WEEKLY WRAP · 2026-09-08
5 quick hits · market context · 28 cards updated
LAUNCH
Ethena Pay opened in beta on September 1 and went into the database the same day. The headline is genuinely strong: 4% back on the first $2,500 of monthly spend on the free Standard tier, 4.5% and 5% at Pro and VIP, paid in AVAX and settled once a day, no annual fee, a virtual card issued in under a minute, and Visa's FX passed through at cost with no Ethena markup. Then read the terms, because this is a secured credit card and not a prepaid debit card. Your charges are backed by collateral in your own linked wallet on Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism or Arbitrum, and a Liquidation Event fires if a payment obligation goes unpaid for one calendar day, or if the collateral's market value drops below the required level. The issuer sets that market value at its own discretion, and you pay the gas for your own liquidation out of the collateral. Purchases are 0% APR today, with a late payment fee up to $40, a returned payment fee up to $29, and the issuer explicitly reserving the right to add interest later. Two things to settle before you plan around the rate. Ethena's own pricing page never states what Pro and VIP cost, so the 5% is a rate we cannot price; The Block reports $2,000 of ENA locked or 10 referrals for Pro and $10,000 or 50 referrals for VIP, and because that is secondary sourcing we deliberately left it out of the tier requirements. And the 49-country list is a jurisdictions page, not an availability promise: launch coverage puts early access at 400 users expanding weekly, a figure Ethena does not publish itself. Our read: the collateral design is defensible and the rate is real, but one calendar day is a very short fuse on a card most people will fund and then forget about.
Source: Card Pilled Ethena Pay Spend Card →
RATES
Settling foreign spend at 0% was one of the few things that made a Crypto.com subscription pencil out for anyone who travels. A September 2 review of Crypto.com's own fee pages says that goes away for most people on October 1: the Ruby, Jade and Indigo prepaid tiers start paying a foreign transaction fee, which until now only the free Midnight tier paid. The monthly inactivity fee rises with it, from EUR/GBP 5 to EUR/GBP 6 after twelve months with no cardholder-initiated activity. Our entry still reads "0% (higher tiers)" on FX and "EUR 5/mo after 12 months inactive", and both are correct today. We are holding both until the effective date and will change them once Crypto.com's own help-centre fee pages carry the new figures, rather than on the strength of one write-up. This is also the second time in a fortnight we have had to hold a line on this card's numbers. Our August deep review removed an 8% Prime tier that does not exist (5% is the ceiling, confirmed against four official sources), and on September 4 an aggregator was again publishing a 4% to 8% Private range against the $50K to $1M lockups. We did not adopt that one either. Our read: if you hold CRO specifically for the FX benefit, October is the month to re-run the arithmetic, because a subscription that pays for itself on foreign spend stops doing that the moment foreign spend costs something.
Source: CryptoTicker Crypto.com Visa Card →
SHUTDOWN
We marked the Cypher Card discontinued back on July 10, when Nium acquired the infrastructure business and the programme was wound down on a published schedule: card loading ended July 8, existing cards were cancelled August 7, and the platform shut down entirely on September 6. What Saturday's deadline made visible is how far that one decision reached. Moonwell Card, live since December 2024 and spending USDC on Visa across 180-plus countries, ran on the same Cypher rails. So did Osmosis Pay Card. Both stopped authorising purchases on August 7, and both hit the identical September 6 balance-withdrawal cutoff that Cypher's own cardholders did. Neither was ever in our database, which is precisely why they are worth naming here: three card brands, three separate product teams, one infrastructure provider, one acquirer's call. Anyone who left a balance on any of the three past Saturday is now dealing with a wind-down process instead of an app. Our read: the logo on the card is not what determines whether it works next month. Ask who issues it, then ask who just bought them.
