Avici card review — spending USDC from a self-custodial escrow, if you live in one of 49 listed regions

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Avici card is a Visa card you fund with USDC. You send stablecoins to a smart contract your own wallet controls, that contract creates a US dollar credit balance on the card, and you spend from that balance as an ordinary Visa — in shops, online, or at an ATM. Avici is built for people who hold USDC but cannot get a normal bank card: residents of Latin America and the UAE are the group it is aimed at. It is not a bank. It is a programme run by Avici Inc. in San Francisco, with “Third National” named in the documentation as a party to the loan contract structure, and no licence details published.

I gave it 6.1 out of 10. That is a working card with a genuinely interesting design, sitting on a set of published limits, a single-currency balance, and a support picture that has left at least one business user with a blocked EUR 20,000 payment. The score is not a judgement of whether the technology is clever — it is. It is a judgement of whether I would hand my own money to it.

The conditions described on this page are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict: 6.1 out of 10 — for USDC holders in Latin America and the UAE, not as a general-purpose card

Let me lay out the score criterion by criterion first, because a single number tells you nothing on its own. Then I will explain who this is really for.

Read that top-up line again, because it is the crux of the whole card. You can only officially fund it with one coin — USDC — through one route, a loan smart contract. Everything else about this card assumes you already sit on dollar-pegged crypto and want to spend it as ordinary money. If you hold a normal bank balance in euros or pounds and want a second card for subscriptions, this is the wrong shape of product entirely.

Who it suits, concretely:

• You live in one of the listed regions — Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, among others — and hold USDC you want to spend as dollars.
• You cannot open an ordinary bank card where you live, or you would rather not try.
• You are comfortable sending crypto to a smart contract and understanding that your spendable balance is created by a loan, not simply credited.

Who it does not suit:

• You want a card to spend a salary or a bank balance. This is not that.
• You need a currency other than the US dollar as the card’s own currency, or you want to hold several currencies at once — that is not stated on the public pages.
• You need high limits. The per-transaction cap is $1,000 and the daily cap is $3,000. A furniture purchase or a holiday flight will not go through on one transaction.
• You are in the EU, Georgia, Serbia, Armenia or Kazakhstan — none of those appear on the eligible list. Nor are you in Belarus, China (Mainland), Cuba, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela or Vietnam, where residence makes the card prohibited outright.

The everyday-use score of 9 is the highest number here and it is deserved: this is a Visa that taps to Apple Pay and Google Pay, with real ATMs. That is where the card earns its keep. Everything else about it — the funding model, the limits, the paperwork — is what holds it down to 6.1.

Will they give you the card

The card’s public pages do not state its eligibility criteria outright — they say “not stated” rather than spelling them out — but what they do say is clear enough to judge from: it is issued to residents of listed regions only. That list holds 49 entries, and among them are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa and the USA, all subject to the supported-states list. No EU country appears on it, and neither does Georgia, Serbia, Armenia or Kazakhstan.

There is a second, separate list you should read just as carefully: the countries where *residing* is prohibited. That is Belarus, China (Mainland), Cuba, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam. And a third list, narrower still, of countries where *spending* is prohibited even if you hold the card: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. That third list is the one to watch if you travel. Holding a card that is valid where you live does not mean it will work everywhere your other cards do.

The reason a card issued in one country can look “foreign” to a shop in another is worth understanding, because it explains a lot of declines people complain about. Every card number begins with a six- or eight-digit issuer identification number — the BIN — that tells any merchant which institution and country issued it. Merchants can look that number up, and when the issuer’s country does not match the billing address on file, some apply extra scrutiny. This is ordinary payment plumbing; it is not something Avici invented, but it is something a card with a non-obvious issuer can feel.

One more thing about who gets approved, and I want to be careful here because this is where a lot of people get their hopes up. The card requires KYC, and the verification is done by Sumsub — a standard identity-verification provider. Business accounts go through a separate verification. The card’s own marketing says a card is ready “in 2 minutes” via the app. Whether *you* are approved, and how long it takes for you, is not something the pages promise.

