WEEKLY WRAP · 2026-08-04
4 quick hits · market context · 15 cards updated
SHUTDOWN
Kulipa, a Paris company that issued stablecoin cards on behalf of about 20 wallets and fintechs, shut down on July 29 over solvency problems. It had issued more than 120,000 cards since launching in February 2025. There was no wind-down notice and no grace period. People found out when a card was declined at a till. The Solflare Card is a Kulipa program and stopped working the same day; we marked it Paused on July 30, and Solflare says a rebuilt card on a new issuer, with Apple Pay and Google Pay, higher limits and cashback, is coming back in August. The Ready Card is a Kulipa client too, and it had already lost service for every non-EEA user on June 16 after an earlier issuer change, with roughly an hour's warning. Here is the part worth keeping: Solflare cardholders did not lose money, because the card pulled from a self-custody wallet at the moment of purchase rather than parking a balance with Kulipa. Same collapse, and the architecture decided whether users were inconvenienced or wiped out. Our read: the issuer behind a card is the single least advertised and most load-bearing fact about it, and almost nobody publishes it. Solflare's own legal documents never named an issuer at all, and Ready's still don't. If your card provider won't tell you whose balance sheet your plastic depends on, that is the answer.
Source: Startup Fortune Solflare Card → Ready Card →
INDUSTRY
One week, two structural problems for the same card. Separately from the Kulipa collapse, Ready announced its main app is leaving Starknet for Base by August 15, citing lower fees and deeper stablecoin liquidity. Starknet accounts have to migrate before that date. Ready X will keep supporting Starknet for wallet functions like staking, swaps and DeFi, but the main app won't. On the card itself, Ready says only that details of the "new Ready Card" will follow closer to launch, which is a fairly loud way of saying the current one isn't simply carrying over. We track Ready at 0.5% STRK on Lite and 3% ongoing STRK on Metal, with 10% for the first 30 days on up to $1,500 of spend, across the UK and EEA. The cashback is denominated in the token of the chain the app is walking away from, and the issuer is the one that just went under. We are leaving the entry as it stands rather than guessing at a replacement, but if you hold the Metal card for the STRK earn, treat that rate as unfunded until Ready describes what the new card actually pays.
REGULATION
Tether never applied for MiCA authorization, so Revolut is removing USDT for EU customers on a staged timetable: purchases stopped July 6, deposits stopped July 30, and the full delisting with conversion of remaining balances completes August 31. If you hold USDT in a Revolut account in the EU, you have four weeks to decide what it becomes instead of finding out on the last day. The card angle is indirect but real. Revolut's crypto card converts holdings to fiat at the point of sale, so the delisting narrows which holdings can do that for EU users, and cashback on Metal and Ultra plans has always applied to fiat spend rather than crypto-funded purchases anyway. What makes this bigger than one app is the timing. MiCA's transitional period expired July 1, and USDT had already been pushed off major EU exchanges for the same reason, which we covered in our June 22 wrap. Revolut is the consumer bank account following the exchanges. USDT is a widely used funding asset across the cards we track, though in our own data USDC now shows up on slightly more entries. Watching a stablecoin get walked out of Europe by an authorization deadline rather than by demand is a clear look at what MiCA does to the funding leg of a crypto card.
Source: FXLeaders Revolut Crypto Card →
KYC
We spent the week auditing cards that circulate on no-KYC lists, and added six of them to the database with what we found rather than what they claim. PayFun requires a government ID or passport upload after email or phone signup, so it does not belong on those lists at all. Kardpay asks for a phone number and country after you connect a wallet. PintoPay asks for nothing at signup and MaxSwap asks only for an email, but both companies' own terms reserve the right to demand identity documents on AML review or suspicious activity, which makes them low-KYC, not no-KYC, and PintoPay carries enough other risk that we flagged the entry outright. Trocador isn't an issuer at all: it resells third-party prepaid cards, reportedly from Tremendous and Blackhawk Network, paid for in crypto. That leaves Laso Finance, which genuinely asks for nothing and never requests a document. Even there the verification didn't disappear, it moved: Laso runs Chainalysis screening, sanctions, PEP and adverse-media checks and device fingerprinting, so a deposit can be blocked at the compliance layer without anyone ever learning your name. It is also a FinCEN-registered MSB, which is a self-registration form, not supervision, and there is no safeguarding of balances and no published issuing bank. Honestly, that is the lesson across all six. "No KYC" describes the signup screen. It says nothing about what happens to your money afterward.
Source: Card Pilled PayFun Card → Kardpay → Pinto Pay → MaxSwap Virtual Card → Trocador Prepaid Cards → Laso Finance Card →
Market Context
Every real story this week happened underneath the card rather than on it. An issuer nobody markets went insolvent and took 120,000 cards with it. A chain migration put a cashback token's future in question. An authorization deadline decided which stablecoin can legally fund an account in Europe. And our own no-KYC audit found that on five of six cards, the compliance stack looked nothing like the marketing. None of that shows up in the number people actually compare, which is the cashback rate. We have been building the issuer and banking fields into the database for a few weeks now, and this week made the case better than we could have. Every card has an issuing entity, a BIN sponsor, a licence and a safeguarding arrangement, or conspicuously lacks one, and almost none of them put it on the landing page. Solflare never named its issuer in its own legal documents. Ready still doesn't. Kulipa's clients found out who they were exposed to when a payment failed at a checkout. Our read: the honest way to compare cards right now is two columns, not one. The first is what it pays you, which providers publish loudly and change whenever they like. The second is what has to stay solvent, licensed and authorized for it to keep working at all, which mostly has to be dug out of a cardholder agreement. July reportedly set a spending record. It also killed 120,000 cards. Both columns were busy.
Cards updated this week: Solflare Card → Ready Card → Revolut Crypto Card → Bybit Card → Rain Card →
New cards added: DPT Card → Buenbit Card → OnilX Crypto Card → Trocador Prepaid Cards → Laso Finance Card → MaxSwap Virtual Card → Kardpay → Pinto Pay → PayFun Card → Eurasian Bank Crypto Card →
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