Monolith is gone: the 2024 shutdown explained, plus where the money goes now

Updated October 2026

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If you have been reading about Monolith to decide whether to get one, you can stop: there is nothing to get. The programme closed its services on 8 October 2024, the cards were deactivated and the accounts were shut. No new cards are being issued. This is not a card I am warning you away from — it is a card that has already gone, and the only useful question left is what happens to money that is still sitting in or attached to it.

I give it a score of 1.8 / 10. Not because the card was badly built, but because a card you cannot use cannot be a recommendation to anyone, and the closure leaves the practical work — recovering your crypto, redeeming leftover card balances — on your shoulders.

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

Verdict: 1.8 out of 10, because the programme no longer exists

The score is not a judgement on the design. It is a picture of a service that has switched off. The closure notice on Monolith’s own site states plainly that on 8 October 2024 the services were closed, the cards were deactivated and the accounts were closed, and gives the reason as “increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK”. The card was never the fragile part; the licence and the compliance environment around it were.

Here is how the score breaks down, criterion by criterion.

Two things are worth pausing on. First, the “cost” line is the only mark above zero, and even that is generous — it reflects that there was no monthly fee and modest top-up charges historically, not that the card is good value today, because there is nothing to pay for. Second, the reliability line is where the real story sits, and it is not about complaints. I found no Monolith-specific complaints: there is no Monolith Trustpilot page, and a search on 20 October 2026 returned only unrelated card shutdowns. The one mark is for the closure itself.

So who does this suit? Honestly, nobody as a card. Who does it not suit? Everyone looking for a way to spend crypto day to day, and anyone who needs an ordinary payment card they can rely on being there next month. This matters more for you than for most readers, because if you have been searching for a card because normal banking has been difficult, a closed programme is the worst possible answer — you cannot top up, you cannot spend, and there is no support desk on the Monolith side to fix anything. There is one exception to the “nobody” verdict: if you are a former holder with a leftover balance, this page is for you, because there is a defined route to get that money out, and I explain it below.

What happened to the programme

The history is short and it ends abruptly. Monolith was a crypto card brand. Behind it sat an operating company — the site describes the brand as a trading name of UAB “Belela”, a Lithuanian company, code 305982313, described as a virtual currency deposit and exchange operator, with the site copyright held by Token Group Ltd under licence to UAB “Belela”. The cards themselves were issued not by Monolith but by Solaris, a licensed bank. That distinction matters later, because Solaris is who holds any money left on a card.

On 8 October 2024 the programme closed. The notice cites “increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK” as the reason. It does not mention MiCA by name. That same notice says the app’s balance is no longer accurate, that the cards are deactivated, and that the accounts are closed. On 17 February — the notice does not state the year, though the context points to 2025 — the app was delisted from the app stores. Later, in April 2025, details of a swap of the old TKN token to a new TOKEN token were promised, and a successor app, Token.com, was named.

One loose end, because it may still touch your money: the TKN-to-TOKEN swap. An update dated 28 February 2025 said details would follow in April 2025. If you held TKN, that is the thread to pull on with the support channels listed further down. Monolith’s own support for this, via Telegram and email for the TKN/TOKEN questionnaire, is separate from the card-funds route, and I come back to that distinction because mixing them up costs you time.

For historical colour, and clearly marked as unofficial third-party reporting rather than anything from the card’s own pages: the card was for the EEA (31 European countries) and could “not be used in the USA or Asia”, per Coin Bureau as updated on 29 March 2023. Coin Bureau also described it as a Visa debit card at that date. Earlier coverage from 2019 named Contis Financial Services Ltd as the issuer at that time. These details are of historical interest only — they describe a card that no longer accepts a transaction.

If you already have the card, here is where your money is

This is the section that matters if you are reading because you were one of the users. There are two separate pots of money, held in two different ways, and the route to each is different. People conflate them, so let me be precise.

