as a small programme stretched past its capacity, and then closed. If you are deciding whether to hold anything through 20 December, that distinction should inform how nervous you are: the risk is friction and delay, not disappearance.

Where the structural risk sits is worth understanding. A card number begins with a six or eight digit issuer identification number — the BIN — that merchants can look up to see which institution and country issued it, and some will apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from your billing address. That is why a card issued in one country can look foreign to a shop in another. Card payments involve several parties: the network (Visa or Mastercard) routes messages and sets rules, the issuer is the bank or e-money institution licensed to issue under that network’s licence, and the crypto brand is often only a programme manager and front end. Gnosis Pay sat in that third role. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves; they license issuers, and they 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 issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. So a closure of this kind is not a personal insult to the customer; it is the ordinary risk of a licence-dependent product.

Where the money sits is the other half. A prepaid card draws on a stored balance, while a standard debit card asks the holder’s bank for funds at the moment of purchase; most crypto cards behave like the prepaid model, and in the pre-loaded balance version the card simply cannot overdraw because it only spends what you loaded. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key or seed phrase, and a seed phrase is typically twelve to twenty-four words in an unencrypted form that anyone who obtains it can use to restore the wallet and spend the funds. Transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen key has no built-in recovery: the network cannot freeze or return the money. Custodial platforms have a real record of failure — Mt. Gox at roughly US$350 million reported stolen in 2011 to 2014, Coincheck at about US$400 million in 2018, Ronin Network at US$625 million in 2022. Gnosis Pay’s design was the opposite bet: self-custody, your signer key, your assets, with the company unable to move them. Unofficially, freeze and unfreeze, two-factor authentication, spending controls and insurance of funds are not stated for this card — which is a fair reason to want a self-custody architecture in the first place.

Then there are the payment-level frictions that will outlast this card. Address Verification Service compares the numeric parts of the billing address a buyer typed with issuer records; it is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which causes declines. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs precisely because the lookup reveals the type and country. Merchant category code 7995 covers gambling, and many issuers block it by policy rather than by law, with the list varying by issuer. A declined authorisation may leave a hold on your balance for several days, typically up to seven. And 3-D Secure adds an identity step to online payments — Visa’s brand is Visa Secure, Mastercard’s is Identity Check — under which liability for a fraudulent online payment can shift from the merchant to your bank.

Two operational warnings that apply to whatever you move to. First, funding a card from a network the provider does not support, or sending to an address belonging to another network, can lose the funds or require manual recovery with no guarantee. Second, stablecoins are not censorship-proof: Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity. Third-party sites also report Russia as a restricted country for this card, where use is prohibited — not something the card’s own pages confirm, and something you should verify against the current terms of whichever card you are considering rather than take from a review.

What to take instead

Three programmes are worth putting next to the closed card, and the honest comparison is against what Gnosis Pay did well: free issue, no transaction fee, self-custody.

Reading across the row for MetaMask, the thing to notice is that its fees are less transparent than Gnosis Pay’s ever were: “minimal fee for each transaction” with no amount on the pages read. What it does have is breadth of eligibility — sign-up open in 45 listed countries and territories including Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain and Uruguay, with a waitlist elsewhere and proof of residency required; ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending. Citizenship rule is not stated, and US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ. One card per user, spending directly from the connected wallet, with an interesting footnote: Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit.

KAST is the one to look at if you want tiered rewards and can afford the ladder, because its structure is unusual: Standard at $0, Premium at $1,000 a year, Private at $10,000 a year, billed annually upfront with no monthly option, plus 40 USD delivery on the Standard physical card, 1 USD per month inactivity after twelve months, 0.50 USD for a declined transaction and 0.10 USD on non-USD transactions under 25 USD. Its eligibility messaging is the strictest of the three: if your country is not shown at KYC it is not available there, and living in a supported country while holding an ID from a restricted region may still make you ineligible; a VPN does not bypass it. Note also that its Terms say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC” while the app lists PYUSD and RLUSD — a documentation conflict worth asking about.

Zeal is the loosest fit for a reader who wants something still crypto-native. It spends in 150+ countries with issuance depending on eligibility and regional availability, with a programme live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Accounts in EUR, USD and GBP, no additional FX fee and conversion at Visa’s wholesale rate. Its catch is alignment: because it runs on Gnosis Pay’s own rails, Gnosis Pay fees such as ATM charges may still apply — and Gnosis Pay’s own consumer card is closing, so how that relationship resolves is exactly the kind of question you should ask them in writing before loading anything. Its rewards are paid in GNO and require holding GNO in the card Safe.

Where I would not go: anything promising anonymity, no KYC, or guaranteed approval of a “proof of address” you do not have. KYC is not bureaucracy for its own sake — in the EU, customer 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, and if due diligence cannot be completed, the institution is required to stand aside or end the relationship. Nationality is screened separately from residence because sanctions and issuer risk policy are often applied to citizenship and country of birth too. Prepaid and debit cards are generally for adults aged 18+, some issuers set higher limits. A provider that tells you it does none of this is telling you something.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend this card to nobody as a forward choice, because it cannot be had. To people who hold one, I would recommend exactly three things, in order: export your transaction history and note the card’s last four digits and expiry before 20 December 2026; cancel every recurring payment yourself, well before the cutoff, since none of them will be moved for you; and withdraw your balance, or confirm independent access to your Safe through another interface with your signer key — not because the funds are in danger from Gnosis Pay, which structurally they are not, but because a withdrawal page is a fact today and a hope next year.

