The Based card read closely: fees, locks and open questions

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

There is a particular kind of reader who lands on a page like this. You are not looking for a card because you want the best rewards in town. You are looking because the ordinary bank card you had, or wanted, is not available to you — the bank said no, the waiting list is a wall, the address you live at is not one they serve, the paperwork is a loop you cannot finish. Into that gap step crypto cards, and the Based card is one of them. So the fair question is not whether it is fashionable. It is whether this one will actually work for you, and what it will cost when you use it.

Here is my answer after reading through the card’s own materials and looking at what has been reported about it: 6.9 out of 10. That is not a dismissal and it is not an endorsement. It is a card with genuinely good things on the right side of the ledger — no annual fee, no fee on stablecoin deposits, three tiers with real differences between them — and genuinely soft things on the left — an issuer and licence that are not named on the pages I read, a support record made of a single review, and cashback that only exists if you lock up tokens and wait. The score out of ten is not a ranking against the market. It is my read of how much I could actually verify.

Who it suits: someone who already holds crypto, can sit out the lock-up period, and mostly spends in dollars or in places where a dollar card is normal. Who it does not suit: someone who needs a bank account, wants a card in the currency they actually live in, needs cash from a machine, or plans to close the account and get the balance out — because the pages I read do not explain how withdrawal works.

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

How I scored it

Six criteria, each marked out of ten. I give the marks as they stand and the reason behind each, because a number on its own tells you nothing about where a card will hurt you.

Read that table row by row and you can see the shape of the card. Funding is the best thing about it. Cost is good until you spend outside the dollar. Reliability is where it loses ground, and that is not a detail — it is the question of whether the thing exists tomorrow.

Will they give you the card

Yes, in a great many countries — and no, in a great many others. The card is offered worldwide except for a published list that took effect on 1 August 2026. That list runs to about 74 countries and includes, among others, the United States, Canada, Australia, China, India, Singapore, the Russian Federation, Belarus, Ukraine, Iran and Turkey. If you are in one of them, this is not your card and no amount of good intentions changes that.

The gate is your country of residence. Not your nationality, not where your money is — where you live. The card’s own words on this are practical: see whether you can apply from your country of residence. That is the whole test, and it is worth doing before you read any further, because everything else on this page is moot if your address is on the wrong side of that list.

One thing I want to be straight about, because people often assume the worst: the list is a list of excluded countries. If your country is not on it, the card says it is available. That is what the material says; it is not a promise that your application will succeed, because approval also runs through the identity check described in the next section.

How to get it

You apply inside the Based app, and you complete KYC there — the identity check that every regulated financial service is required to run. It is not optional, and I would treat any offer to skip it as a warning rather than a convenience.

The documents the card accepts are specific. A passport or a national ID card is fine. A driver’s licence and a voter ID are not accepted — that is stated plainly, and it matters if the ID in your wallet is a driving licence, because that is the one thing you will be told to replace. Screening typically runs up to 3 days. If the compliance team wants more, the address given is [email protected]. You must be at least 18 and resident in a country where the card is offered.

Proof of address: not stated. I want to be clear about what that means, because “not stated” is not the same as “not required” and it is certainly not the same as “not checked”. The public pages I read do not say whether a separate address document is needed. Anyone whose application stalls should assume it may be requested and be ready with something official bearing their address.

There is a single KYC level, screening up to 3 days, and the card does not list its rejection reasons. What you get depends on the tier you are in, and that is where the differences are worth holding on to:

• Based Orange — virtual card only, no lock-up, 2.5% FX markup, no cashback. The card states it is not yet available.
• HYPE — virtual plus physical plastic, a 10,000 $BASED lock-up, 1.5% FX markup, 2% cashback.
• Based Gold — metal card, 20g, a 100,000 $BASED lock-up, 0% FX markup, 4% cashback, and 4 airport lounge visits per year.

The virtual card is instant once you are approved. The physical one ships separately by DHL; it costs $50 in HYPE for the HYPE tier and is free on Gold. Which countries it ships to and how long it takes: not stated beyond the availability list above. Physical cards ship separately, in other words — do not assume your plastic arrives in the same week as your approval.

The lock-up is the part to understand before you apply rather than after. It runs 21 days from redemption, then a 3-day unstake cooldown when you unstake. And, critically, all benefits end when unstaking begins — not when you finish unstaking. That is the single most important line on this page for anyone thinking of the HYPE or Gold tiers.

