What SORA card holders face now that the programme is shut

Updated October 2026

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The SORA card is not something you can apply for today. The programme stopped issuing cards, and on 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT the card functions inside the app were switched off. That single fact shapes everything else on this page, so I want to be blunt about it at the start: this is a review of a closed product, not a shopping guide. If you landed here searching for a card to sign up with, you have arrived a year too late for that particular programme and the more useful question is what to do next — either with money you already had loaded, or with the card you were planning to get.

There was a card here worth reading about. SORA was a physical and digital debit card aimed at people who wanted to spend from a crypto balance converted to euros, without handing the crypto itself to a card issuer. Its fees were genuinely low at the entry level, and the client membership cost €39 a year only after the first year. But a card is a promise about next month, not a discount on this month’s purchases. When the issuer suspended accounts and the app stopped giving anyone access to their balance, the low fees stopped mattering entirely.

My score for the card as it now stands is 2.2 out of 10. That is not a judgement of how the team ran it while it was live — it is a rating of what you would get as a new applicant or an existing holder today, and on that question the answer is close to nothing.

Who suits this page: anyone who still has a balance, an account or a pending complaint connected to SORA, and anyone who was considering the card and wants to know whether the same idea still exists elsewhere. Who it does not suit: readers looking for a list of cards to sign up for this month — the comparison section exists for that, but read the closure facts first, because they explain why the alternative table is not just a list of rivals.

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

Score card

The breakdown tells the story more neatly than the total does. Cost is the only criterion that scores above zero, because the published price sheet was, on paper, competitive. Everything that depends on the programme continuing to exist — who can get it, top-up options, reliability, everyday use — scores at or near the floor. That is the shape of a closed product: the price survives, the service does not.

What happened to the programme

I checked the official notice first, because this is the part where the card’s own pages are the most reliable source available. A notice dated 10 January 2026 announced that the card, the app and the card functions would stop after Friday 30 January 2026, 18:00 GMT. The same notice told users that any crypto in GateHub wallets had to be withdrawn before the cutoff, and that SORA Wallet would continue. It also recorded that Unlimit, the issuer, had suspended some accounts earlier. No cause was stated in the notice, and I did not find an explanation elsewhere on the pages I read.

So the sequence, as far as the public record shows it, is: the issuer began suspending accounts; the operator announced a full stop with about 20 days’ notice; card functions ended at the stated moment; and the app stopped giving access to balances. That is a wind-down, not a technical outage. There is no “coming back” language anywhere in what I read.

Before the closure, the eligibility rule was residence-based, not nationality-based: the card was for EEA residents who passed KYC. Residents of Russia, Iran and the DPRK were not eligible, with a fuller list published at a /blacklist page. KYC itself required a selfie, an ID document and proof of address — no tiered levels and no stated processing time. If you were reading about this card as a possibility, the “who can get it” answer was already narrow: an EEA resident with documents to hand.

The card itself was both physical and digital, a debit card; the network it ran on is not stated on the pages I read, so I will not guess at it. Fees, dated 17 September 2024, were: first card €0 whether virtual or physical, €0 monthly, and client membership of €39 per year charged after the first year. International card payments were €0.90 plus 1.1%. Domestic payments were free for the first 10 online and 10 point-of-sale transactions a month. Top-up was €0. Crypto conversion went through an XOR/EUR partner, with the spread not stated.

Apple Pay and Google Pay were promised for “Phase 2” — a phrase that, in hindsight, was doing a lot of work. The list of blocked merchant categories is not stated, and neither are rewards: the card simply had none described. There was a single product, no tiers, and the €39 membership after year one was the only paid level. Currency handling was direct conversion between XOR and EUR, with a note that withdrawals in a currency other than the card currency are charged as international — although the card currency itself is never named.

If you want the structure rather than the timeline: SORA Biome, in Bulgaria, ran the site and the apps. The card was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd in Cyprus, an electronic money institution licensed by the Central Bank of Cyprus under licence 115.1.3.7. That distinction matters, and I will come back to it in the risks section, because it decides whose balance you are waiting on.

