What I could confirm about Cadmos, and what I could not

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Cadmos is a crypto payment card aimed squarely at people who already hold their own crypto and want to spend it directly rather than hand it to a platform. The card sits on top of a self-custodial wallet, accepts USDC and USDT over named networks, and comes in a Premium tier that carries a Visa Signature card with a $0 monthly fee and a 1.75% foreign-exchange fee. That is a coherent product for exactly one kind of user. The problem is not the idea; it is how much of the detail you would need is missing from the public pages.

My score is 7.0 / 10. I want to be straight with you about how I got there, because a single number tells you very little unless you can see what sits underneath it. Some parts of this product are well documented and, frankly, better than most of the category. Other parts are simply not stated, and I do not fill gaps with guesses.

If you keep your funds in a wallet where you hold the keys, you mostly move USDC and USDT, and you are comfortable with support answering by email, this card does what it promises. If you need a card that clearly shows a named issuing bank and a licence on paper, or if you want to know what an ATM withdrawal costs before you find out, you will leave this page less certain than you arrived.

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

Will they give you the card?

There is no published list of countries, and that is the first thing you should notice. Cadmos does not publish one. Availability depends on eligibility and on what options appear in the app when you open it, which means the only real way to find out whether you qualify is to look at the order screen yourself. The terms state one hard exclusion: users must not be in a US-embargoed country. That is the limit of what is written down.

For someone reading this from an unlisted country, that is genuinely unhelpful. You cannot pre-check, and you cannot tell in advance whether you will see a Premium option, a Standard option, or nothing at all. My advice is to judge this the way you would judge any app that only tells you after you sign up: low expectation, quick check, and no large effort until you have seen your own order screen.

What I would ask before you commit to anything: whether your country appears in the app, whether your residence differs from your citizenship, and what documents you will need. On the last point, see the next section.

How to get it

The route is the app. There is a download page at /download, and the order screen is where the real terms of your particular application appear.

The single most important thing to understand about verification is that KYC differs by card product and is shown on the order screen. It can include a government ID, personal information and proof of liveness. Proof of address and an age requirement are not stated. That last one matters more than it sounds: prepaid and debit cards are generally available to adults aged 18 and up, so if you were wondering whether a teenager can open one, the card’s own pages do not answer and the general rule is the one to rely on.

Two further items are not stated, and they are the two I would want answered before paying anything: whether the card is virtual or physical, and which currency the card is denominated in. Card delivery details are not stated either. If a physical card matters to you — because Apple Pay alone will not serve every shop, and because card-not-present verification behaves differently from a plastic card in your hand — then this is an open question, not a solved one.

What is stated about the card itself:

• Premium is a Visa Signature card.
• Standard is a Visa or Mastercard; the app shows which one you get.
• Whether you receive a virtual card, a physical card, or both is not stated.
• The card currency is not stated.

Number of KYC levels, if any, is not stated. So if you were hoping for a lightweight tier that skips document checks, there is no evidence here that one exists.

Fees: what it really costs

Here is where the two tiers diverge sharply, and where a lot of my uncertainty lives. Premium publishes real numbers. Standard largely does not.

For Premium, the monthly fee is $0. The foreign-exchange fee is 1.75%. The issuance fee is not stated, and neither is the crypto conversion fee — the charge for turning your stablecoin into the fiat the merchant sees. That conversion fee is the number I would want most, because it sits on top of the 1.75% every time you spend outside your home currency. For Standard, nothing is published: cross-border and FX fees are referenced to the programme terms with no figures, the crypto conversion fee is not stated, and the costs appear on the order screen.

Two or three everyday payments, to make this concrete rather than abstract.

A coffee in your own currency, Premium. You have USDC in your wallet, you tap at the counter, the stablecoin settles as fiat at the merchant. Your $0 monthly fee is irrelevant to this purchase. What applies is the crypto conversion fee, which is not stated, and if the merchant prices in something other than your card currency, the 1.75% FX fee on top. If you do not know the conversion figure, you do not know the real cost of the coffee.

A subscription in a foreign currency, Premium. Same two fees, but applied to a recurring amount, which turns an unknown cost into a monthly unknown you keep re-committing to. The 1.75% is at least a fixed, published number. The conversion fee is the part you are still waiting on.

