A neat self-custody card caught in the middle of its issuer's shutdown

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Zeal card is a Visa you load with stablecoins from your own crypto wallet and spend like an ordinary payment card, with no monthly fee and no extra foreign-exchange charge from Zeal itself. For someone already holding EUR, USD or GBP stablecoins in a self-custody wallet, the everyday mechanics are unusually clean. That is the good news, and it is why the card scores well on cost and on daily use.

The bad news is not about fees. It is about time. The programme that issues the card, Gnosis Pay, has announced that it is closing its consumer card and web app at 23:59 UTC on 2026-12-20 and moving to business customers. Cardholders are being asked to move to partner apps. The GNO cashback that gave Zeal much of its appeal is already over as of 2026-09-30. That single fact pulls the whole review down, and it is why this card lands at a middling score rather than a good one.

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

Verdict: 6.1 / 10 — good card, bad timing

Zeal scores 6.1 out of 10. Read that as two quite separate verdicts stuck together. On the mechanics of spending, the card does nearly everything right. On whether you will still be able to use it in a year’s time, the answer has been given by the issuer, and the answer is no.

Who this suits: someone who already keeps EUR, USD or GBP stablecoins in a self-custody wallet, who wants a Visa number in their phone and a card in their wallet, and who is comfortable treating the card as one product among several rather than as their main everyday card. If your plan is to set the card up, learn it, and then move it somewhere else when the programme ends, it may be worth a couple of months.

Who it does not suit: anyone who needs a card they can rely on for years. It does not suit anyone who wants to be paid by a bank. It does not suit readers who cannot or will not complete identity verification, since the onboarding route to the card runs through Gnosis Pay’s KYC. And it does not suit someone who is shopping for a reward rate — the headline cashback has already ended.

The scoring above is mine, and the reasons are mine too. But the one line that matters most is the one marked 2 out of 10. Everything else on this page can be undone by a decision taken in a boardroom; that one has already been announced.

Will they give you the card?

Yes in a lot of places, but not automatically, and “available in my country” is not the same question as “will my application be approved”.

The programme side of the answer is broad. The card is advertised for spending in more than 150 countries, and Gnosis Pay’s documentation lists the card programme as live in the EU, the UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Zeal’s own update notes have added card support for Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia.

The catch is that issuance “depends on eligibility and regional availability”. That phrase does a lot of work, because the two halves of it are handled by different companies: the card programme sits with Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, and the Visa is issued by Monavate Limited, an FCA-authorised e-money institution in the UK licensed by Visa Europe. Zeal itself is the app and the wallet in front, not the institution that decides.

On the unofficial side, which is third-party sites reporting what they saw and which the card’s own pages do not confirm, the picture is messier and less flattering. Spendnode.io (September 2026) lists the EEA and UK as requirements and shows an order screen offering the EU, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway, with the card unavailable in the US and much of APAC. Cryptocardhub.com (August 2026) counts 36 countries available and 21 restricted, names Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico in Latin America, and lists Bolivia as both supported and coming soon. Treat these as signs of what is likely rather than as rules you can rely on.

If you are outside those lists, do not order hardware on the strength of a blog post. Work out your own answer first: is your country in the Gnosis Pay programme list, and is your residence and your document nationality both acceptable? Those are separate checks, and they are the reason country lists are never as simple as they look.

How to get it

Getting the card is a short process with one long wait attached to it. What is not published is exactly what you are asked for.

Zeal points to Gnosis Pay for onboarding. Gnosis Pay’s onboarding runs after signing in with Ethereum and uses verification through Sumsub. Documents and age requirements are not stated on zeal.app. Nor are the KYC tiers, the processing time, or the rejection reasons. That is a real gap: if your application is refused, you are not in a position to know whether it was a document problem, a country problem or something else.

On the card itself, zeal.app describes a Visa debit card issued by Monavate Limited with Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, offered in both virtual and physical form. The virtual card is for online use and can be added to Apple Pay. Accounts are held in EUR, USD and GBP. Whether you get the physical card, and where it goes, is a separate question — zeal.app says physical cards are offered but does not give countries, delivery time or cost.

Unofficial sources fill some of the gaps and add others. Cryptocardhub.com (August 2026) describes full identity and address verification, an age minimum of 18, a government ID or passport plus proof of address issued within the previous three months, verification through Sumsub, and warns that uploading documents does not guarantee approval. On delivery, spendnode.io (September 2026) says physical shipping is free without giving a delivery time, and an older Gnosis Pay fee page — undated, so treat with suspicion — lists delivery within 10 days of shipping verification.

So the sequence is roughly: create the account, sign in with Ethereum, get through Sumsub, receive the virtual card in the app, add it to Apple Pay. The physical card, if you want one, is the part where the card’s own pages go quiet.