The first is your crypto. Monolith was, historically, a non-custodial wallet card: you spent from a wallet whose keys you held, not from a balance the company held for you. That means your crypto is still yours and still reachable — but only if you kept the recovery phrase. The official guidance is this: your crypto stays in the non-custodial wallet and can be accessed with the 12-word seed phrase imported into another wallet, for example MetaMask, Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet. If you never saved the phrase, it was shown in the app under Settings, then “Back up Seed”. If the app is gone and you never saved it, you are in real trouble, and no amount of goodwill from a closed company will fix it. I want to be straight with you about that rather than soft-pedal it: the seed phrase is the wallet, and without it there is no back door.

The second pot is any fiat left sitting on the card balance. Because the card was issued by Solaris, that money is held by Solaris, not by Monolith. The official route is to submit a request on the Solaris Redemptions page with the subject “Redemption funds of Monolith customer”, your payout account details in EUR or GBP — the card’s currency — and a copy of your colour ID if the email on the account differs. Solaris aims to respond within 14 days.

A few practical points on the redemption form, so you do not have to learn this the hard way. Have your payout account already open in the card’s currency — EUR or GBP — because a mismatch is the kind of small thing that turns into a delay. Keep your colour ID scan ready; the request specifically calls for it where the email differs. Note the 14-day figure is the issuer’s stated aim for a response, not a guarantee of money in your account on day fourteen. And if your situation touches TKN rather than card funds, that is a different queue — Monolith’s Telegram and email channels for the TKN/TOKEN questionnaire — not the Solaris form.

For the record, the historical top-up options on this card, unofficial and from the same 2023 Coin Bureau report, were ETH, TKN, DAI, DGD, DGX, MKR, SAI and USDT. You can no longer top up the cards through Monolith, so this list is only useful for understanding what your old wallet might still hold.

What can go wrong

The closure notice is careful to say what it does not cover, and so should I. The biggest risks here are not the usual card risks; they are the specific hazards of a programme that has switched off while your money is still in it.

The first is the app balance. The notice says plainly that the app balance is no longer accurate. So do not treat anything the old app showed as a real figure. Get your true position from the seed phrase and from Solaris directly.

The second is protection. The official position is blunt: Lithuanian deposit insurance and the UK FSCS do not cover crypto activities, and do not cover funds in the non-custodial wallet. So neither of those backstops is standing behind you here. This is not a promise that anything will go wrong — it is a statement that the familiar safety nets people assume do not extend to this arrangement. If a balance is at risk, the recovery route is the operational one above, not an insurance claim.

The third is the TKN/TOKEN swap. As of the update dated 28 February 2025, details of the swap were promised for April 2025. I cannot tell you how that resolved — the card’s own pages do not state an outcome — and I will not guess. If you held TKN, treat it as an open item and use the questionnaire channels.

The fourth is the waiting. A 14-day response aim is a response aim. When a programme has closed, the practical risk is that correspondence slows down as staffing winds down. Submit the redemption request properly and completely the first time; a form with everything in it is the one that moves.

What I did not find is worth stating too, because silence is not the same as comfort: there is no Monolith-specific complaint record to weigh. One piece of context, offered as context only and not as anything to do with Monolith: other Solaris-issuer card closures, such as Plutus, did draw Trustpilot complaints about slow refunds. I mention it not to alarm you but because it tells you what to watch for and why a complete, prompt first submission matters.

What to take instead

You have two kinds of money to place: the crypto you recovered into your own wallet, and the EUR or GBP you redeem from Solaris. For the second kind, any ordinary bank or e-money account that holds your currency will do — that is simply your own money returning to you, and choosing where it sits is a normal, unglamorous decision. For the first kind, the crypto side, you need something that still issues cards. Here are the alternatives that came through in this review, each with its own caveats.

Here is what each one involves, and what I could not confirm about them.