Any payment at all on Standard. You are working entirely from what the order screen shows you at the moment you apply. That is not unreasonable — plenty of products quote at the checkout — but it means the comparison between Premium and Standard has to be made on your own screen, not from this page.

What Premium buys with its Visa Signature benefits: lounge access at more than 1,300 lounges across more than 500 cities, a 24/7 concierge, and Visa Airport Companion. Standard lists no benefits. Whether lounge access matters to you is entirely personal; if you travel, it is the single most concrete thing in the Premium package.

How to Top up

This is the strongest part of the product, and it is why my top-up score is the highest in the table.

The card is tied to a self-custodial wallet, and USDC and USDT are what top it up, settled in fiat at the merchant. Three transfer networks are listed: Arbitrum, Solana and Tron. That is a clean, specific answer, and specificity is what this category is usually short of.

The mechanics have one detail worth pausing on: your wallet balance stays self-custodial until a card top-up is approved. So the moment of spending is not a moment where a platform takes title to your money; there is an approval step in between, and until it happens the assets are still yours in your own wallet. Fees and minimums for top-ups are not stated, which is the gap here — you know *how* to fund the card but not what it costs to do so.

On networks, a practical warning. Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option, and USDT on Tron is the route that still exists there. Fees on Tron are paid through its own bandwidth and energy system, often by burning TRX, which is why Tron transfers can feel cheap or expensive in ways that do not map onto other chains. And the general rule applies here with real force: blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network the card does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or may need manual recovery with no guarantee.

Withdrawing is where I have the least to work with. Closure is by email. Closure does not freeze or move digital assets — your crypto stays where it is. Whether you can withdraw a card balance, as distinct from your wallet balance, is not stated. If you hold money in the card at the end of a trip, that is the question to have answered first.

Paying with it every day

Premium works with Apple Pay and Google Pay. Standard works with Apple Pay, on both the Visa and Mastercard versions; Google Pay is not mentioned for Standard. If your Standard card turns up and Google Pay is your habit, that difference is real and immediate.

Blocked merchant categories are not stated. That matters more than it sounds, because the category that most often causes trouble with cards like this — gambling, covered by merchant category code 7995 — is one that issuers frequently block by policy rather than by law, and the list varies by issuer. Card currency is also not stated, which is the single most useful fact for planning a trip and the one I would ask about first.

Two other everyday details go unrecorded: whether the card can be frozen from the app, and whether there is any rewards or cashback. Rewards are not stated, so unlike most of the cards in this category, there is no cashback figure to quote you.

A note on why cards like this get declined, since it is not about you paying late. The first six or eight digits of any card number identify the issuing institution, and merchants can look that up to see the issuer and its country. If that country differs from the billing address you typed, the merchant may apply extra scrutiny. Address verification is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which on its own can cause a decline. Some merchants simply decline prepaid or foreign BINs once the lookup reveals the card type. Declined authorisations can also leave a hold on your funds that stays for several days, typically up to seven. None of this is a Cadmos problem; it is the ordinary texture of spending a card issued in one country in another.

If a payment is disputed, the terms are French law and the courts of Paris, with a 30-day good-faith resolution window after written notice. The chargeback process itself is not stated. Under EU rules, prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed, so I would not treat the 30-day window as equivalent to a full dispute scheme.

What can go wrong

Let me start with the company, because that is where I found the most to sit with.

The card is issued by Cadmos LTD, Limassol, Cyprus, registration number HE 457316, founded in 2021. The card issuer is not named. No licence is named in the Terms. Those are two separate omissions, and both matter. The issuer is the institution that actually holds the card programme and owes you the money when you spend; the licence tells you what regime that institution operates under. Cadmos can be a programme manager and a front end without either of those existing, and the general structure of this industry makes that arrangement common rather than unusual — the card network routes messages and sets rules, an issuing bank or licensed e-money institution holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often the marketing layer. But “common” is not “disclosed”, and you are entitled to ask which of the three roles Cadmos fills.

On complaints: I found none. A search returned no Trustpilot or Reddit reviews of Cadmos Pay, and no Trustpilot page was found. That is not the same as a good track record — it is an absence of data, and a company founded in 2021 with no visible complaint history is exactly what you would expect from a company that is small. Complaint details are not stated anywhere I could find.

