A self-custody USDC card with no annual fee — but the country rules and limits stay unpublished

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

If you have trouble getting an ordinary bank card — because of where you live, how you earn, or simply how your paperwork looks — the Banqa card is one of the tools that has appeared to fill that gap. It is a Visa Infinite card you load with USDC from a wallet you control yourself, rather than a card attached to a bank account you had to open first. That is genuinely a different proposition from most cards in this category.

But the honest version of this review has to start with a caveat: Banqa does not publish its country list, its verification-tier limits, or the name of the bank that actually issues its cards. Those are not small omissions. For a reader deciding whether to rely on a card day to day, they are the first things you would want to know, and you will have to find out by applying rather than by reading.

Here is what I checked, what the card’s own public pages say, and where I would and would not lean on it.

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

Verdict: 7.1 out of 10 — good for the USDC holder who keeps their own keys, uncertain for everyone else

My overall score for the Banqa card is 7.1 out of 10. That is not a low number, and it is not a rave. It reflects a card that has genuinely good everyday mechanics — Apple Pay, Google Pay, no annual fee on the entry tier — attached to an operation that publishes less about eligibility and limits than I would like before you hand over your documents.

Who it suits: you already hold USDC, you are comfortable moving it on-chain from a self-custody wallet, and you want a card that spends from that balance without converting through an exchange. If that is you, the Banqa proposition is straightforward and the numbers on fees are reasonable.

Who it does not suit: someone who needs a card tomorrow and lives somewhere the eligibility rules turn out not to reach them; someone who plans to lean on the card heavily and needs published monthly limits; or anyone who is uneasy about a crypto brand that is not a bank and does not name its issuing bank.

Let me give the score in full so you can see where it comes from and disagree with me if you like.

Everyday use scores highest because that is where the card does the thing you actually want: it is a normal Visa Infinite that taps in shops and works in your phone wallet, and getting money out of an ATM is priced clearly at 1% plus $1.

Reliability sits in the middle. The good news — an issuer licensed by Visa, SOC 2 controls, penetration testing — is offset by the fact that Banqa does not name that issuer, and the only public review on Trustpilot is a single 5-star review from July 2026, which tells you almost nothing either way.

Who will they actually give the card to

This is the section where Banqa is vaguest, and I will not dress it up. The card’s public pages do not publish a list of eligible countries. What they do say is that eligibility depends on your residence and the applicable rules, and that it is confirmed during the application and identity check. A supported-countries page is linked from the site, but its contents are not part of what I could confirm.

So if your question is “can I get a Banqa card in my country?”, the honest answer from the published material is: probably maybe, and you find out by applying. I know that is frustrating, and I would rather say it plainly than imply a list exists when I could not read one.

There is a second, less obvious reason this matters. Even where you live is not the only filter. Nationality and country of birth are recorded and screened separately from your address, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy are often applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as to where you reside. In other words, a card that is technically open to residents of your country may still be closed to you, and the screening that decides that is not something the marketing page explains.

One more general point that belongs here: prepaid and debit cards are generally available to adults aged 18 and over, and some issuers set higher limits on top of that. Banqa’s own pages do not state an age requirement.

How to get it: identity checks first, then the card arrives

The application itself is a standard KYC flow, and this is one of the areas where Banqa is reasonably forthcoming.

To apply you supply a government ID — a passport, national ID, or driver’s licence — plus proof of address dated within the last 3 months. Higher verification tiers may also ask for documents showing where your funds come from. That last point catches people out: if you are moving meaningful crypto, expect to be asked to explain it, and have your records ready.

The checks are usually fast. Automated verification typically completes in minutes; if a case needs a human review, the card says allow 24 to 48 hours. If a check fails, you can retry from your dashboard rather than starting over.

The card itself is a Visa Infinite, available both virtual and physical. Business customers also get virtual and physical cards. The card’s currency is the US dollar, which is why spending anywhere else picks up the FX fee described further down.

Physical card issuance and shipping costs $39.00. The card does not state which countries it ships to, or how long delivery takes, so if the physical card is the point for you, that is another unknown to weigh.

One thing to note about limits before you get too excited: your daily, weekly and monthly spending limits depend on which verification tier you end up at. The tier names and the actual amounts are not published. You can set per-transaction limits yourself, which gives you a speed bump on any single purchase, but it does not tell you what ceiling you are working under overall.

What it really costs: Fees, the ones that bite and the ones you will forget

Cost is where Banqa looks best on paper, and where reality gets a little more textured once you start spending outside the dollar. Here is the fee schedule as the card states it.

Three everyday payments, and which of these lines actually applies to each, is the most useful thing I can give you here.

A coffee bought in your own country, in dollars, from a shop that accepts Visa. This is the clean case. No FX fee, because the transaction is in the card’s currency; no conversion fee, because the USDC behind the card is spent directly as collateral. Your only cost is the network fee on the deposit you made earlier, which the blockchain charges, not Banqa.

