A self-custody Visa that works well on a normal spending day, built on a card programme its issuer has already said it is closing

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Zeal card is a Visa you spend from a stablecoin balance you hold yourself. There is no bank account behind it, no deposit guarantee, and no company holding your coins: the money sits in your own wallet and the card spends it as you pay. On the mechanics of an ordinary day — buying coffee, paying a hotel, adding the card to Apple Pay — it does the job well and charges no foreign-exchange fee of its own. What sits on top of that, and what I cannot ignore while writing this review, is that the company that runs the card programme, Gnosis Pay, has announced that it will close its consumer card and web app at 23:59 UTC on 2026-12-20 and move to a business-to-business model. Zeal’s own future plans are not confirmed on its public pages. That single fact should shape how you read everything else below.

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

I scored this card 6.1 out of 10. That is a mid-table number, and it is not a judgement on whether Zeal works — it works. It is a judgement on a card that is good at the job it was built for, sitting on a programme with a published end date and thin public pricing.

Before the details, the short version of who this suits. If you already keep your crypto in self-custody, you hold or are ready to hold EUR, USD or GBP stablecoins, you want a card that spends that balance without handing your keys to anyone, and you mostly spend in the currencies the card is built around — this is a sensible card. If you need a bank card, a credit line, a card with a published fee schedule you can read before you commit, or a provider that has told you what happens in three years — this is not the one.

The score, criterion by criterion

The reliability mark is what drags the total down, and it is worth being blunt about why. Three separate things are going on at once: the issuer is closing the programme, the cashback that was one of the card’s selling points has already ended, and user reviews on both the app’s store listing and Trustpilot mention transfer problems and slow support. A card that is easy to use and cheap is still hard to recommend at a moment when its issuer has published a wind-down date.

Will they give you the card?

Probably, if you are in a supported region and clear identity checks — but the region matters more than the app suggests. Zeal says you can spend in 150+ countries, and that is the acceptance side: it is the issuing side that is restricted. Zeal’s own wording is that issuance “depends on eligibility and regional availability”.

The card programme itself is documented as live in the EU, the UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, according to the Gnosis Pay documentation. Zeal’s own update notes have separately added card support for Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia.

Now the part you will read on comparison sites rather than on Zeal’s pages, and which I could not confirm with the card itself: third-party listings from around August and September 2026 describe the EEA and UK as stated requirements, show an order screen covering the EU, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway, and say the card is unavailable in the US and much of the Asia-Pacific region. One of them counts 36 countries available and 21 restricted, and lists Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico under Latin America. The same source lists Bolivia as both supported and “coming soon”, which is a contradiction rather than a fact. None of this is confirmed by Zeal. If your country is not in the first list above, the honest answer is that I cannot tell you from public pages whether you will be offered the card.

One practical point that trips people up: eligibility is residence and region, not citizenship. KYC screening in this industry often records nationality separately from address and applies to both, but the published lists here are about where you live. If you live in a supported country but hold an ID from somewhere else, that is exactly the situation where approval can fail late, and Zeal publishes nothing on it.

How to get it

It is a short application — sign in, clear Gnosis Pay’s identity check, and the virtual card appears first. The virtual card is what you actually spend with day to day: it is a Visa for online use and it can be added to Apple Pay. Zeal describes the card as a Visa debit card issued by Monavate Limited together with Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, offered as both a virtual and a physical card.

What is not stated is almost as important as what is. Zeal’s public pages do not publish KYC tiers, processing times or the reasons an application can be rejected. They do not state which documents are needed or what age applies. Gnosis Pay’s onboarding does include KYC after you sign in with Ethereum, with verification handled through Sumsub, but the detail of that check lives with the issuer rather than on Zeal’s site.

On unofficial lines from a third-party site in August 2026: full identity and address verification, age 18+, a government ID or passport plus proof of address issued within the previous three months, handled through Sumsub — and an explicit warning that uploading documents does not guarantee approval. Neither site publishes KYC levels or timing.

Physical delivery: Zeal says physical cards are offered but does not say which countries they ship to, how long delivery takes or what it costs. Unofficial sources say physical shipping is free and that delivery time is not stated; an older Gnosis Pay fee page, of unclear date, promised delivery within 10 days after shipping verification.

