WEEKLY WRAP · 2026-08-18
4 quick hits · market context · 12 cards updated
SHUTDOWN
Two weeks ago we wrote that we were leaving Ready's entry alone rather than guessing what came after Kulipa. That question is now answered. Ready shut the card programme outright after its issuer ceased operations on July 29, and co-founder Itamar Lesuisse confirmed there was no advance notice to give because Ready did not receive any either. We changed the entry to discontinued on August 14. The detail worth knowing if you held one: Ready is refunding card subscriptions, shipping and card fees charged over the previous 12 months, within 10 business days. Balances were never at risk. The card debited USDC from a self-custody Starknet wallet at the moment of purchase rather than parking a float with the issuer, which is the same architecture that protected Solflare users through the same collapse. Solflare is still paused as of August 14, with a rebuilt card on a new issuer signposted for August and terms not yet published. One Kulipa client is refunding and closing, the other is rebuilding, and neither had any say in the timing. Our read: the 12-month refund is decent conduct in a bad situation, and it is also the clearest thing Ready has said about whether the card comes back. You don't refund a year of subscription fees on a product you expect to restart next month.
Source: The Defiant Ready Card Solflare Card →
RATES
This one is a correction to our own data, and it cost readers money in the direction that stings. We had the Gnosis Pay Intermediary Cashback Programme recorded as expired on June 30, 2026, with rates marked unconfirmed and a successor listed as TBD. Gnosis Pay's help centre gives the operative window as November 9, 2025 through September 30, 2026. The programme is live and has been the whole time. So the GNO tiers are real right now: 1% at 0.1 GNO held, 2% at 1, 3% at 10, 4% at 100, plus 1% for an OG NFT to a 5% ceiling, with GNO held rather than staked or locked. We fixed the entry on August 14 and applied the same correction to Rebind, which runs on the same programme. Partner-led incentives (Zeal in Europe, PicnicBR in Brazil, the latter already live) are set to replace the Gnosis-funded programme after September 30, so October is the date to actually put in your calendar. If you hold GNO and stopped using the card because a comparison site told you the cashback was dead, ours was one of them, and you left up to 5% on the table for six weeks. Re-check it in October, and re-check us too.
Source: Gnosis Pay Gnosis Pay → Rebind Card →
LAUNCH
Bitrefill, Karta and Karma went in on August 12, all three found in a provider roundup rather than a launch announcement, and all three advertise a reward that doesn't convert to money. Bitrefill's 2% (1% on deposit, 1% on spend) pays in Bitrefill store credit good for gift cards and mobile top-ups on Bitrefill, non-withdrawable and not movable to the card balance. EEA only, free virtual and physical cards, and a EUR 10 per month inactivity fee after 12 quiet months. Karta markets 25% cashback in KARAT tokens, valued by Karta itself at 100 KARAT to 1 USDT, on an internal balance with no external market and no published redemption path. An independent card directory puts the real figure at 1%, earned only on referrals' spending. Karta also takes 1.5% off every card payment whether a reward lands or not, which is unusual enough that we put a warning on the entry. Karma's tiers do carry a rate, except the rate appears nowhere in Karma's own docs or fee page, so it went in as points too. We recorded all three as points-based instead of repeating the marketed number, and taught the ROI calculator to discount store credit the way it already discounts points, because otherwise Bitrefill's shop-only 2% would have ranked as though it were cash. Plutus is the other change: back to active on the strength of its own status page showing card creation, top-ups and transactions at 100% uptime since May. Its newest official post still describes card spending as suspended and the replacement banking partner has never been named, so that caveat stays on the entry.
Source: Card Pilled Bitrefill Card → Karta Card → Karma Card → Plutus Card →
LAUNCH
Two Argentine cards joined the database on August 16, and the rate is the least interesting thing about either. Decrypto's prepaid Visa pays 2% in BTC if you settle in full, and 3% if you split the purchase into 3, 6 or 12 interest-free peso instalments, capped at ARS 15,000 a month. Spending is collateralised: crypto is posted as a guarantee and released as payments settle, and the instalment route accepts only USDT or DAI as that guarantee, locked until the instalments clear. LB Finanzas, the exchange that traded as Let'sBit until an October 2024 rebrand, runs a prepaid Mastercard processed by Prisma paying 2.5% when a purchase settles in pesos or nuARS and 3% when it settles in crypto, capped at ARS 30,000 a month resetting on the 1st, and lets a yield-bearing balance keep earning until the purchase clears. Cuotas are how Argentines buy things, and both products are designed around that rather than around a number on a landing page. Two honest caveats. Neither publishes ATM or FX fees, and both entries were built from Argentine press because we could not reach the providers' own sites this week. Separately, our ROI calculator only parses dollar, euro and pound caps, so an ARS cap currently reads as no cap at all and these two rank better than they deserve. That's a bug in our tooling, not a feature of the cards, and it's queued.
Source: Card Pilled Decrypto Card → LB Finanzas Card →
Market Context
Three of this week's items are the same problem pointed in different directions. Gnosis Pay's cashback was live while our data said it had expired. Xapo's may have ended six weeks ago and the only people saying so are trackers. Bitrefill, Karta and Karma each publish a headline number that isn't cash. Nobody announces a rate change the way they announce a launch, and nothing in this market obliges them to. Our read: assuming a card's rate holds steady between check-ins is the most expensive thing a comparison site can believe, and this week we got caught believing it in the direction that costs readers money rather than the direction that just embarrasses us. Underneath all of it the volume keeps climbing. July did a reported $759M across roughly 9M purchases, more than double a year ago, mostly stablecoins converting at the till. And the only genuinely new idea this week came out of Argentina, where two cards compete on interest-free instalments backed by locked USDT instead of on a percentage. That is a product built around how people in that country actually pay for things, which is more imagination than most 8%-behind-a-VIP-ladder launches manage. We are at 183 cards, 152 active. Ready is the fourth in six weeks whose fate was settled somewhere behind it rather than by the card team: Cypher's acquirer, BitMart's exchange, and Kulipa's insolvency twice over. Not one of those started with a decision about a card.
Cards updated this week: Ready Card Solflare Card → Gnosis Pay → Rebind Card → Plutus Card → Xapo Card → Binance Card (LATAM/Africa) →
New cards added: Bitrefill Card → Karta Card → Karma Card → Decrypto Card → LB Finanzas Card →
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