How to get it

The sign-up route is short, and that is genuinely one of the card’s better qualities. After you sign up with your email you do a single verification through Sumsub: your personal details, your identity documents, and a liveness check — the camera check that confirms you are in front of the document. The card’s marketing frames this as taking “about 2 minutes” or “no more than a few minutes”. Your KYC data is shared with the card’s partners, and Sumsub runs anti-money-laundering monitoring of users and of on-chain funds — that last part is a little unusual and worth knowing about; it means activity in your wallet can be screened.

What the pages do *not* say is as informative as what they do. The document types accepted are not listed, and neither are the reasons a verification might be rejected — so you cannot prepare for the specific failure. Proof of address is not mentioned. There is no stated rule about which nationality you must hold, only where you reside.

When you are approved, what arrives depends on the tier you picked:

• Virtual cards are issued immediately and are organised *by spending category* — the card’s own framing is subscriptions, groceries, travel — which is a neat idea: you can freeze one category without touching the rest.
• A physical card is delivered to you. Standard shipping is free and untracked, and takes 3–4 weeks. Priority tracked shipping costs $50 internationally (1–2 weeks) or $15 in the US (the timing for that tier is not stated). Which countries they ship to is not stated, and neither is the cost to replace a lost or stolen card — that last gap is worth keeping in mind, since a physical card in the post with untracked free shipping is a real thing to think about.

The verification flow itself is not exotic, and it is worth remembering that it is not optional. KYC rules require regulated businesses to verify customers and assess risk as part of anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing law, including ongoing monitoring and suspicious-activity reporting. In the EU, customer due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether you are a politically exposed person. In the US, the customer identification programme requires your name, date of birth, address and an identification number, with electronic systems also checking proof-of-address documents against records. And note the point that trips people up: nationality is screened *separately* from residence, because sanctions screening is applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as to your address. That is why an address in one country and a passport from another can be treated differently.

Prepaid and debit cards are generally available to adults 18 and over; some issuers set higher limits, and Avici’s own limits are the subject of the next section anyway.

If you pay for a card and then do not complete or pass verification, the only stated remedy is to contact support in the app for a refund. That is the whole of it. Keep the wording in mind — we come back to it when we look at what happens when a payment goes wrong.

Fees: what it really costs day to day

The card advertises “No Hidden Fee” and “No Gas Fee, No Interchange Fee”, and the numbers that *are* published are genuinely good in places. But you have to read them against the tier you actually sign up for, because the two tiers differ in exactly the places that matter — ATMs and declined payments — and the cheaper tier in year one is not the cheaper tier in year two.

Some important reading notes on that table:

• The limits are the same on both tiers. A $1,000 per-transaction cap, a $3,000 daily cap and three transactions a day is the whole allowance, on a $0 ATM card or a $75 one. Signature buys you cheaper cash and cheaper mistakes, not more spending power.
• “No transaction limits” is a claim about the default state, not about your card. The card says there are no transaction limits by default, with per-card limits you can set in settings. What you actually get are the numbers above.
• The 0% FX markup is not the whole cost of a foreign purchase. The card’s own currency is the US dollar and its forex markup is 0%, but Visa may add a cross-border fee of roughly 0.4–1% on transactions that are not in dollars. If you are spending abroad, budget for that.
• Three transactions a day is the real ceiling, not the dollar amount. It is easy to read “$3,000 a day” as generous. Three payments and the card is done until tomorrow, whatever they cost.

Now let me walk three ordinary payments through the fee rules, because that is how you will actually meet them:

A coffee purchase in a local currency. If the coffee is not priced in dollars, this is a non-USD transaction. Avici’s own markup is 0%, but Visa’s cross-border fee of around 0.4–1% may apply — call it a fraction of a cent to a few cents. You would pay the coffee price plus possibly a cent or so. No Avici transaction fee ($0). This is the payment where the card’s fee story is at its cleanest.

