A crypto card with a free virtual tier, 0% FX on its metal card — and rewards that only pay if you lock up tokens

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Based is a crypto Visa debit card with three tiers, one of them free to hold and two of them

requiring you to lock up your own BASED token for a set period. The free side of the catalogue is

genuinely cheap: no signup fee, no annual fee, no foreign-exchange markup, and a virtual card that

appears right after your identity check clears. The expensive side is not expensive in money — it is

expensive in commitment. To get the better cashback rates, better FX terms and a metal card, you

have to stake 10,000 or 100,000 dollars’ worth of BASED and leave it locked, accepting a 21-day

lockup and a further 3-day cooldown before you can unstake.

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

I scored it 6.9 out of 10. That is a fair score for a product with real strengths in how you

fund it and what it costs, held back by a thin public paper trail around the company, a rewards

programme that stops when you unstake, and a single-line complaint history that suggests the cashback

is not what the headline number implies.

Before I go further, one thing worth saying plainly: this card is aimed at people who already hold

crypto and want to spend it, and at people who cannot get an ordinary bank card easily. If you want a

plain debit card with a branch, a phone number to call, or a cash withdrawal in a village, this is the

wrong product. If you want to be paid crypto back for spending, and you are willing to lock tokens to

get the better rates, it is worth a look. My own note in the margin of these files is the honest

summary of the audience: stakers of BASED who want cashback in crypto.

Will they give you the card

Mostly yes, and this is the strongest part of the picture. Based says it is available worldwide except

for a published list effective 1 August 2026 — about 74 countries. On that list, among others, sit

the Russian Federation, Belarus, the United States, Canada, Australia, China, India, Singapore,

Ukraine, Iran and Turkey. So the honest version of the answer is: if you are in one of the excluded

places, no; almost everywhere else, yes.

The framing matters, though, and it is the first thing you should check before anything else. The

eligibility test is your country of residence, not your citizenship. That is what the card’s own

wording says: see whether you can apply from your country of residence. In practice that is a narrower

gate than it looks, because the list has grown and has already swallowed several large markets that

crypto users used to assume were open. The US and Canada — where most crypto-native people live — are

both on it.

One nuance worth holding on to. The list is described as effective 1 August 2026. That is a *published*

list with a date. Whether the coverage you read about today is exactly the list in force on the day

you apply is something only the card can answer, so treat any secondary summary as a starting point

rather than a verdict.

How to get it

The route is the app. You complete KYC inside the Based app, and the card is applied for there too.

There is no branch, no paper form, no appointment.

What the identity check accepts is narrow and worth reading twice, because it is where a lot of

applications end. The accepted documents are a passport or a national ID card. Driver’s licences

and voter IDs are not accepted. If your country’s national ID is not in a machine-readable

format, the passport is the safer document, and a passport is the one you would want to carry anyway.

The timing: screening typically takes up to 3 days. That is the stated typical window, not a promise.

More documents can be requested, and the card publishes a compliance address — [email protected] —

for that case. That is unusual to see published and it is worth noting as a positive: you have somewhere

to send paperwork rather than only an in-app rejection.

The age bar is 18, and you must be resident in a country where the card is offered. **Proof of address is

not stated** on the pages I read. So do not assume a utility bill will be required, and do not assume it

will not — if you get asked, that is the same route as any other additional document.

There is a single KYC level, not a tiered ladder. Screening is the same step for everyone, and the

card does not state the reasons an application can be rejected. That last point is a real gap: you

cannot tell from the public pages whether a rejection was a document problem, a screening result, or

simply a residency call.

On the physical side, three formats exist. You get a virtual card instantly after approval — and

only a virtual card if you are on Based Orange. A physical plastic card comes with the HYPE tier.

A metal card weighing 20 g comes with Based Gold. The card currency is USD, which is the

source of the FX markup discussed below. Physical cards ship separately by DHL; delivery countries

and delivery times are not stated beyond the availability list, which is worth asking about if you need

the plastic for something time-bound.

Fees, and what a payment actually costs

The headline costs are genuinely good, and I want to be straight about that before the caveats. There

is no signup fee and no annual fee on the card. Stablecoin deposits carry no added fees — the

card puts it plainly: no, there are no top-up fees for USDT and USDC. Crypto conversion at the point

of sale is not separately stated, so I cannot tell you whether a spread is applied on conversion, only

that deposits themselves are not charged.

Where money does leave you is the FX markup on non-USD spend, and it is a three-way split that

tracks the tiers: 2.5% on Based Orange, 1.5% on HYPE, 0% on Based Gold. Since the card is USD, any

payment made in euros, pounds or anything else goes through this markup. On Gold there is none, which

is the single most concrete financial advantage in the catalogue.