Fees and limits: what a Zeal payment really costs

Zeal publishes no fee schedule at all. No fee schedule on zeal.app, none in the App Store listing. What it does state is one useful thing: Zeal charges no additional foreign-exchange fee, and conversion happens at the Visa wholesale rate. Gnosis Pay’s fees — an ATM fee, for example — may still apply on top.

That is the honest official answer, and it leaves you guessing. The unofficial picture, from cryptocardhub.com (August 2026) and spendnode.io (September 2026), is that the card order is free, physical shipping is free, a replacement card costs 4.99, the monthly or annual fee is 0, the first 5 ATM withdrawals or 200 units per month are free depending which comes first, then 2% per withdrawal, and there are limits of 5,000 per transaction and 8,000 per rolling 24 hours in EURe, GBPe or USDCe.

One more unofficial line deserves a flag rather than a shrug: a web capture of an older Gnosis Pay fee page lists a card purchase fee of EUR 30.23 including shipping. I cannot date that page, so I do not know whether it is current, historical, or a capture of a different product line entirely. Treat it as a reason to check the fee screen inside the app before you commit, not as a number to budget on.

Now the three payments that tell you whether this matters to you.

A coffee in a euro country. You tap, the merchant charges you euros, and the amount comes out of your euro stablecoin balance. There is no FX leg because no conversion is needed. The cost to you is whatever remains of the 2% ATM-style spread that does not apply here, which is nothing — so a coffee costs a coffee. This is where the no-FX-fee promise actually pays out, and it is the ordinary case for most Zeal users.

A meal in a city that is not your own. Here the Visa mid-market rate does the work. No additional FX fee from Zeal, so you see the wholesale rate rather than a marked-up one. But watch the ATM line in the same table: Gnosis Pay’s charges can still apply on some rails, and the per-transaction and rolling daily limits of 5,000 and 8,000 mean a large restaurant bill or a car hire booking can decline for reasons that have nothing to do with your balance. Set expectations on that before you are abroad.

A hotel or a car hire deposit. This is the one that catches people out. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to seven. Combined with an 8,000 rolling daily limit that the card’s own pages do not document, a pre-auth large enough for a hotel can do real damage: the money is not spent but it is not available either. If you plan to use this card for anything that holds funds, check the limit screen in the app first.

What I cannot tell you is the cost of the crypto side of the equation — the gas for a top-up, or any off-ramp fee — because the card does not publish those. The rule of thumb is that on-chain network fees for your deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider, and a wallet holding USDT with no ETH for gas cannot send it on Ethereum at all.

Top up: how the money gets in

The mechanism is the elegant part. Zeal is self-custodial, and the card spends directly from balances in your own Safe — EUR, USD and GBP stablecoin accounts, on Gnosis Chain and Celo per the documentation. No consolidation into a company account, no custodial pool. The exact coins supported for Zeal specifically are not stated, which is an odd little omission given how many multi-chain stablecoins exist and how often bridges matter.

On the fiat side, bank transfers go through Monerium ehf for EUR and Unblock LT UAB for others. The card top-up fee and minimum are not stated. Neither are the fees on those bank transfers, nor the network fees for a crypto top-up. That is three unstated numbers in the place where your money enters, which is the wrong place to be vague.

Unofficial reporting adds speed and a reassurance. Spendnode.io (September 2026) says the card accounts hold EURe, GBPe and USDCe, that a SEPA top-up arrives in 1–2 business days, and that conversion, off-ramp and gas fees are 0%, while bridging over Ethereum still needs gas. The 0% line is the kind of number that deserves a moment’s scepticism, because it may describe one path and not another.

Withdrawals are where the self-custody design pays you back. Funds stay in your own wallet or Safe, and Earn balances in USD or EUR are withdrawable 24/7 with no lockups. What is not stated: the steps and fees for withdrawing the card balance itself, and what happens to the balance if the card is closed. On a programme with a published end date, that second blank is the one I would want filled before I deposited.

Paying with it every day

This is where the card earns its 8 out of 10 for everyday use, and where the closure news hurts most, because the mechanics are genuinely good.

The virtual card is for online use and adds to Apple Pay, where the card number is replaced by a device-specific number held in the Secure Element and each payment uses a one-time code. Google Pay is not stated by Zeal; unofficial sources from cryptocardhub.com (August 2026) say it is supported, and that Google Pay is not subject to the physical-card contactless limit. Blocked merchants are not stated anywhere. ATM withdrawals are possible, on Gnosis Pay’s tariffs rather than Zeal’s own.

The app itself rates well. It needs an iPhone on iOS 16.2 or later, or a Mac with M1 and up, or Vision Pro. The App Store rating was 4.5 out of 5 from 17 ratings when I read it, and the version I saw was 0.33.3 from 1 September. The Google Play rating was not read. Security features are the sort you would want: biometric passkey authentication, real-time transaction alerts, the ability to freeze the card in the app, transaction previews and Safety Checks, with the wallet’s security policy published on GitHub.

