Monolith shut its doors: score 1.8 out of 10

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

If you are here because you were thinking of getting a Monolith card, stop there: this card cannot be obtained. The service closed on 8 October 2024, the cards were deactivated, and the app was pulled out of the app stores. There is no application to fill in, no waiting list, no support desk that will open a new account. My score for the card as it stands today is 1.8 out of 10 — and the low mark is not about fees or limits, it is about the fact that the product simply does not exist any more.

The good news is that most of what the card used to hold for people was never in the card at all. It was in your own wallet, and it is still there if you kept your seed phrase. So this page does two things: it explains precisely what happened and what is still recoverable, and then it points you at cards that are actually operating today.

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

Verdict: 1.8 / 10, and the reason is not a fee schedule

Monolith scores 1.8 out of 10 because there is nothing left to score. A card that cannot be opened, cannot be loaded, and cannot be spent at is not a mediocre card — it is a closed product. The one thing that still functions is the redemption channel for people who held money on the card balance when the doors shut.

Here is the breakdown, criterion by criterion, with the numbers exactly as they came out of the review:

Only one mark is not zero, and it is the cost line — not because the fees were attractive, but because there is nothing left to charge for, and because the historical fees were, frankly, ordinary for the category.

Who this card suits now: nobody who wants a card. There is no version of “is Monolith right for me” that ends in a working product. The only audience still served is former holders who have a leftover balance sitting with Solaris and want to get it back. If that is you, the section on holders below is the part that matters.

Who it does not suit: anyone who was planning around it. If you read something recently — a comparison table, a thread, a “best crypto cards” list — that still shows Monolith as an option, that list was not updated, and I would treat it as a bad sign about the list rather than about you.

One thing worth saying plainly, because it comes up in searches: Monolith was never a bank. It was a programme run by a company, on top of a card issued by someone else. The card itself was issued by Solaris, and the operating company was the Lithuanian entity UAB “Belela”. When I explain what that means on this page, it is not a technicality — it is the single most useful thing to understand about why a shutdown can happen without anyone going bankrupt.

What happened to the programme

The closure was announced as effective 8 October 2024. On that date the services closed, the cards were deactivated and the accounts were closed. The stated reason was “increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK”. The closure notice does not mention MiCA by name, and I am not going to pretend it did.

The app was delisted from the app stores on 17 February — the page does not state the year, though the context points to 2025. That detail matters more than it looks: once the app is gone from the store, the in-app route to your seed phrase is gone too, unless you had already written the twelve words down. More on that in the holders section.

Some loose ends were still being tied up after the closure. In a 28 February 2025 update, Monolith said that details of the swap from the $TKN token to $TOKEN would follow in April 2025. The successor app is Token.com. The entity behind the service was UAB “Belela” in Lithuania, a virtual currency deposit and exchange operator with the code 305982313, and the site copyright is held by Token Group Ltd under licence to that company. The card issuer was Solaris.

What the public pages do not say, and what I will not invent: the closure notice carries no eligibility information, because eligibility no longer applies to anyone; it says nothing about KYC, because there is no one to verify; and it is silent on tiers, on delivery, and on KYC levels. Those are the blanks you get when a programme ends — the marketing pages go quiet rather than being updated.

One category point belongs here rather than later, because it explains the shape of the whole event. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves. They license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. There is a precedent worth knowing: in November 2022 Visa said it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX”, and the FTX US debit card programme was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme it backed. Shutdowns are a known shape in this category, not a rare freak accident.

So if your instinct is “this cannot happen to me” — it can, and it has happened several times. That is an argument for choosing a provider with a live, checkable authorisation and a real balance sheet behind it, not for avoiding the category.

If you already have the card

If you held Monolith, there are two completely separate piles of money, and it matters enormously which one you are looking at.

Pile one: the crypto in your wallet. This was always yours. The card spent from a non-custodial wallet — meaning the crypto stayed under your control and the card only drew on it. The official position is that your crypto remains accessible with the twelve-word seed phrase, imported into another wallet such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet. If you never saved the phrase, the seed was shown in the app under Settings, then Back up Seed. If the app is no longer available to you, that is a real problem, and it is worth acting on immediately rather than reading on.

Pile two: whatever was left sitting on the card balance. That is not in your wallet. That is held by the issuer, Solaris, and the route out is a request, not a withdrawal button. Officially, you submit a request on the Solaris Redemptions page with the subject “Redemption funds of Monolith customer”, you give payout account details in EUR or GBP — the card’s currency — and you attach a colour copy of your ID if the email address on the account differs from the one you are writing from. Solaris aims to respond within 14 days. That is a stated aim, not a guarantee, and I would treat the fourteen days as the start of the conversation rather than the end of it.