A $60 grocery shop. Straightforward. Same as the coffee: $0 Avici transaction fee, 0% Avici markup, plus a possible small Visa cross-border fee if the shop charges in local currency. Count one of your three daily transactions. Nothing else applies — no monthly fee is published for either tier.

A $200 withdrawal from a cash machine. Here the tiers diverge sharply. On Platinum you pay $1 plus 0.65% — so $1 plus $1.30 on $200, or $2.30, taken out of the cash you receive. On Signature the same withdrawal is $0. And ATM withdrawals count against the same $1,000-per-transaction, $3,000-a-day, three-per-day envelope as everything else. If cash is a large part of how you live, that $1 and 0.65% on Platinum is the number that matters most, and it is the reason Signature exists.

What is *not* published is as notable as what is. There is no stated minimum balance, no monthly account fee, no fee for a low-auth (no-signature) purchase, and no published fee for topping up or withdrawing to your wallet — that last one is stated as $0. There is also no stated multi-currency support: you hold a dollar balance, not several.

One unofficial line deserves a flag rather than a repeat. A third-party summary dated 20 October 2026 gives the ATM limit as $250 daily with a maximum of three transactions. That contradicts the card’s own published $1,000 per transaction and $3,000 per day. Treat the official numbers as the real ones and be cautious about secondary write-ups — several of the figures floating around online come from them.

Top up: how the money actually gets in

This is the section I would want a friend to read twice, because the mechanism is unusual and the rules that follow from it are not obvious.

You do not “deposit” into an account in the ordinary sense. You deposit crypto — officially, USDC — into a Loan Escrow smart contract, and that contract creates a US dollar *credit* balance for your card. It is a loan against your own collateral, which is why the word “loan” keeps appearing: the balance is credit created by the contract, not credit extended by a bank. When you spend, the USDC you spent is liquidated from the contract, roughly every one to two days, sometimes weekly. So your balance and your collateral drift in steps rather than instantly, which is worth keeping in mind if you are watching a balance closely.

The good news: there is no top-up fee and no fee for withdrawal to your wallet, and no minimum top-up is stated. If something is wrong, you withdraw to your wallet. And here is the genuinely interesting part — the escrow is self-custodial. Your wallet owns the contract, and after your spends are deducted you can withdraw the remaining funds yourself. The documentation says plainly that neither Third National, nor Avici, nor Visa controls the loan contract, and that the provider can only withdraw funds tied to spend charges. That is a materially stronger position than a normal custodial card, where the exchange or issuer holds the balance and you withdraw on request.

So what are the catch-words on the other side? What you will not find stated: which coins and networks are supported (the card’s funding page does not list them — the USDC/Loan Escrow route is the documented one); any fiat top-up option at all, i.e. no bank transfer, no card-to-card, no Apple Pay top-up; and no stated arrival time or minimum from the card itself.

What is known only unofficially: a summary dated 20 October 2026 gives a minimum top-up of $1 arriving in 2–7 minutes, and describes top-ups in USDC *or any token* via a Relay auto-swap on EVM L2 or Solana networks. If that auto-swap is real, it broadens the funding options considerably — it would mean you could send, say, a token on Solana and have it converted. But it comes from a third-party site, not the card. Ask in the app before you rely on it, and remember that a swap route means a swap fee, and a second network in the path.

Two general facts about stablecoins that matter here, before you move anything:

• Stablecoins aim to hold a stable value against a currency, but they are not stable — USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis, and TerraUSD collapsed outright in May 2022. Circle says USDC is redeemable 1:1 for dollars and fully backed by cash and cash equivalents, mostly in a government money market fund, with monthly reserve attestations; the BIS put about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in USDC and USDT as of July 2025.
• Blockchain transfers are irreversible, and network choice is yours, not the card’s. Send on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, and the deposit can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. ERC-20 fees are paid in ETH, so a wallet holding only USDC and no ETH cannot send on Ethereum; Tron prices fees by burning TRX; and Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option. Check the network before you confirm the transfer, every time.