The rewards are the part that has already gone. Cashback of up to 4% was paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain and required GNO to be held in the card Safe; the App Store also advertised up to 5% variable APY on EUR/USD balances. The up-to-5% figure appears in reviews, and both rates were always variable. But GNO cashback eligibility ended on 2026-09-30, so the number you read about is now history.

Complaints in the App Store reviews mention transfer problems from balance to card and slow support — individual reports, unverified. A January 2026 Trustpilot review is a one-star about support requests going unanswered for two weeks, and Zeal apologised publicly. Another 2026 review describes a scam transaction and slow dispute handling, and Zeal replied that card disputes take time. Dispute handling itself is not stated on zeal.app or in the App Store listing.

So: the card itself works well, the app is competent, and the two things that would make it better — cashback and a support line that answers — are both currently absent.

What can go wrong

Start with the big one, because it is not a risk any more. It is a scheduled event.

Gnosis Pay announced it will close its consumer card and web app at 23:59 UTC on 2026-12-20 and move to B2B. The notice to cardholders was dated 2026-09-21, with other outlets picking it up on 2026-09-25. Users are to move to partner apps for replacement cards, with MiniPay named. Safe funds stay accessible, and the web app stays in a limited form for withdrawals. One secondary report says Zeal has not confirmed its own future plans; I could not find a Zeal statement. That gap is the thing to watch, and it is exactly the thing you would want settled before you load money.

Then the security history. On 2026-06-01 an ERC-1271 module exploit affected Card Safes, per cryptocardhub. An exploit of the module that authorises card actions is not a small thing in a system whose whole pitch is that your funds are yours. The self-custody design has a hard edge to it: no bank or company can freeze or seize your funds, which is genuinely good, but lost funds are also likely unrecoverable. Deposits are not insured and the wallet says plainly that “Your principal is at risk”.

The regulatory shape matters for judging who you are actually trusting. Zeal is self-custodial software and not itself regulated; the developer is grwth lbs ltd. The cards are managed by Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, UK company number 14919639. The issuer is Monavate Limited, an FCA-authorised e-money institution. So the money sits with you, the card programme sits with a UK company, and the Visa sits with a licensed EMI — three parties, and only the last is a regulated bank-style institution.

Complaints are worth weighing with the closure in mind. Trustpilot for zeal.app showed 3.5 out of 5 from 17 reviews when I read it, and the page also displayed 3.7 at another moment. The issuer’s own Trustpilot is worse: Gnosis Pay at 2.3 out of 5 from 38 reviews, with 58% one-star, on slow or unanswered tickets, per cryptocardhub on 8 August 2026. Support for Zeal runs through Discord and X only — no email, no chat, no stated hours. The site runs in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian; Russian is not offered, and the App Store listing is English only.

And the category risks are real, even when the card works. A card issued in one country can look foreign to a shop in another, because merchants read the issuer’s BIN, and some will decline prepaid or foreign BINs on that basis. Address verification is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which causes declines. Blocked merchant categories are policy, not law, and the list varies by issuer. In the EU, if customer due diligence cannot be completed, rules require the institution to hold off — which is why accounts close pending documents, and why your citizenship can matter separately from where you live.

Alternatives worth comparing

Zeal is not alone in the self-custody card space, and the alternatives have some advantages that are hard to ignore right now. Scores below are mine, on the same scale.

MetaMask scores highest of the four at 7.1. It is a Mastercard, virtual first and instant, with a metal card you can pre-order after approval and one card per user; the issuer is Monavate, the same EMI that issues Zeal’s Visa, with Crypto Life as card provider. It spends directly from your connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad or Solana, from tokens including mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT. The trade-offs: a Metal card at $199/year, a “minimal fee” per transaction that is not quantified on the pages I read, cashback at only 1% on the virtual card, and the odd rule that Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit. The bigger issue for you is sign-up: 45 listed countries, proof of residency, and US and UK sign-ups temporarily closed.

KAST matches Zeal’s 6.1 but structures things differently: real tiers with real prices, up to 10 cards per user, Visa Platinum, Infinite metal and Infinite gold, and cashback in USD of 1.5%, 2% or 3% depending on monthly spend caps. Its KYC is the strictest of the four — residence list plus ID nationality, VPN does not bypass it, only your own ID is accepted. And it is the only one of the four where an annual membership of 1,000 or 10,000 USD is part of the design.

TokenPocket scores 5.8. It runs on Arbitrum, offers a virtual card with balances in EUR24 and USD24, and charges 1% on crypto deposits which it says it will refund later through rewards. That refund language is the part to watch: a fee you are promised back later is not the same as no fee. Availability is split between Visa for European countries/territories and Mastercard for a longer list including Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and the UK.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend this card to exactly one kind of reader, and that is you if all four of these are true.