Let me take three everyday payments and walk you through which of those lines actually bites.

A coffee in a euro-zone country on Based Orange. The card is USD, so the euro amount is converted and

the tier’s 2.5% FX markup applies. No annual fee, no signup fee, nothing else. If you are on Orange,

the virtual card is free and that 2.5% is the whole cost.

The same coffee on Based Gold, once you have unlocked it. The FX markup is 0%, so the coffee costs

the converted amount and nothing more. That is where the 100,000 $BASED lockup is earning its keep —

not in a headline reward rate, but in the markup you stop paying on every foreign purchase.

A laptop bought online in dollars from a merchant that declines foreign BINs. This is not a fee at

all, but it is the cost people are most often surprised by. The card’s BIN identifies the issuing

institution and country, and some merchants apply extra scrutiny or decline when the issuer country

differs from the billing address — see the payments section below. Whether it happens to you depends

on the shop, not on the card.

Two limits are conspicuously absent. There are no general spending limits stated — only reward

caps. And there is no statement of ATM availability in the docs; the unconfirmed report is that

withdrawals are not enabled. If cash matters to you at all, treat that as a likely “no” until the card

tells you otherwise.

How to Top up

This is where the card scores highest for me, and it is not close. The top-up list on the site is

USDT, USDC, XSGD, SOL, HYPE and BASED. The documentation adds the networks: **Solana, Arbitrum,

Polygon and Hyperliquid. And at the point of sale the card auto-converts** — meaning you can hold

a stablecoin and pay in a currency your balance is not denominated in without pre-converting by hand.

Why this matters more than it sounds: the alternative to a wide top-up list is that you hold the right

coin on the right network, and one mistake is expensive. Blockchain transfers are irreversible. A

deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different

network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. Four supported networks plus

six assets means far fewer combinations where you can get it wrong.

The reassuring line is the one about fees: no top-up fees for USDT and USDC. What is not stated

is the minimum top-up amount, who pays the on-chain network fee, and whether fiat top-up exists at

all. Those are three real gaps. The on-chain network fee for a deposit is charged by the blockchain,

not by the card provider — so it is not a card fee, but it is still money out of your wallet, and

for a small top-up it can be a meaningful share of it.

One more thing the public pages do not say: withdrawals. There is no stated withdrawal process. If

you are planning around this card, that is the first question to put to support before you fund it.

Paying with it every day

Day to day, Based behaves like an ordinary Visa debit with one unusual mechanic: **rewards stop when

you begin unstaking**. That sentence from the card’s own terms does more damage to the value

proposition than any fee, because the reward is the reason to hold the tier.

The rewards, as stated: cashback is paid in $BASED at the start of each month. HYPE pays **2%,

capped at $20 a month; Based Gold pays 4%, capped at $100 a month**. AI subscription rebates go up

to $10 a month on HYPE and $100 a month on Gold. Entertainment rebates go up to $20 a month on Gold.

Gold also includes 4 airport lounge visits per year. Rewards are promotional and may change, and

all benefits end when unstaking begins.

Read the caps against the rates. The reviewer on Trustpilot made exactly this point: the headline

percentage is only reachable up to a ceiling, and beyond that ceiling the effective rate falls.

Cashing in at the $20 cap on HYPE requires spending $1,000 a month; the $100 cap on Gold requires

$2,500 a month. Below those, your real rate is lower than 2% or 4%. If you spend less than that,

the honest comparison is not 4% — it is whatever your spend divided into the cap gives you.

Paying by phone: the documentation says Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported, added at the

receipt. Unofficially, a Trustpilot reviewer (May 2026) said Apple Pay was not supported — directly

contradicting the docs. I have no way to settle that from here, and it matters enough to test

yourself early rather than assume.

Also not stated: blocked merchant categories. That matters because some issuers block gambling

categories by policy rather than by law, and the blocked list varies by issuer — so you cannot infer

it from any general knowledge of crypto cards. The app is the interface for everything, and I did not

read store ratings, so treat the software quality as unassessed rather than good.

Finally, dispute handling is not stated. No chargeback policy, no reason codes, nothing. That is

the gap I would care about most if I were about to put several thousand dollars through this card.

What can go wrong

The first category is structural. Based is operated by SHA2 LABS PTE. LTD., Singapore per the

starting data — though the site footer says only “Based”. The issuer and licences are not named.

