A virtual crypto card with a two percent top-up fee, one passport photo, and no named issuer

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

ExCards is a virtual payment card that spends money you have already loaded into it from USDT. You send crypto to a network address, the balance lands in dollars, and then a Visa or Mastercard number behaves like an ordinary card online — with Apple Pay and Google Pay on top. On paper it is one of the cheaper ways to pay ordinary internet bills with crypto: no monthly fee, no ATM, one passport photo for the identity check, and a card number in 10 minutes. I scored it 5.9 out of 10. The features are good. The paperwork behind them is not, and that is where most of the deduction comes from.

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

Verdict: 5.9 out of 10, best for spending subscriptions from crypto you already hold

Let me give you the whole picture first, then take it apart. ExCards scores 5.9 / 10. It is genuinely good at the narrow job it is built for — turning a USDT balance into online payments, fast, cheaply, without a bank in the middle. It is weak on everything a payment card is normally judged on: who is behind it, what protection your money has, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Who it suits: someone already holding USDT who spends online on subscriptions, software, hosting, advertising, and app-store-style spending, and who is comfortable with a custodial balance held by a partner they cannot name. If you live in a place where an ordinary bank card is awkward to get or easy to lose, the light passport-only check and the 10-minute issuance are the reason to look at it at all.

Who it does not suit: anyone who needs cash from an ATM, anyone who wants a physical card in the hand as the main card, anyone who needs chargebacks, and anyone who is uneasy about their balance being held by an unnamed third party with no safeguarding statement. It is also not the card to choose if you plan to trade with the balance or move it on — the withdrawal side is not described on the public pages.

The 9 for eligibility and the 9 for top-up options are the two things this card does better than almost anything else in its class. The 3 for cost is where the arithmetic turns on you: if you top up once a month for a year, the 2% fee on Universe costs you roughly a fifth of the balance again. If you top up monthly and pay with it every day, you are looking for a card with a lower loading fee or no loading fee at all.

Will they give you the card?

The eligibility page lists only what is excluded, and the list is long enough to read twice. North Korea, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and — “where applicable” — Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Then Russia, noted as depending on transaction context and issuer policy. Then Belarus, for sanctioned persons. Then Myanmar and Sudan. There is no list of supported countries; the rule runs the other way.

The rule that actually matters to you is by residence, not citizenship. You must state your country of residence accurately at issuance. If you move, you report it within 30 days. A false disclosure can lead to the card being closed retroactively — which is worth pausing on, because it means the residence you gave on day one follows you. Nothing on the public pages says what “retroactive closure” means for money already loaded.

Sanctions and politically exposed person screening is part of the process, and refusal can happen without a reason being given. There is one level of account only, so limits do not change as you build a history.

The 9 here is for a service that tells you most of what you need and does not hide behind a vague “available in select regions”. If you are in one of the excluded places, the answer is no, and there is no reading of the page that changes it.

How to get it

Light KYC — meaning the check is deliberately thin. You send a clear scan of the photo page of a government-issued passport. There is no selfie, no video, no liveness check, and no proof of address mentioned. The age rule is “18+ in most countries”, with the legal age in your own jurisdiction governing.

The sequence is short:

1. Sign up at app.excards.io, or through the @ex_cards_bot Telegram mini-app.
2. Upload the passport scan.
3. An issuer partner checks authenticity and screens you against sanctions and PEP lists.
4. The card is issued “within 10 minutes after a successful check”.

That ten minutes is the headline claim, and it applies to the virtual cards. There is no App Store or Google Play app — the service is the web dashboard at app.excards.io plus the Telegram mini-app. The interface is available in English, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian, which is a real accessibility point if Russian is your working language.

What you get is a choice of three virtual cards: Visa Universe, Visa E-commerce, Mastercard Business. A physical Visa E-commerce card exists but only as a pre-order, with no shipping date or shipping cost stated on the pages I could read. If you lose a virtual card, or it leaks, or it expires, replacing it costs the card price again — 29, 35 or 50 USDT depending on which one it was.

Refusal grounds are listed: false or altered documents, which triggers a permanent block; a sanctions or PEP hit; a failed check; or issuance that would breach the law or the issuer’s policy. The company may also refuse without giving a reason. KYC data is refreshed at card expiry, on a change of residence, on suspicious activity, or by default every 24 months.