Dinner in Europe, paid in euros. Your card is US-dollar based, so the euro amount is converted at the Visa exchange rate and Banqa adds its 1.99% FX fee on top. This is the fee people forget, because on a single $60 dinner it is roughly $1.20 — trivial in isolation, but it is the line item that quietly adds up over a month of travel or a year of foreign purchases. This is exactly the fee to watch if you are not in the US.

Cash from an ATM at home. Here you pay the $1.50 fixed fee plus the 1% + $1 percentage fee for end users, and a $0.60 balance or authorisation check can apply on top. Add the ATM limit — which follows Visa partner standards and is not published by name — and the total cost of a $100 cash withdrawal is meaningfully more than the headline “1% + $1” suggests once the fixed and check fees are counted.

There is also the “no annual fee” caveat worth pausing on. It is true for the Standard tier, which is named. Other tiers exist but their benefits and any annual fees are not described. If you are eventually moved onto a higher tier, do not assume the no-annual-fee feature carries over.

How to top it up: send USDC on the right chain

Topping up is the part Banqa explains most cleanly, and the mechanism matters more than any fee.

The card draws on USDC held in a self-custody smart-contract wallet on the Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum networks. The site phrases it as “Hold USDC on Base and Arbitrum” and “Send only USDC on Base”. In practice, you are not paying into a Banqa account — your USDC stays in a wallet you control, and the card spends against it as collateral.

Fees here are the best part of the cost story. USDC top-ups are free: “Zero deposit fees”. Other assets and other networks cost from free to 1% depending on the route. The card does not state a minimum top-up.

Getting the network right is not a formality. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network Banqa does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. There is a second reason to be careful: on Ethereum, gas must be paid in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT or USDC with no ETH cannot send at all. Tether also disables tokens on wallets tied to the OFAC sanctions list, so stablecoins are not censorship-proof.

When you want to move USDC the other way — taking it off the card collateral back into your own wallet — the card describes an on-chain authorisation from your self-custody wallet, and quotes an example “offramp” fee of 1% + $3.00. Closing the account costs $10.00.

Paying with it every day: the part that scores 9

This is where Banqa is strongest, and where the “everyday use” score comes from.

The card is a Visa Infinite, in virtual and physical form, and it works with both Apple Pay and Google Pay. Add it to your phone’s wallet and you are tapping in the same way you would tap any other card; the phone replaces your card number with a device-specific number and uses a one-time code per payment, so your actual card details are not sitting on a merchant’s server.

There is no cashback stated. What there is instead is a referral programme: 0.15% of what your referred friends spend, plus a $10 bonus for each friend who reaches $500 in spend.

Some things the card’s public pages do not say, which you may find out only by trying: whether any merchant categories are blocked, the app platforms and any store ratings, and how chargebacks are handled in practice. That last one matters if a payment goes wrong — chargeback handling appears in the fee schedule as a disclosed fee, but the process and the time frames are not described, so treat it as a cost with paperwork attached rather than a straightforward refund.

One general behaviour to expect with any card like this: a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to 7. That is not a Banqa quirk, it is how card networks handle pending transactions, but it surprises people.

What can go wrong: the risks section is really a list of unknowns

The risks with a card like Banqa fall into two groups — the risks it tells you about, and the ones it leaves open.

On the safety side, Banqa does some of this properly. Your funds sit in a self-custody wallet, so a failure at the provider does not directly hand over your keys — but it also means the responsibility for key loss, phishing, and malware that swaps a copied address is entirely yours. The card offers an instant freeze in the app, shows card details for 60 seconds, supports email one-time codes and Google two-factor authentication, and is rolling out passkeys. Your recovery phrase is shown once and is not recoverable by Banqa — take that seriously, because nobody else can restore it for you. Codego Group runs penetration tests and operates under SOC 2 controls.

On the structural side, the real risks are these:

The issuer is not named. Banqa states it is not a bank, and that the cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member under a licence from Visa. But it does not publish which institution that is. In this category that matters: Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves — they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all its Visa programmes. And in November 2022 Visa said it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX”, with the FTX US debit card being wound down. Programmes in this space can end.

So the structural risk is not that your crypto is stolen from a hot wallet; it is that the card programme you rely on is discontinued and you are given a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw what is left. Banqa is young enough that this is not a prediction — it is just the category’s history.

The complaints record is too thin to judge. Trustpilot shows 3.7 from a single review — a 5-star review from July 2026 — and Trustpilot notes the company has not invited reviews. One review is not a track record in either direction.

Support is email, with replies usually within 24 hours, plus a help centre and contact pages. For a card where a wrong-network deposit is irreversible, a 24-hour email turnaround is on the slow side.

Two final category-level cautions that are worth internalising, because they apply to any prepaid or crypto card and are not Banqa-specific. A prepaid card draws on a stored balance, and the balance is not the same as a bank deposit — electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds, but that safeguarding is not deposit guarantee, and the coverage can vary. And in the US, FinCEN guidance treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters, while ordinary users buying things are not — so the regulatory weight sits on the platform, not on you, but it also means the platform carries obligations that shape how it operates.