On custody, the Terms are unusually clear, and this is the real strength. Cadmos states that it “does not receive, hold, safeguard, or acquire title to your Digital Assets or fiat funds”, and you hold the recovery phrase. That is the correct side of the trade-off. It also means you carry the whole burden: a seed phrase is typically 12 to 24 words, anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds, crypto transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen key has no built-in recovery because the network cannot freeze or return anything. You also carry phishing and malware risk — clipboard-hijacking malware that silently swaps a copied address is a real and common theft vector, which is why checking the first and last characters of every address you send to matters more here than on any normal app.

Support is reachable at [email protected], through tickets in Settings, and by phone on +1 (845) 588-8434. Premium adds a 24/7 concierge by email and WhatsApp. A US phone number for a Cyprus company is a small oddity worth noticing rather than a finding.

One thing the card’s own pages do not discuss, which I would want you to weigh on your own: a company can be wound down. The FTX card was terminated by Visa in November 2022 and the US programme wound down by its issuer; WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing every programme it had issued. Closures typically mean a notice period, then loading stops, then spending stops, then you are asked to withdraw. That is the pattern to expect if a provider does not make it, and it is the main reason self-custody is a genuine advantage: when the provider disappears, your crypto did not go with it.

What to take instead

I looked at three cards that solve the same problem differently. The comparison is worth making because each one trades a different thing away.

MetaMask is the closest competitor and scores marginally higher, at 7.1. It is the more transparent of the two. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories with examples including Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain and Uruguay, with other regions on a waitlist; proof of residency is required; US and UK sign-ups were temporarily closed per its FAQ. The issuer is named — Monovate, with Crypto Life as the card provider — and the card currency is still not stated. The cost structure is clearer than Cadmos’s: a virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee, a metal card is $199/year, there is “a minimal fee for each transaction” with no MetaMask fees on top, and no foreign transaction fee, so the Mastercard rate applies. What you get for it is spending directly from the connected wallet across Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, and real cashback — 1% on Virtual, a headline 3% on Metal with a footnote limiting that to the first $10,000 spent. Note the tension between those two figures, and note also that Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit.

KAST is the one to consider if cashback actually drives your spending. It is also the one with the widest scope — 1.5% on the first $2,000 a month for Standard, 2% on $10,000 for Premium, 3% on $40,000 for Private — against an annual membership of $0, $1,000 or $10,000 respectively, billed annually upfront with no monthly option. Its fees are the most explicit in the group: 0% on stablecoin top-up, 0% on card spend in USD, 0% transaction fee, 0% for Apple and Google Pay, with a 0.5%–1.75% FX fee depending on where you live, where you are spending and which programme you hold, plus $0.10 on non-USD transactions under $25 and $0.50 for a declined transaction. It accepts four stablecoins across five chains. But eligibility is stricter than the headline suggests: the country list is not published, KAST states that living in a supported country while holding an ID from a restricted region may still make you ineligible, only the account holder’s own ID is accepted, and a VPN does not bypass this. Its Terms say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”, which conflicts with the PYUSD and RLUSD on the product page.

TokenPocket scored lowest at 5.8 and I would not put it in front of you as a serious alternative. Its availability is a long regional list — Visa debit across European countries and territories, Mastercard debit across Asia-Pacific — with the Americas “planned for Q2 2025”. Its fee structure is the most confusing: a 1% fee on crypto deposits into the card, which is then “to be refunded later via rewards, reduced transaction fees, etc.”, on top of settlement costs that can arise between institutions. Cards are described as virtual, with balances in EUR24 and USD24.

Two caveats on the whole table. The TokenPocket and KAST figures come from those providers’ own pages and are not confirmed by Cadmos or by me. And MetaMask’s US and UK sign-up status was temporary at the time its FAQ was read, so check current availability before you plan around it.

Who I would recommend it to

Cadmos suits a narrow, real person. You hold your own crypto, you spend in USDC or USDT, you are comfortable approving a top-up rather than watching a balance drift, you have checked the order screen and liked what you saw, and you accept that email is how you will resolve a problem. You are probably someone for whom a normal bank card has been difficult to obtain, and you want a card that spends what you actually own.

I would not push it if you need a named issuer on paper, a published licence, a published ATM fee, or a rewards structure you can plan a budget around. I would not push it if you travel on the assumption that Google Pay will be there on Standard, because Google Pay is not mentioned for Standard. And I would not push it if you are new to self-custody: the guarantee that Cadmos does not hold your assets is real and valuable, but it comes with a recovery phrase that nobody can restore for you and transfers nobody can reverse.