Paying with it every day

This is the card at its best and where the 9/10 comes from. It is a Visa, virtual or physical, and it works with Apple Pay and Google Pay tap-to-pay. Behind that sits self-custody with passkeys and account abstraction. In practical terms, your day-to-day is unremarkable in the best way: unlock your phone, tap, done. A physical card in hand behaves like any other Visa.

The app gives you the controls you would want. You can freeze the card (a temporary stop on spending), cancel it permanently, set per-card spending limits, set a PIN, and show or hide your card details. Two-factor authentication and passkeys are mentioned on the homepage, though the security page itself does not detail two-factor or insurance. The download link for the app is on the homepage via a shortlink; the platforms and the App Store or Google Play ratings are not stated.

The perks listed are the sort of thing Visa cards advertise: airline miles, rental car insurance, travel and restaurant perks, trip protection, and a mention of an “Avenue to TradeFI rewards” link. No cashback rate is stated — which is worth noting, because cashback is the thing many people actually choose a crypto card for.

Where the card is used matters as much as how. A merchant category code is a four-digit number classifying a business by goods or services, assigned when a business starts accepting a card. MCC 7995 covers gambling — casinos, betting, lotteries — and many issuers block it on specific cards by policy rather than by law, with the blocked list varying by issuer. Unofficial reporting on this card (from the 20 October 2026 third-party summary) says spending is blocked in restricted categories including gambling, illegal drugs, and financial institutions, the last needing additional approval. The card’s own pages do not list blocked categories — so the exact restrictions are not stated officially, and it is worth finding out before you are standing at a till. Merchants can also decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards outright, because a BIN lookup reveals the card type and issuer country. Address verification, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address you type with the issuer’s records, is mainly a US, Canada and UK thing and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards — another ordinary cause of a decline that has nothing to do with you.

And one small, slightly gloomy fact about any card: a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for several days, sometimes up to seven. On Platinum, a declined transaction also costs you $0.60. That combination is the argument for Signature if you expect a decline.

What can go wrong

Let me deal with the sharpest risk first, because it is the one the card’s own materials raise and the one you should weigh most heavily.

Nobody will tell you who is actually regulated here. Avici Inc. is at 300 4th St, San Francisco, CA 94107. “Third National” is named as a party to the loan contract structure — its role is not detailed anywhere I could find, and the documentation is explicit that it does *not* control the contract. Avici’s licences are not stated; neither is the issuer/BIN sponsor in the card’s own documentation. Only unofficially does a third-party summary name Rain as an issuing partner with KYC data shared with it. So on the most basic question — who stands behind this card, under whose licence — the public pages are silent.

Why does that matter to you as a customer, not as a regulator? Because licence is what determines who is obliged to hold and safeguard your money, what your complaint route is, and what happens if the company has a bad day. In the EU, an electronic money institution must safeguard customer funds by segregating them in dedicated accounts or insuring them, and such funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. Cards like this increasingly sit under MiCA — the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation, in legal effect since June 2023, with its asset-referenced and e-money-token rules applying from 30 June 2024 and the crypto-asset service provider rules from 30 December 2024. E-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution; the transitional period for existing providers runs only until 1 July 2026 or until they are authorised or refused; and ESMA keeps a public interim register where you can check whether a provider appears on it. Avici, issuing no EU countries, is not in that frame — but the principle is the point. You are entitled to ask what sits behind a card, and “not stated” is a real answer with real consequences.