What it really costs

The headline is good: no signup fee and no annual fee. Beyond that, the picture is a set of tier-dependent percentage markups and one shipping price. There is no monthly fee to forget.

The card is a Visa debit in USD. That single fact drives the rest of the cost story, so let us walk three everyday payments through it and see which fees actually bite.

A coffee in a country that does not use dollars. You are charged the local price, the network converts it to dollars, and the tier’s markup is added: 2.5% on Orange, 1.5% on HYPE, 0% on Gold. On Orange, a $4 coffee becomes roughly $4.10. This is the fee that matters if you live anywhere the dollar is not the currency — and it is why Gold’s zero markup is the tier’s real prize, not the 4% cashback.

A subscription bought in dollars, on an app that prices in USD. Here the markup is zero on every tier, because you are spending in the card’s own currency. What you may still meet is the crypto conversion at the point of sale: the docs describe auto-conversion, but the conversion rate and any separate conversion fee are not stated. I cannot tell you what that costs, because the card does not say. Treat it as unknown rather than free.

A meal paid for by topping up stablecoins first. A deposit of USDT or USDC carries no added fee, so the money arrives whole. What the blockchain charges for the transfer is a separate matter and is not set by the card — that is the network’s fee, and it is charged by the chain regardless of who issued your card. Spend from a balance already loaded and you pay no deposit fee at all.

Two things the fee table does not contain, and I want them named rather than glossed over. ATM withdrawals are not mentioned anywhere in the documentation. A Trustpilot reviewer in May 2026 reported that ATM withdrawals are not enabled — that is an unofficial report from one person, not something the card confirms, but it lines up with the documentation’s silence. If you need cash from a machine, assume this card is not the answer until you have seen it work yourself. And withdrawals from the balance are not stated at all: the pages I read do not describe a withdrawal process, so I cannot tell you what it costs, how long it takes, or whether it is even offered. That is a real gap, not a stylistic one, and it is the kind of thing you want to know before you depend on a balance, not after.

How to top it up

This is the part the card does best, and if there is a single reason to keep reading, it is here. You deposit USDT, USDC, XSGD, SOL, HYPE or BASED. The docs list the networks as Solana, Arbitrum, Polygon and Hyperliquid. And when you pay, the balance converts automatically at the point of sale.

On fees the card is unambiguous, and the sentence in the docs is worth repeating because it is unusual: “No, there are no top-up fees for USDT and USDC”. Stablecoin deposits carry no added fee. What is not stated: the minimum deposit, who pays the network fee, and whether there is any fiat top-up route at all. The absence of a stated minimum is the one that will surprise you if you try a small first transfer — find out before you send.

There is a piece of general knowledge here that costs people real money, so it is worth saying once, and it applies to every crypto card rather than this one. Blockchain transfers are irreversible. A deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or sent to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost, or need manual recovery with no guarantee of success. The chain does not take it back. Check the network, check the address, then send — not the other way round.

And a hard truth about the assets themselves: stablecoins are not necessarily stable. USDT and USDC are US-dollar-pegged, and the BIS put about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in these two as of July 2025. USDC lost its peg briefly in March 2023 during the US banking crisis, and TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022. Your top-up is denominated in something that is designed to hold steady and does not always do so.

Paying with it every day

Day to day, the card behaves like an ordinary Visa debit with one unusual feature: it converts as you spend.

Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported per the documentation, added at the point of receipt. There is one conflict I should pass on rather than hide: a Trustpilot reviewer in May 2026 said Apple Pay was not supported. That contradicts the docs. Treat the docs as the better source and the review as an unverified user report — but if Apple Pay is the way you intend to pay, test it before you rely on it.

Blocked merchant categories are not stated. What that means in practice is that I cannot tell you in advance whether a given shop will decline the card. The general reason crypto cards get declined is worth knowing: a merchant category code — a four-digit classification assigned to a business under ISO 18245 — tells the shop what it is selling, and issuers block codes by policy. MCC 7995, gambling, is the classic example that many issuers block on specific cards. The blocked list varies by issuer, and this card does not publish one.

The cashback is the most conditional thing here. It is paid in $BASED at the start of each month:

• HYPE: 2%, capped at $20 per month. AI subscription rebates up to $10/month on HYPE.
• Gold: 4%, capped at $100 per month. AI subscription rebates up to $100/month; entertainment rebates up to $20/month.
• Rewards are promotional and may change — the card says so itself.
• All benefits end when unstaking begins.