If you are here because an ordinary bank card is proving difficult — and for many readers of this kind of review that is the real reason — then the honest summary is that the Zeal path runs through a UK-licensed e-money issuer’s onboarding, and that is the same kind of check any regulated provider will run. Nothing here is a way around that; it is just what the route looks like.

Fees and limits: what it really costs

Zeal itself adds no foreign-exchange fee and no monthly charge, but the card publishes no complete fee schedule at all — so part of what you pay is only knowable from unofficial sources. The honest answer to “is Zeal card free” is: the parts Zeal states are free, and the rest is documented elsewhere or not at all.

What Zeal states plainly: it charges no additional FX fee, and conversion happens at the Visa wholesale rate. Spending goes through at the mid-market rate. Gnosis Pay’s own fees — ATM withdrawals being the obvious example — can still apply on top.

What Zeal does not state: any fee schedule. There is none published on zeal.app or in the App Store listing. Limits are not stated either; Zeal points to Gnosis Pay’s fees-and-limits documentation, and that document is not retrievable.

The unofficial picture, from two third-party sites in August and September 2026, is as follows. Treat it as unofficial and verify in the app before you rely on it.

There is also a confusing counter-signal worth knowing about: an older Gnosis Pay fee page lists a card purchase fee, but that source is outdated and unconfirmed by the current Zeal documentation. Do not treat any such older figure as your price.

Three everyday payments, and what applies

A coffee abroad: you pay the Visa rate and nothing else. Zeal charges no additional FX fee on top of the Visa wholesale rate, so if you are spending euros in a eurozone country there is no conversion to argue with at all. If you are spending dollars in Japan or pounds in Britain, the conversion happens at the network rate. That is the genuinely good part of this fee story.

A hotel booking in a currency the card does not hold: same rule, plus the stablecoin risk. The card holds EUR, USD and GBP accounts. Anything else comes out of one of those, so you get the Visa conversion rate but you are also exposed to whatever the stablecoin does against its peg in the meantime. Stablecoins can and do move: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, and USDC briefly lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. The 2% ATM fee is irrelevant here, and the FX fee is zero — but none of that protects you from the peg.

Withdrawing cash from an ATM in a city you have never visited: here the money does come out of your pocket. Under the unofficial terms, the first 5 withdrawals or 200 units in a month are free, whichever runs out first, and after that it is 2% per withdrawal, capped at 250 per withdrawal and 500 per day. Two things to hold onto: those figures are unofficial, and Gnosis Pay’s fees are the ones that actually govern the withdrawal even though Zeal is the front end.

Cashback, which is not a fee but changes the arithmetic. Up to 4% cashback paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain, and it only qualifies if you hold GNO in the card Safe — so the rate is a function of your own holdings, and rates can change. The App Store also advertises up to 5% variable APY on EUR and USD balances. The important date: GNO cashback eligibility ended 2026-09-30. If you were reading about this card because of the cashback, that particular argument for it has already expired.

There are no paid tiers and no second card product to upgrade to. One card, one fee structure, and a rewards rate that moves.

How to Top up the card

You load the card Safe from your own wallet, and Zeal does not publish the top-up fee, the minimum, or the network fee. That is the weakest part of the documentation, and the reason the top-up mark is only 5 out of 10.

What is clear: the card spends from balances held in the card Safe, in EUR, USD and GBP stablecoin accounts, on the Gnosis Chain and Celo networks per the docs. The exact coins are not stated for Zeal. Unofficial sources name EURe, GBPe and USDCe as what the card accounts hold.

Bank transfers work, and the routes are named: euro transfers are processed by Monerium ehf, other transfers by Unblock LT UAB. Neither the fees for those transfers nor the network fee for a crypto top-up is stated. Unofficial sources say a SEPA top-up arrives in one to two business days, and that conversion, off-ramp and gas fees are 0% — with the important caveat that bridging on Ethereum still needs gas.

That last point is the one that catches people. If you hold tokens on Ethereum and they need to reach Gnosis Chain or Celo, you pay the network to do it. On-chain fees are charged by the blockchain, not by the card, and they are not part of any Zeal schedule.

One structural feature worth pausing on: this is self-custodial. Funds stay in your own wallet and the Safe, which means no company can freeze or seize them — and also that lost funds are very unlikely to be recoverable. Earn balances in USD or EUR are withdrawable 24/7 with no lockups. What Zeal does not state: the steps and fees for withdrawing the card balance, and what happens to any balance still on the card when it closes.