The International Visa Card is the strongest of the three in this review, at 6.7 / 10, and the one with the clearest published rules. It is described as a “U.S.-issued Platinum Visa card”, virtual only, paying in USD, with a physical card listed as “coming soon”. On cost: virtual card issuance is $5 one-time with no maintenance fee, and there are plans — Classic free, Pro $9.00/month, Max $19.00/month. Spending in USD is free on all plans; in another currency the rate is the “Visa exchange rate + 2% FX fee”. Deposits of any kind carry no fee, and you fund the USD account with USDC or USDT at 1:1, plus USD, EUR, SEPA, SWIFT and FedNow. There is no cashback stated.

The catch, and it is a real one, is who it is not for. The account and card are not available to residents or legal registrants of Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela or Vietnam. FATF grey-list countries are reviewed case by case with compliance approval. Purchases are blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. Note this is by residence or registration, not citizenship.

The Young Card scores 5.7 / 10. What is clearly stated is its rewards: cashback paid in YNG tokens, at a rate set by your Club tier — Essential 0.1%, Gold 1.8%, Platinum 3.6% — while the Bronze and Silver rates are not stated. Who can get it, what the card physically is, its cost and its fees are all not stated officially, so I am not going to dress that up.

The Cardex scores 5.6 / 10. It markets itself as “One crypto card, 200+ countries”, with no country list and no stated exclusions, though its app store listing is Naira-focused, meaning you pay in Naira. It runs on the networks VERVE, VISA, Mastercard and UnionPay, and offers both virtual and physical cards. The interesting part is how it works: real-time crypto-to-fiat conversion at the moment of payment, with an “AI-Powered Conversion Rate” that scans global exchange rates and picks the best one when you spend — but no fee percentage is stated on the site. You fund it from USDT, USDC and BTC wallets, networks not stated. Rewards are not stated.

Now the background behind these choices, because it explains why a card can vanish like Monolith’s did. A payment card number starts with a 6- or 8-digit issuer identification number (BIN/IIN) that tells the merchant which institution and country issued it — and merchants can apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from your billing address. That is why a card issued in one country can look “foreign” in another shop. Most crypto cards behave like prepaid cards: crypto is converted and loaded as a fiat balance, and the card spends only that balance. Critically, the card network (Visa, Mastercard) routes and sets rules, the issuer holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often just a front-end and programme manager. Monolith was exactly that shape — Solaris issued, Monolith marketed — which is why Solaris is the one redeeming your balance now.

Regulation explains the shutdown. MiCA, the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation, took legal effect in June 2023; its rules on asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024, with the remaining provisions, including crypto-asset service provider rules, from 30 December 2024. Under it, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. Transitional “grandfathering” lets providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026, or until they receive or are refused a MiCA authorisation, whichever comes first. A card itself is a payment service regulated separately under e-money and payment-services law, so a crypto card often depends on two licences at once. And the networks themselves hold the levers: Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers, they license issuers and can suspend a programme — as with FTX, whose global agreements Visa terminated on 13 November 2022, and WaveCrest, which Visa suspended in Europe in 2018, closing every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme. Monolith’s closure is one more turn of that same crank.

Two more things to weigh before you pick a stablecoin-funded card. On-chain network fees (gas, bandwidth) for your deposit are charged by the blockchain, not the card provider, so that cost exists whatever the card says. And stablecoins are not risk-free: the BIS in July 2025 put about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in USDT and USDC, but these can depeg — TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022 and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on an unsupported network can be lost. Tether also disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list, so stablecoins are not censorship-proof either.

Who I would recommend it to

In the end I would recommend Monolith to exactly one kind of person, and not as a card: a former holder with a small leftover balance who needs to redeem it through Solaris and, separately, a seed phrase to reach their crypto. For them this page is the useful thing to read.