The dates, in order

• Notice of termination published: 10 January 2026
• GateHub wallets had to be emptied before the cutoff
• Card, app and card functions stopped: Friday 30 January 2026, 18:00 GMT
• Balances: no longer accessible through the app after that moment

If you already have the card

This is the section I would read twice if the money is yours. Here it is without softening.

After 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT, the app gives no access to balances. The only route stated is Unlimit support, at [email protected]. Accounts that were suspended may still show a balance while remaining inaccessible until Unlimit reviews them. And the part that has drawn the most criticism from anyone reading this situation: SORA cannot submit release requests on your behalf. You are not queuing behind a support queue that will eventually process your case — you are contacting the issuer yourself, and the operator says it cannot act as an intermediary.

I want to be careful about tone here, because there is a real temptation to write the paragraph a commentator would write. I did not find Reddit or Trustpilot reports to substantiate a pattern of complaints; the Trustpilot page for soracard. exists but no reports were found on 20 October 2026, and none of the public pages describe a dispute process (the details of disputes are not stated on the pages I read). So the honest position is this: the mechanics of the closure are officially documented and they are unfavourable, but I am not going to tell you what the crowd’s experience has been when I have no evidence to present.

What you can and cannot do, based on what is stated:

• You cannot reach your balance through the app.
• You can contact the issuer at [email protected].
• You cannot have SORA submit the request for you.
• You cannot expect SEPA withdrawals as an exit route — outgoing SEPA and SEPA Instant were €0.50 each while live, and that route is now inside the closed app.

The mechanics of getting money in, for the record, were conversion of XOR into EUR or a SEPA transfer, at a ledger load fee of €0, with no minimum stated and no way to load crypto directly onto the card. ATM withdrawals were €1.20 plus 3% in the domestic region of the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, and €1.75 plus 3% internationally, with the balance inquiry free once a month. Spending limits were said to be on the fees page, but the amounts are not present there, and neither closure fees nor replacement cost are listed anywhere.

Support channels, if you need them: soracard.com/support and soracard.com/contact, plus [email protected], and Discord, Telegram, X and Reddit accounts. The site is in English and Spanish; Russian is not offered. Hours are not stated.

My one piece of practical advice is not about the card at all. Whatever balance is showing, whether it looks accessible or not, write to the issuer now rather than in a week’s time, and keep the whole exchange. Not because writing sooner changes the outcome — I have no evidence that it does — but because a documented request with a date on it is worth more to you later than an undated one, whatever route the resolution eventually takes. And if the amount is significant to you, a lawyer who works on payment disputes is the person to pay before you pay anyone else. That is not tax or legal advice; it is the observation that consumer e-money disputes have their own procedures and deadlines, and that they are not something you should learn while the clock is already running.

What can go wrong

The obvious thing has already happened, so this section is about the part that has not resolved yet.

You are dependent on a company you never had a relationship with. SORA Biome ran the app and the site. Unlimit EU Ltd issued the card. That separation is normal in this industry — an e-money institution is the one licensed to issue, while the crypto brand is often just the programme manager and front-end — but it means the entity that must give your money back is not the entity whose name is on your phone screen. Right now it is also the entity that suspended some accounts and has not finished reviewing them. If your balance sits with an electronic money institution, it is supposed to be safeguarded: EMIs must segregate customer funds in dedicated accounts or insure them. Those funds are not bank deposits, and this one is not covered by Cyprus deposit insurance, which is stated plainly on the issuer’s side of the arrangement.

Self-custody cuts both ways. The crypto side was genuinely yours: SORA Wallet is self-custodial, you keep the keys, and two-factor authentication and biometrics were mentioned. That is a real advantage over handing over a seed phrase to someone else, and it is why the GateHub withdrawal instruction made sense — assets in a wallet under your control could be moved out before the cutoff, while a balance sitting in a card account could not. But the same structure means losses are unrecoverable in a different way: transfers on these networks are typically irreversible, and a stolen key has no built-in recovery, because the network cannot freeze or return funds. The classic historical record of custodial custody failures — Mt. Gox at around US$350 million reported stolen between 2011 and 2014, Coincheck at around US$400 million in 2018, Ronin Network at US$625 million in 2022 — is the reason people ask for self-custody at all.