On that last point, be careful. When a card programme winds down, the usual sequence is a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then users are asked to withdraw what is left. A secondary report of one 2026 closure described new loads ending 8 July 2026 and spending stopping 8 August 2026 — a single unconfirmed source, but the shape of it is what you are dealing with here too.

Paying with it every day

This is where the card earns its keep: a Visa you add to Apple Pay and forget about, spending a balance you control. Apple Pay is supported for the virtual card. Google Pay is not confirmed by Zeal; unofficial sources say it is supported and, usefully, that Google Pay is not subject to the physical-card contactless limit. Blocked merchant categories are not stated by Zeal and not stated by the unofficial sources either — and that matters, because gambling (MCC 7995) is one of the categories issuers commonly block on specific cards by policy rather than by law, with the list varying by issuer.

The app: iPhone on iOS 16.2 or later, or Mac with M1 and later, plus Vision Pro. The App Store listing showed 4.5 out of 5 from 17 UK ratings when I read it, version 0.33.3 dated 1 September. The Google Play rating I did not read, so I cannot tell you what Android users think.

What makes this different from a normal prepaid card is the control layer. Authentication is by biometric passkey, there are real-time transaction alerts, you can freeze the card in the app, the wallet has been audited with a published security policy, and there are Safety Checks and transaction previews before you sign. That is a genuine answer to the question people ask next: no, nobody can freeze your balance — but you can freeze the card.

Where reviews get unhappy: the App Store reviews mention problems transferring from balance to card, and slow support. Zeal’s own Trustpilot reply to a fraud-related complaint was that card disputes take time. Zeal does not publish anything about how disputes are handled — how long they take, what evidence you need, what your chances are. Unofficial sources also found nothing. So the practical answer to “what if someone charges my card fraudulently” is: freeze it in the app, and expect the rest to be slow and undocumented.

What can go wrong

The largest risk is not technical, it is programme-level: the issuer has announced it is closing the consumer card. Gnosis Pay announced it will close its consumer card and web app at 23:59 UTC on 2026-12-20 and move to a B2B model. The notice to cardholders is dated 2026-09-21, with other outlets picking it up on 2026-09-25. Users are being directed to partner apps for replacement cards, with MiniPay named. Safe funds stay accessible and the web app stays in a limited form for withdrawals. And GNO cashback eligibility ended 2026-09-30.

One secondary report says Zeal has not confirmed its own future plans, and I could not find a Zeal statement on the matter. So: the card is built on a programme with a published expiry, and the app on top of it has not said publicly what it does next. If you are reading this because you are considering getting the card, that is the first question to ask — of Zeal, in writing.

Second risk: a security incident that hit card Safes directly. On 2026-06-01 an exploit affected an ERC-1271 module and card Safes were impacted. The security tooling around it is real — audited wallet, passkeys, transaction previews, instant freeze — but it is security tooling on top of smart contracts, which is a different category of risk from a bank’s.

Third: money you cannot get back. Self-custody cuts both ways. No bank or company can freeze or seize your funds, and equally, lost funds are very unlikely to be recovered. Crypto transfers are typically irreversible and a stolen private key has no built-in recovery — the network cannot freeze or return it. And be careful with the mechanics: an ERC-20 wallet with USDT but no ETH cannot send, because gas is paid only in ETH. A deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to another network, can simply be gone.

Fourth: the support record. Zeal’s Trustpilot shows 3.5 out of 5 from 17 reviews — the page also showed 3.7 when I looked. A January 2026 one-star review describes support requests going unanswered for two weeks, and Zeal apologised publicly. A 2026 review describes a scam transaction with slow dispute handling. The issuer Gnosis Pay sits at 2.3 out of 5 from 38 reviews, with 58% one-star, again citing slow or unanswered tickets. App Store reviews add balance-to-card transfer problems. I found no official incident report; these are individual, unverified reports, and 17 reviews is a small sample — but on a card where disputes are undocumented, slow support is the risk that costs you money.

Fifth: the deposits are not insured, and the card says so. Zeal’s own security material carries the line “Your principal is at risk”. Deposits are not insured. That is not a technicality — e-money customer funds must be safeguarded by segregation or insurance, but such funds are not bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme.