For anyone who has been turned away by a bank, ten minutes and one document is a genuinely attractive proposition. For anyone who has been turned away before for something they were not aware of — a name on a sanctions-adjacent list, an old PEP role — the screening is real and happens at the partner, so it is worth knowing that “no reason given” is a stated possibility.

Fees: what it really costs

Here is the whole price list as published. Everything is in USD or USDT.

Now three ordinary payments, with the fees that actually apply.

A $50 hosting bill. You top up 50 USDT. On Universe, the 2% fee means 1 USDT goes to the fee and 49 USDT lands on the balance — so you pay $51 in total. On E-commerce or Business at 3.5%, you lose 1.75 USDT and pay $51.75. Then the $50 payment takes a $0.50 authorization fee on Universe and Business, or nothing at all on E-commerce because you are at or above $1.00. If the merchant charges in euros, the issuer rate applies with up to 2% on top.

A $0.99 monthly subscription. This is where the authorization fee shape matters. On Universe, $0.50 of authorization on a $0.99 payment is over 50% of the value of the transaction, paid on top. On Business the same 50 cents applies. On E-commerce the $0.10 under-$1.00 tier is the cheaper route, though the 3.5% top-up fee is the highest of the three — for a payment this small, that 3.5% is a few cents, so it depends on how much you load at a time.

A $400 ad spend across several platforms. Load once at 2% on Universe — 8 USDT — and pay four $100 invoices at 50 cents authorization each, 2 USDT. Total overhead 10 USDT on 400. But check the decline clause: on E-commerce, a decline rate above 10% in a rolling window costs $0.80 each time, and ad platforms decline cards more often than ordinary shops do. That clause is written for people running paid traffic, which is exactly the audience for this card.

A word on the limits, because they are unusual. Universe’s $1,000,000 per transaction and $3,000,000 per day are far above anything a retail card offers, and the same limits apply to every user with no KYC-level split. E-commerce is the opposite: $20,000 per transaction with no daily or monthly ceiling stated. Business sits between. There are no account tiers — three card products, differentiated by price, top-up fee and limits, nothing else.

Non-USDT coins are converted to USDT “at network rate” and no conversion fee is stated. Network fees are paid to the blockchain, not to ExCards.

How to Top up the balance

This is the strongest part of the card. The balance is denominated in USDT and USD, and all three cards share one wallet.

Top up by sending USDT to the provider’s address over any of these named networks:

• ERC-20 (Ethereum)
• TRC-20 (Tron)
• BEP-20 (BNB Chain)
• Bitcoin
• Polygon
• Arbitrum
• Optimism
• Avalanche

The page is careful to add that these are examples and other networks are accepted too, but I would not treat that as permission to send over anything unlisted — blockchain transfers are irreversible, and a deposit sent on a network or to an address the provider does not support can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee.

Other coins — BTC, ETH, SOL and the like — are converted to USDT first, at the network rate.

The numbers to hold in your head: the top-up fee is 2% on Universe and 3.5% on the other two, so 100 USDT at 3.5% credits 96.50 USDT. The minimum first top-up is 10 USDT, and that 10 stays spendable rather than being eaten. Transfers between your own cards are free. Fiat top-up is not mentioned anywhere on the public pages, so plan on funding from crypto only.

Withdrawal is not stated. No method for getting the balance back out to a bank account or an exchange is described, which means the card is a one-way street: crypto in, spending out. That is fine if you only ever want to spend, and a real problem if you misload or need to move funds.

Paying with it every day

Apple Pay and Google Pay work on all three cards. That matters more than it sounds: tokenised mobile wallet numbers generate a fresh security code per payment and are less likely to be declined by shops that distrust unfamiliar card numbers than the raw card number typed into a checkout page.

There is no cashback mentioned anywhere. The only reward is a referral programme: 20% per card issued at Bronze tier plus 0.05% of top-ups, rising to 40% plus 0.20% at Platinum, with 10% off a first card if you have a code. That is a payment for recruiting other people, not a rebate on your own spending.

Blocked categories are described in general terms — terms of use for illegal goods or services, terrorism financing, money laundering, and transactions in sanctioned countries — but no merchant-category list is published, so you cannot check in advance whether a specific category you use is closed. Gambling is the category most card issuers block; here, the absence of a published list means you find out at the till.

