WEEKLY WRAP · 2026-08-11
3 quick hits · market context · 10 cards updated
SHUTDOWN
Cypher's wind-down reached the part that costs people money. Card loading stopped on July 8, the day the Nium acquisition was announced. August 7 was the last day any Cypher card could authorize a purchase, and spending ended at 00:00 UTC on August 8. What is left is a withdrawal-only portal, and it goes offline on September 6 along with the app and the dApp. Cypher was self-custodial, so the funds sit in wallets the user controls rather than on a company balance sheet, but the interface for reaching them has a shutdown date attached and the company running it has been acquired. Osmosis Pay is built on the same infrastructure and is caught in the same wind-down; we do not track it as a separate card. The CYPR token is the ugly footnote. The protocol is permanently wound down, there is no buyback and no compensation for holders, and the token sits about 97% below its all-time high. If you took cashback in CYPR and locked it as veCYPR to steer merchant emissions, that is the outcome. Our read: a shutdown with a published calendar is the good version of this. Kulipa gave people no notice at all, and that was ten days ago. Cypher gave two months, and the only useful thing to do with two months is not spend seven weeks of it.
Source: Cypher Cypher Card
SHUTDOWN
Two weeks ago we left the BitMart Card marked active, waiting on a card-level notice that never arrived. On August 7 we changed it to discontinued. The card was funded from the BitMart exchange account and its tiers keyed off exchange VIP level, and with deposits suspended since July 26 there is no way to top one up or get a new one issued, so "active" had stopped describing anything. The deadline to plan around is not the January closure. BitMart asks users to complete verification and submit withdrawal requests before 05:00 UTC on August 26, the same day all trading ends at 01:00 UTC. The platform stays reachable until 15:59 UTC on January 31, 2027, but a withdrawal filed after August 26 is a request into a company that has already stopped running its markets, and the wind-down notice warns that withdrawals may trigger extra compliance checks. The card's headline was up to 5.5% USDT across an eight-tier VIP ladder in 115+ countries. That ceiling now belongs to a card nobody can load, which is a good reminder that a rate is a claim on whoever is still operating.
Source: CoinDesk BitMart Card
LAUNCH
Bitunix, a derivatives-focused exchange, launched a Visa debit card on July 16. The launch announcement puts VIP-tiered cashback at 1% to 8%, capped at 1,000 USDT a month. It did not surface in any of our news scans until this week, which is our miss, and it goes into the next deep review batch. The fee sheet is worth reading before the headline rate. Bitunix's own help centre lists a 1.5% FX fee stacked on top of Visa's rate, a 0.5% international processing fee, and a 0.3 USDT charge on any purchase under $10 with the first three each month free. That last one is unusual and it targets exactly the coffee-and-transit spending that people use these cards for. On the rate itself, 8% sounds aggressive until you put it next to what we already track: Bybit, Oobit, MEXC and WhiteBIT all publish 10% ceilings. What is actually competitive here is the cap. Bybit's top Infinite tier caps cashback at $600 a month and its Base tier caps at $5, so 1,000 USDT is a real number by comparison, assuming you can reach a VIP level on a derivatives exchange to claim it. Regional availability and anything beyond "Visa" on the network still need confirming from the official help centre, so we have not added an entry yet rather than publish a guess.
Source: CryptoSlate Bybit Card → Oobit Card →
RATES
The rotating check covered 50 cards on August 7 and a follow-up pass cleaned up what it flagged. Oobit is the one that stings, because we badge it High Cashback at up to 10%. Per Oobit's own 5X Reward Terms, both the stablecoin and token rewards require Level 2 or above, reached at $250 of cumulative spend in a rolling 90-day cycle. A new cardholder earns reward points and no cashback at all. Trustee Plus was worse: our entry described the wrong card. The Wirex-issued replacement is a USD Visa prepaid issued in Great Britain, and we were still carrying the euro Mastercard from the Quicko era, including a 1.5% plus EUR 1 ATM fee for a card that has no ATM access. Nexo's FX is now flat rather than a tiered free allowance, at 0.2% on weekdays and 0.7% at weekends across the EEA, UK and Switzerland, and 2% and 2.5% respectively everywhere else. Wirex's free ATM allowance turns out to be regional, GBP 200, EUR 200 or SGD 200 a month and AUD 400 in Australia, not the flat $400 we had. None of these are exotic. Each one is published correctly on the provider's own site, in the terms or the help centre rather than the card page, and each was stale in our data for months. That is the failure mode worth naming: not fabricated numbers, just old ones sitting where nobody looks twice.
Source: Oobit Oobit Card → Trustee Plus Card → Nexo Card → Wirex Card →
Market Context
Two withdrawal deadlines in one week, both on cards we track, neither of them announced by the card team. Cypher's portal closes September 6 and BitMart wants withdrawal requests in before August 26. Add Kulipa's insolvency on July 29, which gave 120,000 cardholders no notice whatsoever, and August is shaping up as the month the crypto card sector's back office became the whole story. Meanwhile the money keeps moving in the other direction: Mastercard closed its $1.8B BVNK acquisition on August 4, and the EU's targeted MiCA review is taking public comment until August 31. Big infrastructure buying big infrastructure while the mid-tier consolidates around it. Our read, and this is the thread running through the audit findings too: the number a card advertises is the most published and least reliable thing about it. Oobit's 10% requires spending $250 first. Bitunix's 8% is capped at 1,000 USDT a month behind a derivatives VIP ladder. BitMart's 5.5% belongs to a card that cannot be funded. In every case the real terms were sitting in a help centre or a terms page, correctly stated, just not where anyone comparing cards would look. We are now at 178 cards and 147 active, and the useful work is increasingly not finding new cards. It is checking whether the old entries still describe reality.
Cards updated this week: BitMart Card Oobit Card → Trustee Plus Card → Nexo Card → Wirex Card → Crypto.com Visa Card → MetaMask Card →
New cards added: KOSH Global Card → Keytom Card → Stack Card →
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