That is not a small omission. When you hold a payment card, you want to know which institution is

obligated to you, under which licence, and with what segregation of customer funds. The pages I read

do not say. Given the tier design mirrors an e-money structure — an electronic money institution can

issue e-money and payment cards but cannot lend — the absence is stranger, not less surprising.

The second is the staking lockup, which is not a fee but a constraint with real consequences. The

lockup is 21 days from redemption, followed by a 3-day unstake cooldown. So money committed to

tier benefits is unavailable for over three weeks at the end of your holding period. And because

rewards end when unstaking begins, the exit decision and the reward stream are coupled: you are

choosing between cashflow and yield, on a clock the card sets.

The third is custody, and here the pages are quiet in a way that should concern you. Based on the

pages read, the custody model, two-factor authentication and card freeze are not stated. Those

are standard safeguards — app-based 2FA, instant freeze, spending limits, tokenised mobile wallets —

and their absence from public documentation is not evidence they are missing, but it does mean you

cannot verify them before funding. Ask.

The fourth is the review record, and I want to be precise about how much weight it carries. On

Trustpilot, read 2026-10-21, the profile shows 3.4 from 1 review, dated 24 May 2026, and the

profile is unclaimed — meaning the business has not verified it, so the score is not

authenticated and the count of one is too small to mean anything statistically. That single reviewer

rated it 3/5 and titled the review “Mediocre support”. Their three substantive claims: cashback needs

staking and is capped (they put the cap at roughly $800 or $8,000 depending on reading), Apple Pay

was not supported (contradicted by the docs), and ATM withdrawals are not enabled. I found **no

official incidents**. One review is a signal to ask questions, not a verdict, and the support point

is the one I would test first — support is an FAQ page, an X account and a Telegram, plus the

compliance address.

And the fifth is the category risk, which belongs to any card in this space. Card programmes do get

closed. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card

was wound down. 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 run in an order you

can plan for: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw

remaining balances. What I cannot tell you is what would happen to a BASED-denominated balance during

that last step.

What to take instead

Let me walk through the alternatives against the same criteria, because the comparison is more useful

than the verdict.

Gemini scores 4.9 / 10 here. Its card is a Mastercard World Elite credit card, not a

prepaid one — no annual fee, no foreign transaction fees, and no crypto conversion at all, because

you are spending borrowed money and being paid back in crypto. Rewards: 4% on gas, EV and transit up

to the first $300 a month, 3% dining, 2% groceries, 1% elsewhere, paid instantly in Bitcoin or 50+

other cryptos. That rewards structure is genuinely stronger than Based’s for someone with normal

spending. The catch is obvious from the word credit: you need an income and a credit history, which is

precisely the thing Based exists for people who do not have.

Lava scores 7.1 / 10 — the highest of the three. “No annual fees”, “no FX fees, and no FX

spread”, and spend at 150 million merchants in 150+ countries. You can fund with local currency or

stablecoins. Rewards are “up to 5% back in bitcoin on every purchase” — note that the conditions are

not stated, which is exactly the clause I would interrogate on Based, where at least the caps are

published. If FX cost is your main concern, Lava’s no-spread-no-fee position is as strong as

Based Gold’s 0% markup and does not appear to require a six-figure token lockup.

GoMining scores 6.6 / 10. The virtual card is available now, physical “coming soon”; you can top

up with BTC, USDT, GOMINING and other coins. Its differentiator is that opening a card grants a

free 1 TH miner, and cashback is paid in mining power with a rate that rises with VIP level, “up to

5%”. Cashback denominated in mining power rather than a spendable token is a different product

entirely — you are being paid in compute, not money.

Here is how the four line up.

Two of these deserve a caveat on the evidence. For Gemini and GoMining, eligibility is not stated as

a list — GoMining only says products “may not be available in your jurisdiction” and that

availability is subject to eligibility and regional checks. For Lava, the card’s network and whether

it is virtual or physical are not stated either. So I am comparing partially documented products,

and you should not read the Lava row as a recommendation on strength of documentation alone.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Based to someone in an eligible country who already holds stablecoins, spends

regularly outside the US or in a currency other than dollars, and is comfortable treating the card as

one instrument among several rather than as their only card. For that person the free virtual tier is a

genuinely useful cost saving and the top-up breadth removes the most common way crypto cards go wrong.

I would recommend it with more enthusiasm to a BASED holder who spends enough to approach the caps —

roughly $1,000 a month for HYPE or $2,500 for Gold — and who is confident they will not need the

locked tokens for weeks. For them the maths works, and the 0% FX on Gold is a real, recurring benefit.