My actual recommendation: spend a few minutes on the order screen before you spend anything. Ask for the crypto conversion fee, ask whether the card is virtual or physical, ask the card currency, ask what an ATM withdrawal costs, and ask who the issuer is. The product is sound and the top-up story is genuinely better than most of this category. The disclosure is not where it should be, and you are the one who has to live with that.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Cadmos card?

The Cadmos card is a Visa Signature card (Premium) or a Visa or Mastercard card (Standard) that spends a stablecoin balance you hold in your own self-custodial wallet. You top it up with USDC or USDT over Arbitrum, Solana or Tron, and the payment settles in fiat at the merchant. It is a payment card, not a bank account, and it has no rewards, ATM fee or card currency stated anywhere on the public pages.

How does the Cadmos card work?

You keep control of your crypto in your own wallet, and the balance stays self-custodial until a card top-up is approved. Once approved, the card spends that loaded balance, much like a prepaid card. Because the card cannot overdraw, your spending is bounded by what you have transferred in. Two ordinary payment-card rules still apply: a declined payment can leave a hold for up to seven days, and 3-D Secure may add a one-time code or a biometric check on online payments.

Is Cadmos a bank?

No — and the card’s own pages do not name one. The card is offered by Cadmos LTD, Limassol, Cyprus, registration HE 457316, founded 2021. The card issuer is not named and no licence is named in the Terms, which is not the same as saying there is no issuer or licence behind the programme. In this industry the brand is often just the programme manager and front end, with a licensed bank or e-money institution holding the actual card programme.

Who owns Cadmos?

Cadmos is a Cyprus-registered company, Cadmos LTD in Limassol, registered under HE 457316 and founded in 2021. Its public pages name no parent, no owner and no investor. When I searched for reviews I found none — no Trustpilot page and no Reddit discussion of Cadmos Pay — so there is no user track record to judge it by either. Absence of complaints is not the same as a good history.

Which countries is the Cadmos card available in?

No country list is published. Availability depends on eligibility and on which options appear in the app for you, so the order screen is the only real check. The one written exclusion is that users must not be in a US-embargoed country. If you live somewhere that feels uncertain, open the app and look before you spend time on the rest of this setup, and note that residence and citizenship can be treated separately.

How do I get the Cadmos card?

Download the app from the /download page and apply through the order screen. That screen is also where your personal terms appear, including the KYC level, which differs by card product and can involve a government ID, personal information and proof of liveness. Proof of address and age requirements are not stated, whether you get a virtual or physical card is not stated, and card currency is not stated — so the app is where all four questions get answered.

Does the Cadmos card require KYC?

Yes, verification is part of applying, and its exact shape depends on which card product you choose — the requirement is shown on the order screen. It can include a government ID, personal information and proof of liveness. Proof of address and age are not stated, and any KYC levels are not stated either. Separately, the Terms require that you are not in a US-embargoed country, which is a rule about eligibility rather than about documents.

How much does the Cadmos card cost?

Premium has a $0 monthly fee and a 1.75% FX fee, plus Visa Signature benefits including lounge access at over 1,300 lounges in over 500 cities and a 24/7 concierge. The Premium issuance fee and crypto conversion fee are not stated, and the Premium monthly spend limit is $175,000. For Standard nothing is published: costs appear on the order screen, cross-border fees point to the programme terms with no figures, and no benefits are listed.

How do I top up the Cadmos card?

Send USDC or USDT from your own self-custodial wallet to the card, over Arbitrum, Solana or Tron. Your wallet balance stays self-custodial until the top-up is approved, so the assets are still yours until then. Top-up fees and minimums are not stated, and you should use one of the three listed networks — an unsupported network or a mismatched address can mean lost funds, because blockchain transfers are irreversible and recovery is manual with no guarantee.

Is the Cadmos card safe?

The custody position is the strong part: the Terms say Cadmos does not receive, hold, safeguard or acquire title to your digital assets or fiat funds, and you hold the recovery phrase. That protects you from the provider, and it leaves you responsible for the seed phrase, phishing and clipboard-swapping malware. The unknowns are corporate rather than technical: no named issuer, no named licence, no published complaint history, and no stated ATM, issuance or conversion fees.

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