The phone app was the only door. Card freeze was not described, and the dispute process is not stated on the pages I read. So the safety features people normally rely on — instant freeze, spending limits, a chargeback route with reason codes for fraud or goods not received — cannot be assumed here. With mobile wallets, there is a second thing worth understanding: Apple Pay stores a device-specific number in the Secure Element rather than on Apple’s servers, and each payment carries a one-time dynamic code. An issuer can also restrict a tokenised number to specific channels. None of that helps if the card behind it has been switched off.

Shopping friction you cannot control. A card’s first six or eight digits identify the issuing institution, and any merchant can look that up to see which institution and country issued it. If the issuer’s country differs from your billing address, some shops apply extra scrutiny, and some decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards outright. Address verification, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address a buyer typed against issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines. A declined authorisation may also leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to seven. Gambling is classified under its own merchant category code, and many issuers block it on specific cards by policy rather than by law — the list varies by issuer. None of this is SORA-specific; it is the category’s texture, and it is the part that makes a “cheap card” less useful than its fee sheet suggests.

The regulatory backdrop. MiCA, the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation, took legal effect in June 2023; its rules on stablecoins applied from 30 June 2024, and the remaining provisions, including the rules for crypto-asset service providers, from 30 December 2024. E-money tokens may only be issued by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. Transitional (“grandfathering”) arrangements let providers operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026, or until they are granted or refused a MiCA authorisation, whichever comes first. ESMA maintains an interim register of authorised providers, white papers and non-compliant entities, and it is worth checking what is on it for any provider you are considering. Note also that a card is a payment service regulated separately from the crypto side: a crypto card often depends on two licences, and the one that holds your balance is the one that matters when something stops.

On taxes, only this: the IRS treats digital assets as property, so converting or spending them generally produces a taxable gain or loss, measured in local fiat currency at fair market value on the date of the transaction. Each card payment funded from crypto may therefore be a separate disposal. Whether that applies to you, and how, is a question for a professional in your own country, not for me.

What to take instead

Below is what I could find among alternatives currently operating. I am not ranking them beyond the scores the comparison produced, and I am not telling you which one to take — the right answer depends on where you live, how much you need day to day, and whether you want to hold crypto directly or a converted balance. What I can tell you is that each of these is open in a way SORA is not.

MetaMask

Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France and Spain among the examples — with other regions on a waitlist. Proof of residency is required, and the stated principle is that ineligible regions limit sign-ups rather than spending. Citizenship rules are not stated. US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ. The card is a Mastercard issued by Monovate, with Crypto Life as card provider, and the card currency is not stated.

On cost, the virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee, and the Metal card is $199 a year. Fees are described as a minimal fee per transaction, with the amount not stated on the pages I read, plus no additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee — the Mastercard rate is used. Rewards are cashback in mUSD into the Money Account: 1% on Virtual, and on Metal a headline 3% with a footnote limiting 3% to the first $10,000 spent and 1% thereafter. There is also a $FLY bonus of 5X on Virtual and 7X on Metal through the Blackbird dining app. Tokens named include mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT, the page saying nine. Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit.

KAST

KAST is the one to read carefully before you start, because its eligibility rule is stricter than its marketing suggests. The country list is shown at KYC — if your country is not listed, KAST is not available there — but the list itself is not published, and a Restricted Locations list is referenced without naming countries. Citizenship matters separately: living in a supported country while holding only an ID from a restricted region may still make you ineligible for KYC. Dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass. Only the account holder’s own ID is accepted, and a VPN does not bypass any of this. An account can be created in an unsupported country, but KYC stays locked.