If you are starting from nothing, my honest ranking is MetaMask first on eligibility breadth and because its licence relationship is visible, with the caveat that its transaction fee is not published as an amount on the pages I read. Zeal second if you specifically want crypto-native rails and are willing to ask hard questions about what happens to Gnosis Pay’s fee structure after this closure. KAST only if you want the tier ladder and can afford it, and only after you have read its eligibility rules carefully, because they are the strictest. Whatever you pick, check three things before you load money: the legal issuer’s name and regulator, the date support and dispute handling end, and whether your funds sit in your own wallet or in the provider’s balance.

And check the plain background. A card is a payment service regulated separately from crypto, so a crypto card often rests on two licences at once — MiCA, the EU’s markets-in-crypto regulation which took legal effect in June 2023, with its token rules applying from 30 June 2024 and the remaining provisions from 30 December 2024, governs the crypto side, while e-money and payment-services law governs the card. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution, and the transitional period ran until 1 July 2026 or until a provider received or was refused authorisation, whichever came first. ESMA keeps an interim register you can actually check. Electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds by segregating or insuring them, and such funds are not bank deposits and may sit outside deposit guarantee schemes. In the US, FinCEN guidance treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters while ordinary users are not.

One last practical point about the assets themselves. Stablecoins aim to hold a steady value but, as the BIS put it in July 2025 with roughly 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in USDT and USDC, “despite the name, stablecoins are not necessarily stable”. USDC depegged briefly in March 2023 during the US banking crisis, and TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022. If your balance is denominated in one of these, your exposure to a depeg does not end when the card stops working. And if you are tax-resident anywhere sensitive to this, note only that the IRS treats digital assets as property, so spending crypto on goods generally produces a taxable gain or loss measured in local currency at the transaction’s fair market value — that is a description of how it works, not advice, and it is worth a conversation with your own accountant before you unwind a balance.

Frequently asked questions

What was Gnosis Pay card?

It was a Visa payment card, virtual and physical, that spent directly from a self-custodial Gnosis Chain Safe rather than from a balance held by a company. Issued by Monavate Limited under a Visa Europe licence, it charged no transaction fees and added no FX markup of its own, and it worked with Apple Pay and Google Pay. The consumer card and web app stop working on 20 December 2026 and the programme is being replaced by partner-issued cards.

How does Gnosis Pay card work?

You hold crypto and stablecoins in a Safe smart contract account on Gnosis Chain, and the card spends that balance 1:1 in EURe, GBPe or USDCe. There is no gas fee on a card purchase, because no on-chain transfer happens; gas applies only to on-chain transfers such as moving funds to another wallet. Settlement is T+1, and card payments fail once the programme closes.

Is Gnosis Pay a bank?

No. Gnosis Pay is the trading name of Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, a UK-registered company (No. 14919639), acting as technical services provider and programme manager — not the issuer. The issuer was Monavate Limited, an FCA-authorised electronic money institution (FRN 901097), for UK and non-EEA holders, and UAB Monavate under the Bank of Lithuania for EEA holders. An e-money institution cannot lend.

Who owns Gnosis Pay?

Ownership is not stated on the card’s public pages, so I cannot tell you who owns it. What the pages do say is the corporate structure: Gnosis Pay Co Ltd is registered in the UK, Monavate Limited issues the card under a Visa Europe licence, and Monavate handles complaints. Beyond that, the official pages are silent, and anything else you read would be third-party reporting.

Can I still apply for a Gnosis Pay card?

No. Issuance is closed, which is why availability scores zero out of ten. The card and web app stop working on 20 December 2026 at 23:59 UTC, and the consumer card is being replaced by cards issued through partners. Gnosis Pay’s site now promotes a business-to-business issuing platform with Startup and Enterprise tiers, which is a different product for companies, not for individual applicants.

What happens to my money after 20 December 2026?

Withdrawals stay open on the web app at app.gnosispay.com/withdraw with no deadline stated, though network fees may apply. The Safe is self-custodial, so neither Gnosis Pay nor Monavate can take your assets or block transfers, and you can reach the same Safe through third-party Safe interfaces with your existing signer key. Withdraw sooner rather than later.

What happens to subscriptions and recurring payments?

They will fail once the card stops authorising on 20 December 2026, and they cannot be transferred to another card for you. Cancel them yourself with a comfortable margin before the cutoff. Transactions already authorised but not yet settled will still complete, and any refund arriving after deactivation cannot be used on the card — so chase pending refunds early.

Can I still get a refund or file a dispute after closure?

Yes. Your rights for unauthorised or incorrectly executed transactions and your card-scheme chargeback rights are unaffected by the closure, and statutory rights against Monavate are not limited by any date. Raise disputes promptly via [email protected] or the help centre, because scheme time limits apply. Support specifically for refunds, disputes and chargebacks ends on 12 June 2028, and general cardholder support ends 18 June 2027.

Is Gnosis Pay card safe to use?

The funds were structurally yours — a self-custodial Safe, your signer key — so the usual custodial risk of a provider vanishing does not apply. The risks that did show up were operational: Trustpilot 2.3 out of 5 from 38 reviews, with reports of unanswered support tickets, blocked or missing balances, and KYC rejections without stated reasons. Freeze, spending controls and fund insurance are not stated for this card.

Was Gnosis Pay card free?

The current card page says yes: card order and shipping are free, and there are no transaction fees and no added FX fee from Gnosis Pay, with Visa’s exchange rate applied automatically. An older help centre page, possibly outdated, still listed a EUR 30.23 card purchase fee. A lost or stolen replacement cost 4.99 EURe/GBPe/USDCe including shipping, and ATM withdrawals were free up to five times a month or 200 units, then 2%.

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