That last line deserves a second reading. The cashback is not a discount you are given; it is a return you hold in a token you must lock up to earn, that stops the moment you start to get your tokens back, and that is capped at a level the reviewer on Trustpilot described as modest against balances of roughly $800 or $8,000. Whether 2% or 4% is worth locking $10,000 or $100,000 of $BASED for 21 days is a question only you can answer. I would answer it by asking what the lock-up is costing you in opportunity if the token falls while it is tied up.

Everything happens in the Based app; that is where you applied and that is where the card lives.

What can go wrong

Four things, in rough order of how much I would worry about them.

Nobody on the page will tell you who stands behind it. Starting data names SHA2 LABS PTE. LTD., Singapore. The site footer says only “Based”. The issuer and licences are not named. This is the weakest part of the whole card. A crypto card is normally a front end on top of somebody else’s regulated balance: the card network (Visa) routes the payments and sets the rules, the issuer holds the programme and the money, and the crypto brand is often only the programme manager and the marketing. Without knowing your issuer, you cannot check the register where your issuer should appear, and you cannot tell which regulator’s rules your money sits under. It also means the protections you might assume — deposit insurance, say — are entirely unverified. I am not saying anything is wrong. I am saying you are being asked to hold a balance with an entity you cannot name from its own materials.

The complaints record is thin, and what is there is unflattering. On Trustpilot, read on 21 October 2026, the score is 3.4 from a single review dated 24 May 2026, and the profile is unclaimed. One review is not a pattern, and I want to be careful not to present it as one. But that review raises the three things that matter most here: cashback needs staking and is capped, Apple Pay was not supported (which the docs contradict), and ATM withdrawals are not enabled. It is titled “Mediocre support”. I found no official incidents on the card side. Support is by FAQ, X and Telegram, plus that compliance address — reasonable channels, thin evidence that they resolve things.

Lock-ups and irreversible transfers. The 21-day lock-up with a 3-day cooldown, and benefits that stop the moment you unstake, are the deal’s fine print. Combine that with the general principle that crypto transfers do not reverse, and the practical rule is simple: only put in what you can leave there for the full lock-up period and can afford to lose if a network or address goes wrong.

Custody, recovery and disputes are simply not described. The pages I read do not state the custody model, whether two-factor authentication is available, whether the card can be frozen instantly, or how a chargeback works for this product. That is not a red flag on its own — many cards are quiet about it — but it means you are relying on a support channel rather than a stated process if something goes wrong. And a declined payment can leave a hold on your funds for several days, in some cases up to seven.

If you want the wider frame on why this matters: under EU rules an electronic money institution must safeguard customer funds by segregating them in dedicated accounts or insuring them — and such funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. Whoever your issuer turns out to be, that is the category of protection you are in.

What to take instead

I looked at three alternatives that people actually compare this card to. The scores below are mine on the same basis as the 6.9, and the comparison is deliberately blunt about where each is weaker.

Where Based stands out is the funding column. It supports the widest set of assets and networks of anything here, it charges nothing on stablecoin deposits, and it auto-converts at the point of sale. Lava edges it on score and matches it on the absence of an annual fee, with a stated zero FX spread — but it tells you even less: the network, the card form and the conditions on that 5% are not stated.

Gemini is a different object. It is a credit card, paid off in fiat, with crypto as the reward rather than the source. For someone who is excluded from ordinary banking, a credit card is a harder door to open, not an easier one. Its rewards are genuinely richer and uncapped by staking. Trastra is the narrowest: 31 listed countries, a prepaid card topped up from a Mover wallet, and fees not stated at all.

One background fact that explains why these programmes can end: Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves — they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. Visa said in November 2022 that it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX”, and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Closures follow a pattern: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. That is the structural risk behind every card in this table, and it is not a knock on any particular company.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Based card to someone in this position: you cannot get an ordinary bank card where you live, you already hold crypto or stablecoins rather than cash, you spend mostly in dollars or in a place where a dollar card is unremarkable, and you are comfortable treating the balance as money you will not need back quickly. If you are in that position and you can sit out 21 days without the tokens, the Gold tier’s 0% FX markup is the most valuable thing here — more valuable than the 4% cashback, which is capped at $100 a month, promotional, and disappears the moment you begin unstaking. If you travel or live in a currency that is not the dollar, judge the card on that 0% and ignore the cashback.