When a transaction is declined, funds return to the card balance automatically. The card price, top-up fees and authorization fees are non-refundable. There is no dispute or chargeback process published, and the terms state plainly that the company is not liable for declined transactions, FX losses, network downtime, or merchant rejections.

That last sentence is the one to sit with. In ordinary card life, if a merchant charges you twice or takes the money and delivers nothing, the issuer runs a chargeback and you get the money back. Here the public pages describe no such route. Declined payments return to your balance, and that is the entire remedy described.

Support is 24/7 through in-app chat at app.excards.io, with answers claimed “within minutes”, and through the Telegram bot at t.me/excards_bot.

What can go wrong

The reliability mark of 4 out of 10 is the part I would not skip, so here it is in plain terms.

Nobody is named. The brand ExCards carries a © 2026 mark, but no legal entity and no country of registration are published. The cards are described as issued by a “third-party card issuer partner” using “licensed BIN sponsors” — and neither the issuer nor any licence is named. You are being asked to load money onto a card whose issuing institution does not appear anywhere on the public pages. For a prepaid-style card that is an unusual amount of missing information, and it is the single biggest reason the score is not higher.

Your balance is custodial. The balance is held with the card issuer partner, not by you. In crypto that means the provider holds the credentials: you have to trust them completely, and blockchain transfers have no built-in recovery if something goes wrong. The general track record here is not encouraging — Mt. Gox reported about US$350 million stolen in 2011–2014, Coincheck about US$400 million in 2018, Ronin Network US$625 million in 2022.

The Terms are a placeholder. The Terms of Service are dated last updated 17 May 2026 and describe themselves as a placeholder, with the final version due in May–June 2026. So the document that would tell you what happens to your balance in an insolvency is, by its own admission, not the real one yet. Fee changes are announced in-app at least 30 days ahead, which is at least a courtesy.

No safeguarding statement, no freeze feature. Security described on the pages: TLS 1.3, 3D Secure 2.0 on every authorization, and automatic declines on suspicious activity. What is not there is any statement that customer funds are safeguarded in segregated accounts or insured — the kind of protection an e-money institution in the EU is required to provide — and there is no instant card-freeze feature described, only the full card price to replace a lost or leaked one.

No reviews, no complaints, and no incident. I searched for reviews across the usual places and found nothing about excards.io at all, and no Trustpilot page exists. That cuts both ways: it may mean a young service with no customers yet, or it may mean a service nobody has used. No official incident has been published either. No dated licence or issuer events were found.

Balances held on chains can be frozen. Tether states it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity. Stablecoins are not censorship-proof, and this is one more reason the issuer and partner chain matters when your money is already converted to USDT.

What to take instead

None of the alternatives I looked at publish as much as ExCards does, which is worth saying before the comparison. But if the reason you are here is a specific one, there may be a better fit.

Where each one fits differently:

• Cardex is the one to look at if you want a physical card as well as a virtual one, or if you want to spend in naira. Its published conversion behaviour is the interesting part: it converts at the moment of payment and claims to scan exchange rates for the best one. No percentage is published, so I cannot tell you whether that beats a 2% plus 3.5% structure.
• CardFlow is free to create and aimed at Nigeria, with Naira bank transfer as an option alongside BTC, USDT and ETH. If you want a card with no creation cost and a fiat on-ramp, it is worth a look.
• HyperCard balances in USD or EUR and takes a range of crypto. Its App Store listing says the card works in more than 176 countries, which describes where it is accepted rather than who can get one.

If your priority is a physical card, a fiat on-ramp, or spending in naira, one of those three is a better fit than a virtual-only card. If your priority is spending a USDT balance online at a known, published cost, ExCards is more transparent than any of them.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend this card to someone specific: you hold USDT, you already spend most of your money online, and you would rather load the balance once and pay several monthly bills than convert crypto at each purchase. You are comfortable that the balance sits with a partner you cannot name, you read the Terms yourself rather than trusting a summary, and you keep your own record of what you loaded and what is left.

I would not recommend it as your only card. There is no ATM, no chargeback route, no withdrawal method described, and no safeguard statement behind the balance. I would not recommend it if you need a physical card in the hand, because the only plastic option is a pre-order with no shipping date. And I would not recommend it if you are near a limit on any of the excluded-country or sanctions lists and the “refusal without reason” clause worries you.