What to take instead

If Banqa’s gaps — unpublished countries, unpublished limits, unnamed issuer — are the things that bother you, three alternatives sit nearby. They are not obviously better; they have their own silences.

A few observations walking across that table.

Decaf is the only one of the four that publishes an actual country restriction list — a long one, covering both residence and several named countries — which paradoxically makes it easier to plan around than a blank page. It also, like Banqa, declines to state which networks top up the card itself. And its physical card costs $90 outside the US, versus Banqa’s $39.00.

BloFin has the cheapest headline fees — $0.00 activation, annual, issuance and dormancy, and a spend fee that falls to 0.00% at the top VIP tier — but it is a Visa Platinum rather than an Infinite, it does not state its FX fee, and its country list is equally unpublished. SafePal’s 1% FX on non-USD Mastercard settlement and its unquantified swap spread make its costs harder to pin down than Banqa’s, and its regions page being empty when fetched is not a reassuring sign.

None of the three offers what Banqa does most clearly: USDC spent directly against collateral in a wallet you hold the keys to, with no manual conversion step.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Banqa card to someone who already holds USDC, already manages a self-custody wallet, and wants to spend that balance from a real Visa Infinite — in a wallet, in a shop, and at an ATM — without routing through an exchange or giving up custody to hold a card balance. For that person, the fees are honest (no annual fee on Standard, free USDC top-ups, a clearly priced 1.99% FX), the security posture is sound (self-custody, instant freeze, SOC 2, penetration tests), and the day-to-day mechanics are the best in this comparison.

I would be more cautious about recommending it to someone who needs certainty before they commit: people who need to know they qualify before applying, people who need a published monthly ceiling to plan around, people who want a named, established bank behind the card, or anyone for whom an email response within 24 hours is too slow if a deposit goes to the wrong network.

If you are in that second group, treat the country’s eligibility as genuinely unresolved until you apply, and treat the card as something you would be willing to lose, not something you would be upset to lose.

Frequently asked questions

What is Banqa card?

Banqa is a crypto payment card: a Visa Infinite, virtual and physical, that spends USDC you hold in your own self-custody smart-contract wallet rather than money from a bank account. You top it up by sending USDC on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum, and the card spends against that balance as collateral, with no manual conversion step. It is a brand of Codego Group, and Banqa states it is not a bank.

Is Banqa a bank?

No — Banqa states it is not a bank. The cards are issued by a Visa Principal Member under a licence from Visa, but Banqa does not publish the name of that issuing institution. So the card sits on standard card-network rails, but the balance behind it is not a bank deposit and would not carry the protections of one.

Does Banqa card require KYC?

Yes. You need a government ID — passport, national ID or driver’s licence — and proof of address dated within 3 months; higher tiers may ask for source-of-funds documents. Automated checks usually take minutes, manual reviews 24 to 48 hours, and a failed check can be retried from your dashboard.

Is Banqa card free?

Partly. There is no annual fee on the Standard tier, and USDC top-ups cost nothing. But a physical card costs $39.00 to issue and ship, non-USD spending carries a 1.99% FX fee, an ATM withdrawal is $1.50 plus 1% and $1 for end users, account closure is $10.00, and account residency is $3.00.

How do I top up Banqa card?

You send USDC to a self-custody smart-contract wallet on Base, Arbitrum or Ethereum — USDC on the correct network is free to deposit. Other assets and networks cost from free to 1% depending on route. Get the network right: transfers are irreversible, and a deposit on an unsupported network can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee.

Can I use Banqa card in my country?

That depends on your residence, and the card does not publish a country list — eligibility is confirmed during application and KYC. It also helps to know that nationality and country of birth are screened separately from your address, so living in a supported country may not by itself make you eligible. The only way to know is to apply.

Is Banqa card safe?

The security design is reasonable: your USDC stays in a self-custody wallet, and the card adds an instant freeze, 60-second card detail display, email OTP and Google 2FA, with SOC 2 controls and penetration tests at Codego Group. The risk is less about theft than about continuity — the issuer is unnamed, and card programmes in this category can be suspended by the network.

Does Banqa card have cashback or rewards?

No cashback is stated. There is a referral programme instead: you earn 0.15% of what your referred friends spend, plus a $10 bonus for each friend who reaches $500 in spend. If you were counting on cashback, do not — Banqa does not offer it.

How do I withdraw money from Banqa?

There are two ways. At an ATM you get cash against a fixed $1.50 fee plus 1% of the amount and $1 for end users, with limits following Visa partner standards. To move USDC off the card, you authorise an on-chain transfer from your self-custody wallet back to it, with an example “offramp” fee quoted as 1% + $3.00.

Is Banqa card worth it?

For someone already holding USDC who wants to spend it from their own wallet via Apple Pay or Google Pay, with no annual fee on the Standard tier — yes, that is a genuinely useful card and the best of this comparison for everyday use. If you need a published country list, a named bank, or a known spending limit, the value is harder to justify until those are answered.

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