You already hold euros, dollars or pounds as stablecoins in your own wallet. You are comfortable that your money stays yours, with no deposit protection and no one to call when a key goes missing. You can live with a card that has an end date on it and treat the next two months as a trial rather than a home. And you have somewhere else to move to when the programme closes, which in practice means you are already thinking about where.

If you are here for the cashback, stop. The GNO reward ended on 2026-09-30 and the card’s headline advantage on cost was always the zero FX fee, not the reward.

If you need a card that will still work in three years, do not start here. Gnosis Pay’s consumer card closes on 2026-12-20 and the web app will remain only in a limited form for withdrawals. Whatever you load, you will be moving it.

The version of you who should read this twice is the one who cannot get an ordinary bank card. That is a real situation and it is the situation Zeal is genuinely good at — spending in 150+ countries from a stablecoin balance, with no monthly fee, on a self-custody basis where no single company can freeze you out. The mechanism is sound. The timing is not.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Zeal card?

The Zeal card is a Visa payment card that spends directly from stablecoin balances you hold yourself, rather than from a bank account. It is issued by Monavate Limited, an FCA-authorised e-money institution, and the card programme is run by Gnosis Pay Co Ltd. Zeal is the self-custodial app in front of it, not a bank. You add a virtual card to Apple Pay, and a physical card is offered too.

Is Zeal a bank, and who owns it?

No. Zeal is self-custodial software developed by grwth lbs ltd, and it is not regulated as a bank or as an e-money institution. The card is issued by Monavate Limited, licensed by Visa Europe, and managed by Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, UK company number 14919639. Your crypto stays in your own wallet or Safe, which is why no company can freeze or seize it — and also why lost funds are unlikely to be recovered.

How do I get the Zeal card?

You create the account, sign in with Ethereum, and go through Gnosis Pay’s onboarding, which uses verification via Sumsub. You then receive a virtual Visa card you can add to Apple Pay. zeal.app says physical cards are offered but does not publish which countries, what delivery costs, or how long it takes.

Does Zeal require KYC, and what documents do I need?

Zeal’s own site does not state its KYC requirements, and points to Gnosis Pay, whose onboarding includes KYC after signing in with Ethereum, verified through Sumsub. Unofficial sources describe full identity and address verification, age 18+, and a government ID or passport plus proof of address issued within the previous three months. Uploading documents does not guarantee approval.

Is the Zeal card free?

There is no published fee schedule on zeal.app or in the App Store, so officially the answer is not stated. Unofficial sources from August and September 2026 say the card order is free, physical shipping is free, the monthly or annual fee is 0, and a replacement card costs 4.99. An older, undated Gnosis Pay fee page capture lists EUR 30.23 including shipping, so check the fee screen in the app before relying on any of this.

What are the fees on a Zeal payment?

Zeal states one fee position clearly: no additional foreign-exchange fee, with conversion at the Visa wholesale rate. Gnosis Pay fees can still apply on some rails, notably ATM. Unofficial figures say the first 5 withdrawals or 200 units per month are free, then 2% per withdrawal, with limits of 5,000 per transaction and 8,000 per rolling 24 hours — though the card’s own pages do not publish those limits.

How do I top up the Zeal card?

You transfer stablecoins to the Safe the card spends from — EUR, USD and GBP stablecoin accounts on Gnosis Chain and Celo per the documentation — or you make a bank transfer, with EUR handled by Monerium ehf and other transfers by Unblock LT UAB. The card’s top-up fee, minimum, and network fees are not stated. Unofficial reporting puts SEPA arrivals at 1–2 business days.

Is the Zeal card safe?

Safe is the wrong word, given the 2026-06-01 exploit of an ERC-1271 module that affected Card Safes. Self-custody means no company can freeze your funds, which is a real protection, but it also means no rescue if a key is lost or a phishing site gets you. The app offers passkey authentication, real-time alerts, instant card freeze and transaction previews, but deposits are not insured and the wallet itself says your principal is at risk.

What happens when the Gnosis Pay consumer card closes on 2026-12-20?

Cardholders are being asked to move to partner apps, with MiniPay named, for replacement cards. Safe funds stay accessible, and the web app stays in a limited form for withdrawals. Zeal has not, as far as I could find, confirmed its own future plans. If you hold a balance, work out where it goes before December rather than after.

Is the Zeal card worth it?

If you already hold euros, dollars or pounds as stablecoins in your own wallet and can treat it as a short-term tool, yes — there is no monthly fee and no added FX charge. If you are here for the cashback, no: GNO cashback eligibility ended on 2026-09-30. And if you need a card you can count on for years, the announced closure rules it out regardless of how good the mechanics are.

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