I would not recommend it if you need a bank account, if you need cash from an ATM, if you want to be able to withdraw your balance on terms you understand — the pages I read do not describe withdrawal at all — or if you are going to put money in that you might need in a hurry. And I would hold off entirely if you are outside the listed available countries.

One last thing, and it is the thing I would want a friend to know. This is a card from a company whose starting data names a Singapore entity and whose public pages name no issuer and no licence. I found no official incidents against it. I also found no evidence that it is unsafe. Those two sentences are both true, and the second one is not much of a comfort when the size of your balance is at stake. Before you load anything, the questions worth asking are the boring ones: who is the issuer, which register are they on, what happens to my balance if the programme closes. The card does not answer them. That is why it sits at 6.9 rather than higher.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Based card?

Based is a Visa debit card you apply for inside the Based app and spend from a crypto balance rather than a bank account. It comes in three tiers — Orange (virtual only, not yet available), HYPE (virtual plus plastic) and Gold (metal, 20g) — and it converts crypto to fiat as you pay. There is no annual fee, and stablecoin deposits carry no added fee. The card currency is USD.

How does the Based card work?

You load the card with crypto — USDT, USDC, XSGD, SOL, HYPE or BASED — over networks including Solana, Arbitrum, Polygon and Hyperliquid, and the balance converts automatically when you spend. Because it is a Visa debit, the card is accepted wherever Visa is accepted, though the documentation does not publish a list of blocked merchant categories. What sits behind the card is not described on the pages I read.

Is Based a bank?

I could not confirm that it is one, and the pages I read do not claim it. Starting data names SHA2 LABS PTE. LTD., Singapore, while the site footer says only “Based”, and neither the issuer nor its licences are named. That gap matters, because who holds your balance determines what protections apply to it. I would not assume any until the issuer is named and checkable.

Who owns Based, and which countries is it available in?

Operating data points to SHA2 LABS PTE. LTD. in Singapore. The card is offered worldwide except a list of roughly 74 countries that took effect on 1 August 2026, including the United States, Canada, Australia, China, India, Singapore, the Russian Federation, Belarus, Ukraine, Iran and Turkey. Availability turns on your country of residence, not your nationality.

Can I get the Based card in my country?

Check the published list first — that is the fastest way to find out, and eligibility is decided by country of residence. If your country is not on the exclusion list, the card says it is available, and you apply in the Based app with a passport or national ID card. Driver’s licences and voter IDs are not accepted. Screening typically takes up to 3 days, and you must be 18 or older.

Does the Based card require KYC?

Yes, and there is no way round it — every regulated service runs one. You complete it in the Based app, submit a passport or national ID, and wait up to 3 days for screening. More documents may be requested at [email protected]. Whether a separate proof of address is needed is not stated on the public pages, so have an official document bearing your address ready.

How much does the Based card cost to keep?

Nothing recurring: no signup fee and no annual fee on any tier. The costs that appear are the FX markup on non-USD spend — 2.5% on Orange, 1.5% on HYPE, 0% on Gold — and the physical card, which is $50 in HYPE for the HYPE tier and free on Gold. General spending limits are not stated anywhere in the documentation.

Can I use the Based card in Apple Wallet?

The documentation says Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported, added at the point of receipt. One Trustpilot reviewer in May 2026 said Apple Pay was not supported, which conflicts with the docs — an unofficial report from a single person. Treat the documentation as the better source, but test it yourself before you make it your main way of paying.

Can I withdraw cash from an ATM with a Based card?

Do not plan on it. ATM withdrawals are not mentioned anywhere in the card’s documentation, and a Trustpilot reviewer in May 2026 reported that they are not enabled — unofficial, but consistent with that silence. If you need physical cash, this is not the card to rely on. Related: the pages I read do not describe withdrawing from your balance at all, so I cannot tell you the process, the cost or the timing.

Is the Based card safe?

There is no evidence of a problem, and I found no official incidents. But safety here rests on trust you have not been given much to base it on: the issuer and licences are not named, custody arrangements and two-factor authentication are not stated in the pages I read, and the Trustpilot rating is 3.4 from a single unclaimed-profile review dated 24 May 2026. Load only what you can afford to leave, and keep your own records of every transfer.

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