Two warnings on pile two. First, the app balance is no longer accurate, so do not use the app to work out what you are owed; the notice says so explicitly. Second, and this is the one that worries me more: the notice mentions no disputes and no compensation. There is no complaints process described, no chargeback route, nothing that reads like a redress mechanism. The redemption page is presented as the way out, and on the evidence available it is the only way out.

What is not stated: the top-up options after closure are simply gone — you cannot top up a card through Monolith any more, and the card programme is closed, so there is nothing to look up. Historical numbers, unofficial and not confirmed by the card, from a third-party source updated in March 2023: top-up with ETH, TKN, DAI, DGD, DGX, MKR, SAI or USDT; a 1% top-up fee that was avoided by topping up with DAI; a 1% community contribution avoided by topping up with TKN; up to 2% per top-up otherwise; 1.75% conversion outside the card’s currency; and no crypto-to-fiat exchange fee. Also unofficial and historical: a cash withdrawal limit of £350 (€378) a day and a spending limit of £7,500 (€8,113) a day. Neither matters now.

The general principle underneath all of this is worth stating, because it applies to every self-custody card you will ever hold: control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key or the seed phrase. A seed phrase is typically twelve to twenty-four words in an unencrypted form of the private key, and anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds. Blockchain transfers are typically irreversible, so a stolen key has no built-in recovery — the network cannot freeze or return anything. That is why the phrase is the thing to protect, and why an app disappearing from a store is a bigger deal for a self-custody wallet than for a normal bank app.

Support contacts as officially listed: Solaris Redemptions Support, by form and email, for card funds; Monolith via Telegram and email, for the TKN-to-TOKEN questionnaire. Languages and working hours are not stated, and I would not plan around getting a reply in any particular language.

What can go wrong

The biggest risk here already happened to the people who used this card, and the lesson generalises. Let me separate the risks that are specific to this shutdown from the ones you carry with any crypto card.

Specific to Monolith’s closure:

• *Your funds sit with a third party while you wait.* Solaris holds the leftover balance and aims to answer within 14 days. The card’s entity was a Lithuanian virtual currency operator; the issuer was Solaris. Two separate companies stand between you and the money, and one of them is the one that has to move it.
• *There is no stated dispute or compensation route.* The notice describes redemption and nothing else. If a request stalls, the material I read gives you no documented escalation path.
• *The app balance is unreliable.* It is explicitly no longer accurate, so do not negotiate from the number in the app.
• *The seed phrase may only be reachable through a tool that no longer exists.* The app was delisted. If your twelve words were never written down, your access path just narrowed considerably.
• *The TKN-to-TOKEN swap was promised for April 2025 and I cannot confirm how it landed.* Details were announced; the outcome is not something the card’s public pages state. Treat any token conversion connected to this programme as something to verify independently before acting on it, and be sceptical of anyone who approaches you about “completing” it.

General to this category, and the reason I score reliability at 1 rather than 0:

• *Custodial failures are documented and large.* Mt. Gox reported about US$350 million stolen across 2011 to 2014; Coincheck about US$400 million in 2018; the Ronin Network US$625 million in 2022. Holding funds with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk that does not exist when you hold the keys.
• *With a self-custody-linked card, you carry the other side of the trade.* Funds stay in your own wallet until the moment of payment, but sole responsibility for key loss, phishing, and clipboard-hijacking malware that silently swaps a copied address is yours.
• *Deposit insurance does not reach your crypto.* The notice is explicit that Lithuanian deposit insurance and the UK FSCS do not cover crypto activities, nor funds in a non-custodial wallet. If you have been assuming a compensation scheme covers your balance, that assumption is wrong.
• *The issuer can restrict the card at any time, including the tokenised version.* An issuer can block a tokenised card number on magnetic-stripe, phone or website use — the same mechanism behind Apple Pay, where the card number is replaced by a device-specific number in the Secure Element and each payment uses a one-time code.
• *A network fee can strand a deposit.* On-chain fees are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider, and gas is paid only in ETH — a wallet holding USDT with no ETH cannot send it. Each asset is accepted only on the networks a provider lists, and those can change.
• *Stability is assumed, not guaranteed.* Stablecoins can depeg: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis.

On complaints specifically for Monolith: I found none. There is no Monolith Trustpilot page, and a search on 20 October 2026 returned only unrelated card shutdowns. That is genuinely good news and I want to be fair about it. One piece of context, offered as context and not as a verdict: other Solaris-issuer closures have drawn Trustpilot complaints about slow refunds. I am not saying that will happen to you; I am saying the category precedent exists, which is why the redemption request is worth making early and keeping a record of.

What to take instead

Three cards are live, each with a different shape. I am not ranking them against each other so much as pointing you at the one whose model matches what you were getting from Monolith — which, given that Monolith was a non-custodial-wallet card, probably means you want to keep control of your own keys.