Beyond that, my recommendation is not “avoid Monolith” — it is “stop looking at it”. It is a closed programme. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing to apply to, and nothing to activate. If you were researching cards because you cannot get an ordinary bank card where you live, treat this search as over and start from the alternatives above, checking first whether the country you live in is on the exclusion list, because that is the question that decides most of them. If your reason was simpler — you wanted to spend crypto without converting it by hand — then the crypto-funded card market is still alive, it just does not include this card any more.

And if you are holding crypto in a wallet and wondering whether any of this is safe: your own seed phrase is the thing worth protecting. Keep it offline, never type it into a site or a support chat, and treat any message asking for it as an attempt at theft. That is the single habit that matters more than which card you pick.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Monolith card?

Monolith was a crypto card brand that issued Visa debit cards through a licensed bank, Solaris, while the crypto sat in a non-custodial wallet you controlled yourself. The brand was a trading name of UAB “Belela”, a Lithuanian operator. Behind the friendly front-end was an ordinary bank-issued card and an EU-regulated wallet — which is why its shutdown followed a regulatory change rather than anything to do with the technology.

Is Monolith a bank?

No. Monolith was never a bank; it was a crypto brand and programme manager. The card was issued by Solaris, and the operating company was UAB “Belela” in Lithuania, code 305982313, described as a virtual currency deposit and exchange operator. This distinction is the practical one for you: when the programme closed, it was Solaris that held and redeems any card balance.

Why did Monolith close?

The closure notice gives one reason: increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK. Services closed, cards were deactivated and accounts were closed on 8 October 2024. The notice does not name MiCA, but the timing fits the EU’s new crypto regime, and the app was delisted from the stores on 17 February of a year the page does not state.

Is Monolith card available in my country?

It is not available anywhere, because the programme has closed and no new cards are issued. Historically it was for the EEA (31 European countries) and, according to unofficial third-party reporting from 2023, could not be used in the USA or Asia. If you are choosing a replacement, check the exclusion lists of the alternatives first — that matters more than any feature comparison.

How do I get my crypto back out of Monolith?

Your crypto stayed in a non-custodial wallet, so you get it back with your 12-word seed phrase: import it into MetaMask, Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet and the funds reappear. The phrase is the wallet — if you never saved it and the app is gone, there is no recovery route. If you did save it, keep it offline and never type it into any website or chat.

How do I redeem money left on the card?

That balance is held by Solaris, not Monolith. Go to the Solaris Redemptions page and submit a request with the subject “Redemption funds of Monolith customer”, your payout account details in EUR or GBP — the card’s currency — and a colour ID copy if the email differs. Solaris aims to respond within 14 days, so send it complete the first time.

Can I still top up a Monolith card?

No. Cards can no longer be topped up through Monolith, and they were deactivated on 8 October 2024. Historically the top-up coins were ETH, TKN, DAI, DGD, DGX, MKR, SAI and USDT, per unofficial third-party reporting from 2023. Anything you still hold sits in your own wallet and can be spent or moved using a current card or exchange instead.

Was the Monolith card free?

There was no monthly fee historically, per unofficial third-party reporting from 29 March 2023. The charges described at the time were a 1% top-up fee, a 1% community contribution, up to 2% per top-up otherwise, and a 1.75% FX fee outside the card’s own currency. All of it is now historical; with the programme closed there is nothing left to be charged for.

Is my money protected by deposit insurance?

No, and this is worth being blunt about. The official position is that Lithuanian deposit insurance and the UK FSCS do not cover crypto activities, and do not cover funds held in the non-custodial wallet. Your protection is practical rather than institutional: your seed phrase for the crypto, and a complete redemption request for any card balance.

What happened to the TKN token and my Monolith account?

The account is closed and the app has been delisted, so you cannot delete or reactivate it — the closure notice says plainly that accounts were closed. On TKN, an update dated 28 February 2025 said details of the swap to TOKEN would come in April 2025; the card’s own pages do not state an outcome. If you held TKN, the relevant channel is Monolith’s Telegram and email questionnaire, not the Solaris card-funds form.

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