The complaint record is thin, and one report is serious. The card’s own pages list no official incidents. What exists is user-generated and small: a review dated 31 March 2026 describing a business-account user whose incoming payment of EUR 20,000 was credited and then blocked, whose account was restricted, and who reports silence from support and no refund; and a January 2026 review about repeated login errors at the email or authenticator verification step. Treat these as unverified single-user reports, not a pattern — but the EUR 20,000 one is exactly the failure mode that matters, because it is a *received* payment being held, which is a different and more delicate problem than a declined card payment. Trustpilot shows 3.5 out of 5 across 5 reviews, which is a very small sample: good numbers and bad numbers are both unreliable at that size.

If a payment goes wrong, the card tells you almost nothing about getting it back. The only stated remedy anywhere is for the case where you paid for a card and failed verification — contact in-app support for a refund. The chargeback and disputed-payment process is not stated; the security page does not cover it. This is a gap worth weighing heavily, because a chargeback is a refund ordered by the issuer to settle a dispute — fraud, duplicate billing, goods not received — and in the US, debit card reversal rights come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z, while prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed. For someone choosing a card precisely because the ordinary routes are closed, having no published dispute route is a real cost.

Support is barely described. The docs pages read name no support channel except in-app support for verification refunds. Languages and hours are not stated. I would want to know, before funding it, how I reach a human and in what language, and the honest answer is that I could not find out.

The escrow cuts both ways. Self-custody is the card’s best feature and also its sharpest edge. With self-custody, control of the crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key — and a seed phrase, typically 12 to 24 words, is the unencrypted form of that key, so anyone who obtains yours can restore the wallet and spend its funds. Transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen key has no built-in recovery: the network cannot freeze or return the funds. Keeping your keys safe is entirely your job here, and that includes not being careless about phishing or clipboard-hijacking malware that swaps a copied address. Custodial platforms have their own history — Mt. Gox (about $350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about $400 million, 2018), and Ronin Network ($625 million, 2022) — and this card is deliberately on the other side of that line.

Two more risks that are general to the category, not to Avici. Programme closures happen: WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all its Visa programmes, and Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022, winding down the FTX US debit card. A closure typically means a notice period, then a stop on spending and loading, then a request that you withdraw your remaining balance — so a card built on a loan contract, where your collateral sits in a smart contract you own, may take some working out to unwind. And stablecoins are not censorship-proof: Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity.

One last practical warning. The documentation is not recent. The prohibitions page was last updated 19 August 2025, the Terms of Service for the Avici Card on 23 June 2025, and the Business Program Terms on 16 October 2025. The docs index also lists Business Cards, a Credit Line, Markets and Grow products — this is not a one-card company, and a broader product set is usually a sign of a company in motion.

What to take instead

The alternatives below are all self-custody or wallet-linked cards with published terms, so each is a fair comparison rather than a straw man. Scores are out of 10 on the same basis.

MetaMask (7.1) is the strongest of the three alternatives. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay among them — with other regions on a waitlist; proof of residency is required; ineligible regions limit sign-up, not spending; and US and UK sign-ups were temporarily closed per the FAQ. It is a Mastercard, virtual first and instant, with a metal card pre-orderable after approval and one card per user. The issuer is Monovate, the card provider Crypto Life. The virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee; the metal card is $199/year. Fees are described as a “minimal fee for each transaction” with no additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee, with the Mastercard rate used — though the amount of that minimal fee is not stated on the pages I read, and a fee table is linked. It spends directly from the connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, with mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT named. Cashback in mUSD is 1% on Virtual and a headline 3% on metal, though the footnote limits that 3% to the first $10,000 spent and 1% after. Note that Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit. If you want cashback and a European option, this is the one to look at first.