MetaMask — 7.1 / 10. This is the closest match to what Monolith was. It is a Mastercard, issued by Monovate with Crypto Life as card provider, virtual first (issued instantly) with a metal version you can pre-order in the app after virtual approval, one card per user. Spending draws directly from the connected wallet, on Linea, Base, Monad or Solana. The cost picture is simple: the virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee, the metal card is $199 a year, and the pages describe a “minimal fee for each transaction” with the amount not stated where I read it, no additional MetaMask fees, and no foreign transaction fee because the Mastercard rate is used. Rewards are real but modest: 1% cashback in mUSD on the virtual card, and on metal the headline is 3% with a footnote capping 3% at the first $10,000 spent and dropping to 1% after that. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories with proof of residency required; other regions join a waitlist. Card currency is not stated. Note the two limits that would have bitten a Monolith user: one card per user, and Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit.

RedotPay — 6.9 / 10. Virtual and physical, Visa debit in the Singapore terms, with a USD card (USD BIN) and an HKD card (HKB BIN). The cost is heavier than the others: virtual card application 10.00 USD, physical 100.00 USD and not cancellable or refundable once paid, virtual replacement 5.00 USD first and 10.00 USD each later; account maintenance is waived, and the paid tier RedotPay Pro is 12.90 USD monthly or 129.00 USD annual. The fee table, effective 1 December 2025, runs 1.00% as the crypto conversion fee, waived on the default currency and 1.20% on a non-default currency, 0.2 USD on small authorisations after five free per card per month, 0.5 USD on declines after three free, and 1.5% (minimum 0.50 USD) at some named merchants after three free. The 5 USD welcome reward is spending-only, valid 30 days, and cannot be applied to the issuance fee. Funding is an on-chain crypto deposit, or buying ETH, USDC or USDT with a credit card in the app depending on region, with a 1 USDT minimum on USDT-TRC20 after network fees and no deposit fee to the card balance. On eligibility, this is the one to read twice: two official lists word it differently. One, the KYC list, is framed by citizenship and says citizens of the listed countries cannot complete verification or use the services. The other, the card-issuance list dated 28 August 2026 with 47 places, is framed by residence and says residents of those areas are ineligible for both virtual and physical cards and cannot be billing addresses. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Serbia appear on both. Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan and the UAE appear on neither. Citizenship is not mentioned in the second list. If you are in a grey area, this is where an hour of reading saves a rejection.

Bybit Card — 6.0 / 10. Virtual and physical, with the card networks varying by region: Mastercard prepaid in Argentina, Mastercard credit card in AIFC, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Australia and Mexico, Visa prepaid in Brazil and Peru, Visa credit in Asia Pacific. Card currency follows the country of your Advanced Identity Verification. The cost is friendly at the entry point — virtual issuance is free in all regions “until further notice” — and physical issuance runs 29.99 USD in Australia, 5 USD or USDT in Argentina, 29.99 USDT in Georgia, Kazakhstan (AIFC) and Asia Pacific, and nothing in Brazil and Mexico, with VIP holders of several physical cards exempt. There is a “no annual fees” statement. Fees: 0.9% crypto conversion over the One-Click Sell rate, 0.5% in Argentina, and a 2% FX fee on top of the network rate in several regions — 7% in Argentina, 1.5% in Brazil, 1% in Peru, and 2% in Kazakhstan (AIFC) as an “International Fee” on purchases outside Kazakhstan even in USD. Argentina also carries VAT 21% on foreign digital services, a 30% tax on foreign transactions and provincial gross-income tax of 1% to 13.2%. Its rewards scheme is the most intricate of the three: from 5 October 2026 only crypto-funded transactions earn points or cashback, and tiers run from Base at 2.00% with a 5 USD monthly cap up to Infinite at 10% with a 600 USD cap.

A word on what is *not* in this table, so you are not misled by it: none of these is Monolith. Different issuers, different regulators, different funding models, and all three can change their fee tables — RedotPay’s carries an effective date, Bybit’s reward rules have a start date, MetaMask’s Metal cashback has a spending cap. Check the live terms before you move money, and check that your country appears on the eligibility list for the specific card you want, not just the company’s general sign-up list.

One last piece of background that bears on your choice. A card itself is a payment service regulated separately from crypto — a crypto card often depends on two licences. In the EU, MiCA took legal effect in June 2023; the rules on asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024, and the remaining provisions including crypto-asset service provider rules applied from 30 December 2024. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. Transitional “grandfathering” lets providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026 or until they receive or are refused a MiCA authorisation, whichever comes first. ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised providers that you can check. If you want to know whether a provider is inside the tent rather than beside it, that register is where to look.

Who I would recommend it to

To be blunt: I would recommend Monolith to nobody as a card to use, because it does not exist as a card to use. What I would recommend is this.