The card is Visa, virtual and physical, up to 10 cards per user: Visa Platinum (Standard), Visa Infinite metal (Premium) and Visa Infinite gold plated (Private), with other designs including Pengu, Solana and Bitcoin. Balances are held in USD, with stablecoin deposits converted 1:1 at 0% spread.

Costs are the steep part. Annual membership is 0 USD for Standard, 1,000 USD for Premium and 10,000 USD for Private, billed annually upfront with no monthly option. An extra virtual card is 2 USD, in some regions also 2 USD on the included Standard virtual cards. A Standard physical card carries a 0 USD card fee plus 40 USD delivery, while Premium and Private physical cards are included. An inactivity fee of 1 USD a month applies after 12 months, and renewal and reactivation fees exist with amounts not stated.

Transaction costs are unusually transparent: stablecoin top-up 0%, card spend in USD 0%, transaction fee 0%, Apple and Google Pay 0%. The costs that do exist are the non-USD foreign exchange fee of 0.5%–1.75% depending on your residence country, the transaction country and the card programme; 0.10 USD for non-USD transactions under 25 USD; and 0.50 USD for a declined transaction caused by insufficient balance. Non-stablecoin tokens may be auto-converted at a fee shown in the app. Funding is by USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD, with USDT and USDC available on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and TRON, and no bank account needed — though the Terms say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”, which conflicts with the app’s PYUSD and RLUSD listings. Spending draws on your own balance, with each purchase deducted straight away; this is not credit.

Rewards are USD cashback: 1.5% on the first 2,000 USD a month for Standard, 2% on the first 10,000 USD for Premium, 3% on the first 40,000 USD for Private. KAST Points add none on Standard, +1% on Premium and +2% on Private of eligible spend. Cashback is paid in USD when the transaction is authorised.

Zeal

Zeal lets you spend in 150 or more countries, though issuance depends on eligibility and regional availability. The card programme is live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, with Zeal update notes also mentioning Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia. The card is Visa: a virtual card for online use that can be added to Apple Pay, with accounts in EUR, USD and GBP as described in the Gnosis Pay documentation. Whether a physical card exists is not stated.

Costs are not stated — no fee schedule is published on zeal.app or in the App Store listing. What is stated is that Zeal charges no additional foreign exchange fee and converts at the Visa wholesale rate, while Gnosis Pay fees, such as ATM charges, may still apply. Funding comes from balances in the card Safe, being EUR, USD or GBP stablecoin accounts, on Gnosis Chain and Celo per the docs; the exact coins are not stated for Zeal. Rewards are up to 4% cashback, paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain, with GNO held in the card Safe to qualify and rates subject to change. The App Store listing also advertises up to 5% variable APY on EUR/USD balances.

What the comparison does and does not tell you

The honest caveat: none of the “not established here” entries mean risk-free. They mean I did not investigate closure history for these providers, and I am not going to imply a safety record I have not checked. What I have checked is that these products are described as operating, with published eligibility rules and fee schedules of varying completeness — Zeal publishes no fee schedule at all, which is itself worth noticing before you rely on the absence of listed fees.

The category risk sits with everyone. In November 2022 Visa terminated its 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 all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Closures typically follow a pattern: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. It is a normal end, not an extraordinary one, which is precisely why you should keep the withdrawal window in mind with any card in this category — including these three.

Who I would recommend it to

Nobody, as a card to open today. That is the plain answer, and I would rather give it plainly than dress it up.

I would recommend reading this page to you if you fall into one of these groups instead:

• You have a balance or an open complaint. Read the holders section, write to [email protected] today, and keep the record. Whether you then involve a professional depends on the amount, not on how annoyed you are.
• You were planning to sign up. You cannot. What you can do is take the same underlying idea — spend crypto without giving up custody of it — to a provider that is open. MetaMask is the closest in spirit to the self-custody version; KAST and Zeal are balance-based, closer to what SORA actually was.
• You are holding crypto on a service’s platform generally. The lesson from SORA is not about cards. Assets you hold under your own keys were movable before the cutoff; assets sitting in someone else’s account were not. That asymmetry is worth thinking about across everything you hold, not just the card that no longer works.