Sixth: how you are treated depends on two regulators, not one. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution, and a card is a payment service regulated separately from the crypto side — so a card like this rests on two licences. Relevant dates: MiCA took legal effect in June 2023, its stablecoin and asset-referenced-token rules applied from 30 June 2024, the remaining provisions including crypto-asset service provider rules from 30 December 2024, and the transitional grandfathering period runs until 1 July 2026 or until a provider gets a MiCA authorisation, whichever comes first. ESMA maintains an interim register of authorised providers and white papers that you can check.

Seventh: identity rules are real and they are the same for everyone. In the EU, customer due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether you are a politically exposed person. If due diligence cannot be completed, EU rules require the institution to refrain from the transaction or relationship and, where necessary, end the relationship — which is why accounts close or freeze pending documents. In the US the customer identification programme requires name, date of birth, address and an identification number. Prepaid and debit cards are generally for adults 18+. And note that 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.

If your balance is compromised and you need a reversal, the mechanism is a chargeback — a refund ordered by the issuer to settle a dispute, with reason codes such as fraud, duplicate billing or goods not received. US debit card reversal rights come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z; prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed. Under 3-D Secure — Visa’s branding of the identity check for online payments — liability for fraudulent online payments can shift from the merchant to the cardholder’s bank. None of these protections is a substitute for Zeal publishing how its own disputes work.

What to take instead

If the reason you are here is that a card programme is closing, the honest answer is to compare against cards whose operators have not announced an end date — and to look at the ones that publish their fees. Here is where the alternatives stand, on the same questions.

MetaMask is the one to look at first, and it scores 7.1 against Zeal’s 6.1. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay among them — with other regions on a waitlist and proof of residency required; the page says ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending. Citizenship rules are not stated, and US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per its FAQ. The virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee; Metal is $199/year. Fees are described as “minimal fee for each transaction” with the amount not stated on the pages I read, no additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee. It spends directly from the connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, naming mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT among its tokens — and note that Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit.

KAST is the one with the most published detail, and also the one whose fee structure will surprise you. Its country list is shown at KYC rather than published, with a Restricted Locations list referenced but no countries named, and it is unusually explicit that living in a supported country is not enough if your ID comes from a restricted region; 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 this. You can create an account in an unsupported country but KYC stays locked. Fees: stablecoin top-up 0%, card spend in USD 0%, transaction fee 0%, Apple and Google Pay 0% — but non-USD FX runs 0.5% to 1.75% depending on your residence country, the transaction country and the card programme, non-USD transactions under 25 USD cost 0.10 USD, and a declined transaction for insufficient balance costs 0.50 USD. It takes USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD, though its own Terms say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”, which contradicts the app.

Rizon is the middle option. It says it is intended for people who live in and are domiciled in the US or LATAM countries and may be restricted elsewhere, based on residence, while also claiming 122+ countries are supported. Fees: deposit free, card spend in USD free, non-USD 1.7% plus $0.1 — the Emerald figure on the page is garbled and should be verified — and a 1.7% trading fee. Its coins and networks are not stated on the pages I read.

Two category-level warnings that apply to all of these, not just to Zeal. A prepaid card draws on a stored balance, and many crypto cards behave exactly that way, so the card cannot overdraw — but it also cannot extend you anything when the balance is empty. And merchants can look up the card’s issuer identification number to see which institution and country issued it, applying extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from your billing address. Address verification compares numbers in the billing address you type with issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and UK, and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines. Some shops decline prepaid or foreign cards for exactly that reason. A declined authorisation can also leave a hold on your funds for several days.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Zeal to someone who already lives in self-custody and treats the card as a spending tool rather than a financial relationship. Concretely: you hold EUR, USD or GBP stablecoins, you are in a region where the programme is live, you are comfortable that the balance on the card is money you can lose, and you want a Visa that spends it without giving your keys to a provider. For that person the fees are genuinely good — no FX markup, no monthly charge — and the control layer is real. The cashback was a bonus and is now over; judge it without it.

I would not recommend it as your primary card, and I would think hard before choosing it at all this quarter. The issuer has published a closure date for the consumer programme. Zeal has not confirmed its own plans. The support record is weak on both the app and the issuer. The fee schedule is not published, so parts of what you pay come from third-party sites. And the security tooling, however good, sits on smart contracts that have already been through an exploit this year.