If you are reading this before doing anything with crypto cards at all: take MetaMask Card, if your country is on its 45-place sign-up list and you want your keys to stay yours. It is the least surprising thing for someone who was reading about Monolith, it is free to start, and it does not ask you to hold a balance with anyone but yourself. Accept that “minimal fee for each transaction” means a fee exists and the number is in a table you should open before you rely on it.

If you were using Monolith specifically because you wanted a card without touching an exchange: RedotPay is the more conventional answer, with a proper card balance and a stated fee schedule, but it is materially more expensive to enter and its eligibility rules are the most tangled of the three. Read both official lists before you start.

If you already hold a large balance with a platform and want a card tied to it: Bybit Card is built for that, and its tier structure rewards crypto-funded spending heavily — but read the reward change first, because from 5 October 2026 fiat-funded spending earns nothing, and Argentina’s fee stack is the one to watch if that is where you are.

And if you are one of the former holders with a balance at Solaris: you have a different job today, and it is a short one. Get your twelve words written down and verified by importing them into a wallet you control. Then make the redemption request with the exact subject line, your EUR or GBP payout details, and your ID if your email differs. Keep a copy of everything you send. And do not wait for the app to tell you what you are owed — the notice says its balance is no longer accurate.

I will say the uncomfortable thing too, since you would rather hear it here: crypto on a card balance is money you have handed to somebody else’s compliance department. Every one of the alternatives above can also close. The difference between Monolith and a live provider is not that one is safe and one is not. It is that one has already stopped, and you can see that from the outside.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Monolith card?

A debit card that spent directly from a non-custodial crypto wallet, run by the Lithuanian company UAB “Belela” and issued by Solaris. Unofficial and historical: it was a Visa card, aimed at the EEA (31 European countries), and reportedly could not be used in the USA or Asia. The service closed on 8 October 2024 and the cards were deactivated.

Is Monolith a bank?

No. It was a card programme run by a virtual currency deposit and exchange operator, UAB “Belela” (Lithuania, code 305982313), with the card itself issued by Solaris. The card network licenses the issuer, and the crypto brand is often only the programme manager and front end — which is why a shutdown can happen without any bankruptcy.

Why did Monolith close?

The closure was effective 8 October 2024, with services closed, cards deactivated and accounts closed. The stated reason was “increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK”. The notice does not mention MiCA by name, so I would not repeat that link as confirmed.

What happened to my crypto?

Your crypto was never held by Monolith. It stays accessible with the twelve-word seed phrase, which you can import into another wallet such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet. If you never saved it, the seed was shown in the app under Settings, then Back up Seed — but the app was delisted, so act now.

How do I get my money off the card balance?

The leftover balance is held by the issuer, Solaris. Submit a request on the Solaris Redemptions page with the subject “Redemption funds of Monolith customer”, payout account details in EUR or GBP, and a colour ID copy if your email differs. Solaris aims to respond within 14 days. Do not trust the app balance; the notice says it is no longer accurate.

Can I still top up a Monolith card?

No. Cards can no longer be topped up through Monolith, and the programme is closed. Unofficial and historical, from third-party coverage in March 2023: the accepted coins were ETH, TKN, DAI, DGD, DGX, MKR, SAI and USDT, with a 1% top-up fee avoided by using DAI and a 1% community contribution avoided by using TKN.

What did Monolith cost to use?

Historically and unofficially: a 1% top-up fee, up to 2% per top-up otherwise, 1.75% conversion outside the card’s currency, no crypto-to-fiat exchange fee, and no monthly or shipping fee if you used the card in the country where it was registered. There was no cashback. None of this is confirmed by the card, and none of it is usable now.

Is my money protected by deposit insurance?

No. The closure notice is explicit that Lithuanian deposit insurance and the UK FSCS do not cover crypto activities, nor funds held in a non-custodial wallet. That applies to the crypto side of any self-custody card, and it is worth remembering before you assume any scheme has you covered.

Is there a successor to Monolith?

The app was delisted from the stores, and Token.com is named as the successor. A swap from the $TKN token to $TOKEN was announced, with details promised for April 2025; the public pages do not state the outcome, so verify anything connected to that conversion independently.

What should I use instead?

For spending straight from your own wallet, MetaMask Card is the closest fit — free virtual card, cashback, one card per user, sign-up open in 45 listed countries. For a conventional loaded card balance, RedotPay costs more to enter but publishes a full fee table. If your balance already sits with an exchange, Bybit Card is built around that.

Was Monolith safe to use?

While it ran, it was non-custodial: you held the seed phrase and the crypto stayed in your wallet. But nothing protected the card balance itself from a closure, and nothing covered it by deposit insurance. The proof of how little that protection was worth is the fact that the product stopped existing.

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