KAST (6.1) ties Avici on score but in a different shape. Up to 10 cards per user, Visa Platinum (Standard), Visa Infinite metal (Premium) and Visa Infinite gold plated (Private), plus designs for Pengu, Solana and Bitcoin. Annual membership is $0 / $1,000/year / $10,000/year, billed annually upfront with no monthly option; an extra virtual card is $2; a Standard physical card is $0 plus $40 delivery; and there is a $1/month inactivity fee after 12 months. Fees are attractive in the places that matter: stablecoin top-up 0%, USD spend 0%, transaction fee 0%, Apple/Google Pay 0%, with a non-USD FX fee of 0.5–1.75% depending on your residence, transaction country and card programme, $0.10 on non-USD transactions under $25, and $0.50 for a declined transaction. It is funded in USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD — with terms that say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”, a small conflict — and cashback is real: 1.5% / 2% / 3% in USD by tier, capped at $2,000 / $10,000 / $40,000 a month. Its catch is eligibility, and it is the most opaque: the country list is not published, a restricted-location list is referenced without naming countries, holding only an ID from a restricted region can make you ineligible even if you live in a supported country, dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass, only your own ID is accepted, and a VPN does not bypass it. You can create an account in an unsupported country, but KYC stays locked. On the upside, it spends from your own balance with each purchase deducted immediately — not credit.

TokenPocket (5.8) is the weakest fit here. It is a Visa/Mastercard debit card running on Arbitrum, with Fiat24 cards that are virtual — no physical card is mentioned — and balances in EUR24 and USD24. It charges 1% on a cryptocurrency deposit into the card, said to be refunded later through rewards or reduced transaction fees; otherwise “apart from these, TP Card does not charge any additional fees”, though extra fees can come from inter-institution settlement. It is available for a list of European countries and territories on Visa (Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland and others) and a longer list on Mastercard (Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, UK, among others), with the Americas “planned for Q2 2025”. No cashback is stated. The multi-currency balances are genuinely interesting, and the deposit fee is the thing to weigh against them.

Two structural differences are worth naming beyond the numbers. Avici funds you with *credit* created by a loan contract, so your balance can drift from your collateral; MetaMask, KAST and TokenPocket all spend from a balance you hold. And Avici publishes its limits — $1,000, $3,000, three a day — which is more than many of the alternatives do.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Avici card to a specific person, and that person is someone living in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, or the UAE, who already holds USDC, and for whom the balance in question is not their life savings. Someone paying for groceries, subscriptions, travel within the permitted countries, and the occasional cash withdrawal — someone using the card as a *spending* tool for stablecoins they were going to hold anyway. For that person this is a good card: a real Visa, free to hold in year one at the Platinum tier, 0% markup, tap-to-pay on both big mobile wallets, and an escrow that means your collateral is not just a claim against a company’s balance sheet. The 9/10 for everyday use is real.

I would not recommend it as a first crypto card, to someone who has never sent crypto to a smart contract and does not yet know what a loan against collateral means; the mechanism is the product, and you should want to understand it, not just be reassured by it. I would not recommend it to anyone whose income is in a currency the card does not hold, or who needs to spend more than $3,000 in a day, or more than three times. And I would not recommend it to someone who needs a published, reliable route to dispute a payment — because there isn’t one — or who is uneasy that the issuer and licence behind the card are not stated on the card’s own pages.

Before you fund it, three questions I would want answered, none of which the pages answer for me. Who is the issuer and what licence covers the programme? What happens to my escrow contract if the company folds or the programme is closed? And how do I reach a human, in which language, in which timezone? If the answers to those three are unsatisfying, the low price and the clean fee table will not compensate.

If you want a comparison rather than a verdict, the two numbers to weigh are these: Avici’s 0% FX markup against MetaMask’s published “minimal fee” for each transaction, and Avici’s $3,000 daily ceiling against KAST’s tiered cashback. Whichever of those two matters more to you points at a different card.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Avici card?

The Avici card is a Visa payment card you fund with USDC rather than a bank balance. You deposit USDC into a Loan Escrow smart contract that your own wallet controls; the contract creates a US dollar credit balance, and the card spends from it in shops, online and at ATMs. It comes in virtual and physical form across two tiers, Platinum and Signature. Avici Inc. runs the programme from San Francisco.