And if you are the person who was already using SORA happily and just wants to know whether to move on: yes. The programme that served you is not coming back, and the choice in front of you now is between alternatives and holding funds in the old place. I cannot tell you which is right for your situation, and I would not want to guess at the value of a balance I cannot see.

Frequently asked questions

What is the SORA card?

The SORA card was a physical and digital debit card that let users spend a balance converted from the XOR token into euros, or topped up by SEPA transfer. It ran on the SORA app, operated by SORA Biome in Bulgaria, while the card itself was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd, an electronic money institution in Cyprus. There was no direct crypto load onto the card; conversion went through an XOR/EUR partner with the spread not stated.

How does the SORA card work?

You would convert XOR to EUR or send a SEPA transfer to fund a balance, and the card would spend from that stored balance rather than drawing on a bank account at the moment of purchase. Top-up cost €0, domestic payments were free for the first 10 online and 10 point-of-sale transactions a month, and international payments cost €0.90 plus 1.1%. Physical and digital issuance, activation and delivery of the first card were all €0.

Is SORA a bank?

No. SORA Biome is a Bulgarian company that ran the site and the apps, and the card was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd, an electronic money institution licensed by the Central Bank of Cyprus under licence 115.1.3.7. An electronic money institution can issue e-money, payment cards and e-wallets but cannot lend, and the funds it holds are not bank deposits — this programme was expressly not covered by Cyprus deposit insurance.

Who owns SORA?

The site’s operator is SORA Biome, in Bulgaria, which also publishes the iOS and Android apps. The issuer of the card programme is Unlimit EU Ltd in Cyprus. That distinction is not a technicality: when the programme closed, balances became subject to Unlimit’s review rather than SORA’s, and SORA stated it could not submit release requests on users’ behalf.

Is the SORA card available in my country?

No, in any country. Issuance is closed — the card and the app’s card functions stopped after 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT. Before the closure, eligibility was based on residence rather than nationality: EEA residents who passed KYC, with residents of Russia, Iran and the DPRK excluded. KYC meant a selfie, an ID document and proof of address.

Can I use the SORA card in my country?

Not any more. After the cutoff, the app gives no access to balances, which means neither the physical card nor the digital one functions as a payment method. Spending and loading had already been part of the closed system, and outgoing SEPA and SEPA Instant withdrawals — €0.50 each while live — were routes that existed only inside the app that is now shut.

How do I withdraw money from SORA?

Through Unlimit, not through SORA. The only route stated after 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT is Unlimit support at [email protected]. Accounts suspended before the closure may display a balance while remaining inaccessible until Unlimit completes its review, and SORA stated it cannot submit release requests for users, so any request has to be made by you directly to the issuer.

How do I delete my SORA account?

The card functions in the app ended on 30 January 2026, so there is no card to close off in the way there used to be. Account deletion was not described on the pages I read, and the support routes that remain are soracard.com/support, soracard.com/contact and [email protected]. Before doing anything to the account, make sure any balance question has been raised in writing with the issuer, because the account is the only record of what you are owed.

Is the SORA card safe?

Safety has two sides. The crypto side was self-custodial: SORA Wallet kept your keys with you, and two-factor authentication and biometrics were mentioned, which meant crypto held in a GateHub wallet could be withdrawn before the cutoff. The card side was not self-custodial, and its funds were not covered by Cyprus deposit insurance. With the card functions ended, the practical safety question is no longer about fraud but about whether the balance is reachable at all.

Is the SORA card worth it?

While it was live, the price sheet was among the more attractive in the category: €0 for the first card, €0 monthly, €0 top-up, €39 a year for membership only after the first year, and no annual fee beyond that. Worth is a different question from cheap, though, and the answer turned out to be no — the programme closed, and with it the entire reason the fees were low. That is the one lesson I would carry to any card in this category.

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