The honest summary is that ExCards does the easy half of the job unusually well and the hard half — trust, protection, dispute handling — barely at all. If your situation is “no ordinary bank card available to me”, that trade is often worth making deliberately. If it is “this card is a bit cheaper than my current one”, it is not, once you count the 2% or 3.5% top-up fee and the authorization fee.

One thing worth checking before you commit, whichever way you go: fee changes are announced in-app at least 30 days ahead, so the numbers in this review can move. And keep in mind that a card payment funded from crypto can be a taxable disposal where you live. I am not qualified to tell you what your position is — that is a conversation with someone who is.

Frequently asked questions

What is ExCards card?

ExCards is a virtual payment card that spends a balance you load from crypto. You send USDT — or BTC, ETH, SOL and other coins, which get converted — to a supported network, and the amount lands as a USD or USDT balance that a Visa or Mastercard number draws on. Three virtual cards are offered: Visa Universe, Visa E-commerce and Mastercard Business. It is a prepaid-style product, not a bank account, so it can only spend what is already there.

Is ExCards a bank?

No — and it does not present itself as one. The cards are issued by a third-party issuer partner using licensed BIN sponsors, and the pages name neither the issuer nor any licence, nor publish a legal entity or registration country. The balance is custodial, held with that issuer partner. If the absence of a named issuer is the thing that would stop you, stop here; if you have checked it yourself and are comfortable, it works.

How do I get an ExCards card?

Sign up at app.excards.io or through the @ex_cards_bot Telegram mini-app, upload a clear scan of the photo page of a government-issued passport, and the partner checks it against sanctions and PEP lists. No selfie, video or proof of address is mentioned, and the age rule is 18+ in most countries. The card is issued within about 10 minutes of a successful check. You also need a mandatory first top-up of 10 USDT.

Does ExCards card require KYC?

It requires identity verification, but it is described as light KYC: a passport scan and a screening check. There is a single verification level with no upgrades, so your limits do not grow over time. Data is refreshed at card expiry, on a change of residence, on suspicious activity, or by default every 24 months. If you have moved countries, you must report it within 30 days.

Is ExCards card free?

Partly. The card itself is not free: $29 for Visa Universe, $35 for Visa E-commerce, $50 for Mastercard Business, paid in USDT and non-refundable. There is no monthly or inactivity fee. But loading money costs 2% on Universe or 3.5% on the other two, authorizations cost $0.50 on Universe and Business, and non-USD payments carry up to 2% on top of the issuer rate.

What are the minimum and maximum amounts?

The first top-up must be at least 10 USDT, and that amount stays spendable. Limits vary sharply by card: Visa Universe allows $1,000,000 per transaction and $3,000,000 per day and per month; Visa E-commerce allows $20,000 per transaction with no daily or monthly limit stated; Mastercard Business allows $250,000 per transaction, $500,000 per day and $1,000,000 per month. There are no tiers — every user gets the same limits.

How do I top up and where can I use the card?

Top up by sending USDT over ERC-20, TRC-20, BEP-20, Bitcoin, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism or Avalanche; other networks are said to be accepted, though only these are named. Other coins are converted to USDT at the network rate first, and blockchain network fees are paid to the network. You can then spend on Apple Pay and Google Pay anywhere cards are taken, with no ATM withdrawals available.

How do I withdraw money from ExCards?

The public pages do not describe a withdrawal method. No route back to a bank account or an exchange is set out anywhere I could read, and the only mention of the balance leaving is that prohibited use leads to card closure without refund. Treat the balance as one-way: crypto in, spending out. If you need to move money off the card, check this yourself with support before you load anything substantial.

Is ExCards card safe?

It depends on what you mean. The technology is ordinary: TLS 1.3, 3D Secure 2.0 on every authorization, and automatic declines on suspicious activity. The structure is thinner than I would like: a custodial balance held by an unnamed partner, no safeguarding statement, no card-freeze feature, Terms that describe themselves as a placeholder, and no dispute or chargeback process published. Replacement after a leak costs the card price again.

Is ExCards card worth it?

For one situation, yes: you hold USDT, you pay several online subscriptions or ad invoices, and you would rather load once than convert per purchase. For most other situations, the 2% or 3.5% top-up fee adds up quickly, and you give up chargebacks, cash, and any stated fund protection for it. If you also need a physical card or a fiat on-ramp, Cardex, CardFlow or HyperCard may serve you better.

Content created by the «cryptocardadvisor» team