Source: Crypto Briefing Cypher Card
SHUTDOWN
Cards stopped working on July 28-29 when issuer Kulipa ceased operations, pulling roughly 120,000 cards across about 20 wallet and fintech clients offline with no warning. Since then Solflare's card page has carried one sentence: cards are paused while it moves to a new issuing partner, and they will return "with Apple Pay, higher limits, and cash back in August." Our September 4 check found that same sentence, no go-live announcement, and still no issuer named. The card has now been dead for over five weeks, so we re-dated the entry to treat the August return as missed rather than pending. On August 18 we wrote that Ready refunding twelve months of fees was the clearest evidence its card was not coming back, and that Solflare was the one rebuilding. We would put it differently now. A promised month that passes in silence is its own kind of evidence. To be clear about what is and is not at stake: no money is trapped, because the card debited USDC from your own wallet at the point of purchase and Kulipa never held a float, and open Borrow positions remain accessible. If you are an EEA or UK user still waiting, though, treat this as a card to replace and come back to, not one to hold a slot for.
Source: Card Pilled Solflare Card → Ready Card
EXPANSION
Our regional sweep on September 6 closed a gap we had been carrying since July. Fasset serves 125-plus markets as a platform, but its card page states issuance in 40-plus countries, and residents of Turkey and Vietnam sit on the exclusion list alongside India, mainland China, Israel and the sanctioned states. We had Turkey recorded as available on the strength of Fasset holding a Turkish regulatory approval. That approval covers the platform, not card issuance. Our error, now fixed. Two other things moved on the entry: the card is live rather than gated behind the connect-wallet priority list we recorded in July, and the gold-denominated cashback the April launch was marketed on still appears nowhere in Fasset's own card page or cardholder terms, which describe OWN Points earned on spend with no published conversion rate. Funding is USDT only, the daily spending limit is USD 2,000, and fees are free during a promotional period with no stated end date. The same sweep added Plenti, a Medellin fintech running a USD-denominated virtual Visa in Colombia with no issuance fee and no cuota de manejo, the monthly account-maintenance charge that is standard on Colombian cards. It raised a $3M Tether-led seed on September 2 and is funding an expansion into Peru and Bolivia. We could not fetch plenti.com.co directly, so that entry carries a verification note saying so.
Source: Card Pilled Fasset Card → Plenti Card →
Market Context
One card launched this week. Everything else that happened was a calendar turning over, which is how most things in this market actually change. KAST's 0% FX ended on the 31st. Solayer's 10% campaign ended on the 29th. The Cypher wind-down's withdrawal deadline landed on the 6th and took Moonwell and Osmosis Pay with it. Solflare's promised August arrived and left. Crypto.com's FX change is queued for October 1. Not one of those was announced this week. They are all dates that were set weeks or months ago and then quietly came due. Our read: the expensive mistake for a card user is almost never picking the wrong card. It is picking the right one and not noticing the day its terms changed. Which cuts both ways, and this week we got the return leg of it. Three weeks ago we put a flag on Xapo saying two trackers reported everyday cashback had ended on July 1, and wrote that it would be the month's biggest rate change if true. It was not true. Xapo's own pages still describe the same up-to-1% in BTC, and the thing the trackers saw was a taxi campaign layered on top of the standing rates. We were right to flag it instead of rewriting a rate on tracker evidence, and we were also carrying a frightening warning on a perfectly intact card for three weeks. Both of those are true and we would rather say so than only mention the half that flatters us. We are at 189 cards, 156 active, after adding Ethena Pay and Plenti and moving Zro Bank to discontinued. The number worth watching is the one sitting underneath everything else: twenty-one of the largest US banks agreed on September 1 to issue a stablecoin together. There is no card attached to that yet. There will be.
Cards updated this week: KAST Card → SpectroCoin Card → Xapo Card → Solflare Card → Fasset Card → Solayer Pay (formerly Emerald Card) → Wayex Card → E Money Card → Zro Bank Card Avici Card → Rain Card → Binance Card (LATAM/Africa) → Gnosis Pay → Lemon Card → Robinhood Platinum Card → Pionex Card → Brighty Card → XPlace Card → X Money Card → Ether.fi Cash → OKX Card → Bitbank EPOS CRYPTO Card → MEXC Card → Foxbit Card → Wenia Card → Ikigii Card →
New cards added: Ethena Pay Spend Card → Plenti Card →
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