If you want the same idea with a provider that has not announced an end date, look at MetaMask first and KAST second — with your eyes open to KAST’s non-USD fees, and to the fact that MetaMask’s transaction fee is not published either. And if what you actually need is a bank card, a card that works everywhere without exceptions, or a dispute process someone has documented, then a crypto card is the wrong instrument and the honest answer is to keep looking for the ordinary one.

One last thing I would do, and it costs nothing: ask Zeal directly, in writing, what happens to the card and to balances held on it after 2026-12-20, and what the migration path to a partner app is. Save the answer. If the answer is vague, that tells you everything you need to know about whether to top up next week.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Zeal card?

Zeal is a Visa payment card that spends a stablecoin balance you hold yourself, rather than a bank account balance. It is offered as a virtual card for online use and as a physical card, issued by Monavate Limited together with Gnosis Pay Co Ltd. You add it to Apple Pay and pay from EUR, USD or GBP stablecoin accounts in your own Safe. It is not a bank account, and it is not a credit card.

Is Zeal a bank?

No. Zeal is self-custodial software, developed by grwth lbs ltd, and it is not regulated. The card side is handled by Gnosis Pay Co Ltd (UK company no. 14919639) and issued by Monavate Limited, an FCA-authorised e-money institution licensed by Visa Europe. That structure is common in this category: the app you use is usually a front end, not the party that issues the card.

Who owns Zeal?

The app developer is grwth lbs ltd. The card programme is run by Gnosis Pay, with Monavate as the issuer. Gnosis Pay announced it will close its consumer card and web app at 23:59 UTC on 2026-12-20 and move to a B2B model, directing users to partner apps, with MiniPay named. Zeal’s own future plans are not confirmed on its public pages.

Can I use the Zeal card in my country?

Spending works in 150+ countries. Issuing the card is another matter: Zeal says it “depends on eligibility and regional availability”, and the programme is documented as live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Third-party sites add that the US and much of APAC are unavailable, but that is not confirmed by Zeal.

How do I get the Zeal card?

You sign in, clear Gnosis Pay’s identity verification through Sumsub, and the virtual card appears first; it can be added to Apple Pay straight away. Zeal says physical cards are offered but does not publish which countries they ship to, delivery time or cost. Unofficial sources say shipping is free and that an uploaded document set does not guarantee approval.

Does Zeal require KYC?

Yes in practice, through Gnosis Pay’s onboarding, which includes KYC after signing in with Ethereum and uses Sumsub for verification. Zeal itself publishes no KYC tiers, no processing times and no rejection reasons, and does not state which documents or what age apply. An unofficial August 2026 source describes age 18+ and proof of address issued within three months.

How much does the Zeal card cost?

Zeal publishes no fee schedule at all, and charges no additional FX fee — conversion happens at the Visa wholesale rate. Unofficial sources say the card is free to order, shipping is free, replacement costs 4.99, there is no monthly fee, and the first 5 ATM withdrawals or 200 units a month are free before 2% applies. An older, dated Gnosis Pay page lists a card purchase fee, but it is outdated and contradicts current information.

What are the Zeal card’s limits?

Zeal does not state its limits and points to Gnosis Pay documentation that is not retrievable. Unofficial sources give 5,000 per transaction and 8,000 per rolling 24 hours in EURe, GBPe or USDCe, plus 250 per ATM withdrawal and 500 per day. Because these come from third-party sites, read the figures in the app before you rely on them for anything large.

How do I top up the Zeal card?

You load the card Safe from your own wallet, using the Gnosis Chain and Celo networks per the docs; Zeal does not name the exact coins, though unofficial sources say the accounts hold EURe, GBPe and USDCe. Bank transfers run through Monerium ehf for euros and Unblock LT UAB for others. Zeal states no top-up fee or minimum, and no network fee — bridging on Ethereum still costs gas.

Is the Zeal card safe?

It depends what you mean. Self-custody means no company can freeze or seize your funds, and Zeal offers passkeys, real-time alerts, instant card freeze, transaction previews and an audited wallet. But deposits are not insured — Zeal’s own material says “Your principal is at risk” — an ERC-1271 module exploit affected card Safes on 2026-06-01, and lost funds are unlikely to be recoverable. Separately, the issuer is closing the consumer programme.

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