I would not recommend it to you if any of the following is true. You need cash from ATMs, since ATM

withdrawals appear not to be enabled. You are in any of the roughly 74 excluded countries. You want

Apple Pay and the reviewer says it does not work. You want a card with a published dispute and

chargeback policy — none is stated. You want to be able to unstake and keep earning — the terms say

benefits end. And if you have no meaningful balance to commit, do not buy into HYPE or Gold for the

cashback alone: 10,000 or 100,000 $BASED locked for 21 days is a large bet on one token to earn back

a fraction of it each month.

Before you commit to any tier, put four questions to support: what is the issuer and under which

licence are customer funds safeguarded; what exactly happens to a $BASED reward balance if the

programme is wound down; does Apple Pay work today; and what is the withdrawal process. The answers

are not on the public pages, and a card you cannot get your money out of is not a card.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Based card?

Based is a crypto payment card issued on Visa, letting you spend a crypto or stablecoin balance as

ordinary card payments. It comes in three tiers: Based Orange with a virtual card only, HYPE with

virtual and physical plastic, and Based Gold with a metal card. The card currency is USD. It is a

debit card drawing on a balance you fund yourself, not a credit card, so there is no borrowing and

no interest.

Is Based a bank?

Not one that the public pages identify as such. The card states it is operated by SHA2 LABS PTE. LTD.

in Singapore, though its own site footer says only “Based”. The issuing institution and the licences

under which it operates are not named in the pages I read. So I cannot tell you which regulated

entity stands behind the balance, and that is the first thing worth asking support.

Who owns Based?

The information available attributes operation to SHA2 LABS PTE. LTD., a Singapore entity, but the

card’s own footer names only “Based” without identifying an owner. Ownership, funding and group

structure are therefore not established from the card’s public pages. Treat any third-party claim

about who backs the company as unverified until the company states it itself.

Does Based card require KYC?

Yes. You complete identity verification in the Based app, and the accepted documents are a passport

or a national ID card only — driver’s licences and voter IDs are not accepted. Screening typically

takes up to 3 days, and additional documents can be requested at [email protected]. You must be

at least 18 and resident in a country where the card is offered. Proof of address is not stated.

In which countries is the Based card available?

Worldwide except a published restricted list effective 1 August 2026, containing around 74 countries.

Among those excluded are the Russian Federation, Belarus, the United States, Canada, Australia, China,

India, Singapore, Ukraine, Iran and Turkey. Eligibility is judged on your country of residence rather

than citizenship. The list also matters for a second reason: restricted-country rules affect where you

can add the card to a phone wallet, not just whether you can apply.

Is the Based card free?

Yes, with qualifications. There is no signup fee and no annual fee, and the Based Orange virtual card

costs nothing. The physical plastic card costs $50 to ship on the HYPE tier, while Based Gold shipping

is free. The real costs are the FX markup of 2.5% on Orange or 1.5% on HYPE on non-USD spending, and

the $BASED lockup needed to reach the better tiers.

How do I top up the Based card?

You deposit USDT, USDC, XSGD, SOL, HYPE or BASED, on the Solana, Arbitrum, Polygon or Hyperliquid

networks, and the card converts automatically at the point of sale. The card states there are no

top-up fees for USDT and USDC. What is not stated is the minimum deposit, who pays the on-chain

network fee, and whether you can add funds by card or bank transfer — so confirm those before

funding, and never send a transfer on a network the app has not asked you to use.

How do I add the Based card to Apple Wallet?

According to the documentation, Apple Pay and Google Pay are both supported, and you add the card at

the checkout receipt. However, a Trustpilot reviewer in May 2026 reported that Apple Pay was not

supported, which conflicts with the official documentation. Since I cannot settle the conflict, test

it yourself with a small payment soon after approval rather than relying on it for a large one.

Can I withdraw cash or money from Based?

The public pages do not state a withdrawal process, so there is nothing there to rely on. A Trustpilot

reviewer in May 2026 reports that ATM withdrawals are not enabled, and the documentation does not

mention ATMs at all. If you need physical cash, plan on this card not being the instrument for it

and confirm the withdrawal route with support before you fund the account.

Is the Based card safe and worth it?

Worth it depends almost entirely on your spending and your holding period. At 2% capped at $20 a

month you need roughly $1,000 in monthly spending to reach the cap; at 4% capped at $100 you need

about $2,500. The rewards are paid in $BASED at the start of each month and, per the terms, all

benefits end when you begin unstaking — so the lockup of 10,000 or 100,000 $BASED for 21 days plus a

3-day cooldown is part of the cost. On safety, custody arrangements, two-factor authentication and

freeze are not stated in the pages read.

Content created by the «cryptocardtested» team