How does the Avici card work?

Sending USDC to the loan escrow contract creates a dollar credit that your Visa draws on. When you spend, the USDC behind that spend is liquidated from the contract, typically every one to two days and sometimes weekly. Your wallet owns the contract, so after spends are deducted you can withdraw the remainder yourself. Transaction fees are $0 and the forex markup is 0%, though Visa may add 0.4–1% on non-dollar transactions.

Is Avici a bank?

No — it is not a bank, and it does not present itself as one. Avici Inc. is a company at 300 4th St, San Francisco, and its documentation names “Third National” as a party to the loan contract structure without detailing its role. Avici’s own licence details and the issuer/BIN sponsor are not stated on its public pages. Treat it as a card programme, not a deposit-taking institution, and do not assume your balance has bank-deposit protection.

Who owns Avici?

The programme belongs to Avici Inc., registered at 300 4th St, San Francisco, CA 94107. The documentation names Third National as a party to the loan contract structure, and says plainly that neither Third National, nor Avici, nor Visa controls that contract. One third-party source names Rain as the issuing partner, but that is unofficial and not confirmed by the card. Avici also documents Business Cards, a Credit Line, Markets and Grow products.

Can I use the Avici card in my country?

It depends where you live, and there are two lists, not one. Residents of 49 listed regions — including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Japan, the UAE and the USA — can apply; no EU country, Georgia, Serbia, Armenia or Kazakhstan is on the list. Residence in Belarus, China (Mainland), Cuba, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela or Vietnam is prohibited outright. Spending is prohibited in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela.

How do I get the Avici card?

Sign up with your email, then complete a single Sumsub verification: your personal details, identity documents and a liveness check. Marketing frames this as taking 2 minutes. Once approved, a virtual card appears immediately, organised by category such as subscriptions, groceries and travel, and a physical card can be delivered — free and untracked in 3–4 weeks by standard shipping, or $50 internationally / $15 in the US for priority tracked. Which countries they ship to is not stated.

Does the Avici card require KYC?

Yes. Verification through Sumsub is required: personal details, ID documents and a liveness check, with your KYC data shared with the card’s partners and Sumsub running anti-money-laundering monitoring of users and on-chain funds. Business accounts have separate verification. The accepted document types and the reasons a verification might be rejected are not listed, and proof of address is not mentioned — so you cannot prepare for a specific failure in advance.

What does the Avici card cost to use?

Transaction fees are $0 and the forex markup is 0%, but Visa may add a 0.4–1% cross-border fee on non-dollar purchases. Card costs run $15 for a first virtual Platinum card, $50 for a physical Platinum, and $30 in the first year then $20/year for virtual Signature, or $75 plus $20/year for physical Signature. ATM withdrawals cost $1 plus 0.65% on Platinum and $0 on Signature; a declined transaction is $0.60 on Platinum and $0 on Signature. There is no published monthly fee.

Why was my payment declined or my account blocked?

There are several ordinary reasons and one serious one. You are capped at three transactions a day, $1,000 per transaction and $3,000 per day. A merchant may decline a prepaid or foreign-issued card after a BIN lookup, or address verification may simply not work on a foreign card. A declined authorisation can also leave a hold for up to seven days, and on Platinum it costs $0.60. Separately, there is a user report from 31 March 2026 of a business account whose incoming EUR 20,000 payment was credited and then blocked with no refund — unverified, from a very small sample.

Is the Avici card safe and worth it?

“Safe” splits into two questions. Custody: the escrow contract is self-custodial, your wallet owns it, and the documentation says the provider can only withdraw funds tied to spend charges — a real strength. Counterparty: Avici’s licences and the issuing sponsor are not stated, its documentation dates from 2025, and a published dispute or chargeback process is not described anywhere. So it is worth it for spending moderate USDC you already hold, and it is not a card I would build a financial routine around.

Content created by the «cryptocardadvisor» team