Cadmos scores 7.0 out of 10: a self-custody crypto card with a free Premium tier, real Visa Signature perks, and a lot of numbers the company has not published

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Cadmos card is a crypto payment card that spends stablecoins straight from a wallet you control. There is no bank account behind it in the usual sense: you hold the funds, the card draws on them, and the app in front of you is the whole interface. Two products sit side by side — Premium, which carries a Visa Signature card and a $0 monthly fee with a 1.75% foreign-exchange fee, and Standard, a cheaper tier whose prices are only shown on the order screen. My score for it is 7.0 out of 10. That is a good score, not a perfect one, and the gap between the two numbers tells you most of what you need to know.

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

Who this card genuinely suits is narrow and specific: people who already hold USDC or USDT in a self-custodial wallet, who want to spend that balance at ordinary shops, and who are comfortable being their own bank when something goes wrong. Who it does not suit is almost everyone else — anyone wanting a conventional bank card with a bank behind it, anyone who needs predictable published fees across both tiers, anyone who needs a named issuing bank and a named licence, and anyone who would rather not deal with KYC at the order screen.

Before I go further, a warning about how much you will learn here. Cadmos publishes a good deal about how its products work and very little about the numbers people usually want: the country list, the issuance fee, the crypto conversion fee, ATM access, delivery times, the card currency, the blocked merchant categories, the rewards. The company’s public pages simply do not state these things. I have marked each of them below rather than filling the gaps with industry averages, because an average from another card is not a fact about this one.

My score, criterion by criterion

The strongest line in that table is the top-up one, and it is the strongest because it is concrete: two stablecoins, three networks, your own wallet. The weakest are reliability and everyday use, and they are weak for the same reason — the company is a programme front-end whose own pages never name the bank that stands behind the plastic.

Will they give you the card?

Yes, probably, but you will find out by opening the app rather than by reading a list — and that is the first thing worth knowing. Cadmos does not publish a list of eligible countries. Availability depends on your eligibility and on the options shown inside the app, which means the honest answer to “can I get this where I live?” is: install it, look, and see. The public terms do say one thing clearly, and you should read it as a hard rule rather than a guideline: the terms require that you are not in a country under a US embargo.

That embargo condition is narrower than it sounds and wider than it looks. It is not a whitelist of approved jurisdictions, and it is not a statement that the card is available everywhere else. It is a prohibition, not a permission. So the sentence to hold in your head is this: Cadmos tells you where you cannot be, and leaves you to discover where you can.

If your country is not embargoed and the app offers you a product, you can proceed. If the app shows you nothing, that is your answer, and no amount of emailing support will turn the absence into a yes.

A second, quieter point about who gets the card: the KYC requirement is not uniform. It differs by card product and is shown on the order screen, and it can include a government ID, personal information and a proof-of-liveness check. Proof of address and an age requirement are not stated. Prepaid and debit cards are generally available to adults aged 18 and over, and some issuers set higher limits — but for Cadmos specifically, the age rule is one of the things the public pages do not say. Plan on being asked for identity documents, and be aware that you will not find the precise list in advance.

How to get it

The route is short, and there is no branch to visit. Download the app — there is a dedicated download page — and order through it. Along the way you will pass the order screen, which is where the two things you most want to know are actually displayed: which KYC checks your chosen product requires, and what the Standard product costs. In other words, the app is the disclosure document.

What you will be choosing between:

• Premium gives you a Visa Signature card.
• Standard gives you a Visa or Mastercard — the app shows which one you are getting at the point of order.

Two things are conspicuously absent from that comparison. Whether you get a virtual card, a physical card, or both, is not stated. And the currency the card is denominated in is not stated. Both of those matter more than they sound, and I will come back to why in the cost section, because they are the difference between a card that behaves normally abroad and one that quietly costs you an extra slice on every purchase.

Delivery time is not stated either. Nobody at Cadmos has published how long it takes for a physical card to arrive, so if you are someone who needs a working card this week, plan on the assumption that you will not have one this week.

One more thing nobody publishes: the KYC levels, if there are tiers of them, or what triggers an enhanced check. You will find out the hard way if it applies to you.

Fees: what it really costs

The headline on this card is genuinely attractive and I want to give it its due before I complicate it: Premium has $0 monthly fees. No subscription, no annual charge, no maintenance fee. That is the number that will do the persuading for most people, and it is a real number, not a teaser.

The complication is everything around it.

Read that table twice, because the shape of it matters more than any single line. On Premium, the one cost Cadmos commits to publicly is the 1.75% foreign-exchange fee. Everything else — issuance, conversion of crypto into spendable balance, ATM use — is blank. On Standard, the blanks are worse: the FX fees are described only by reference to programme terms, with no figures at all, and the only place the actual prices exist is the order screen in the app.

Which means the honest cost of this card cannot be computed from its public pages. I could add up 1.75% of your holiday spend and give you a number, but it would be a number built on assumptions the company has not published. I am not going to do that, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does.

Three everyday payments, and which fees apply

• Coffee in your own city, paid from USDC. The 1.75% FX fee should not bite, since you are not crossing a border. What you do pay is whatever it costs to turn your stablecoin into spendable balance at the top-up stage — and that rate is not published. On-chain network fees are charged by the blockchain, not by Cadmos, so they come out of the same wallet but not the same line item.
• A hotel abroad, in local currency. Here the 1.75% applies, on Premium, on top of any spread the conversion carries. Add the fact that the card’s own currency is not stated, and there is a real possibility you are paying a currency conversion on a card that is already denominated in something other than the local currency — double conversion, if the setup works that way. Nobody has published enough for me to tell you whether it does.
• A subscription bought online in US dollars. The 1.75% FX fee does not apply if the merchant charges you in dollars and the card settles in dollars. The conversion cost of moving USDC into the card still applies, at an unpublished rate. The online payment may also be challenged by 3-D Secure, the identity check Visa and Mastercard run on card payments, which either passes silently or asks you for a one-time code.

Now the limits, because the $175,000 monthly figure is the sort of number people repeat without reading. That is the Premium monthly spend limit. For Standard, Cadmos states no cap on wallet balance and no cumulative transfer cap of its own; card limits are set by the programme and shown in the app. So if you are comparing the two products, you are not comparing two published numbers. You are comparing one published number against a number you have to look up on your phone.

One more piece of context on limits and eligibility: some merchant categories are blocked by policy rather than by law, and the list varies by issuer. The most common example is gambling — merchant category 7995 covers casinos, betting and lotteries. Whether Cadmos blocks it is not stated. If gambling is part of what you want the card for, ask before you rely on it.

How to top it up

This is where Cadmos is at its best, and the reason is structural rather than promotional: the card is topped up from your own self-custodial wallet, and you can fund it with USDC or USDT, on Arbitrum, Solana or Tron. The transfer networks Cadmos lists are Arbitrum, Solana and Tron. When the merchant takes payment, the stablecoin settles in fiat at the merchant.

So the sequence is: crypto sits in a wallet you control; you send USDC or USDT to the card on one of three networks; an approved top-up converts it into a balance the card can spend.

The detail that matters, and which Cadmos states in plain language, is that your wallet balance stays self-custodial until a card top-up is approved. That is a real design choice with real consequences. Before approval, the funds are yours and no intermediary holds them. After approval, you are spending a loaded balance.

Two things are not stated and you should plan around them rather than hope. The top-up fees and minimums are not published. Not the network fee, not the conversion fee, not a minimum top-up amount — none of it. And the choice of network is genuinely consequential, not a technicality. Sending on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can simply lose the funds; blockchain transfers are irreversible, and recovery in that case depends on manual support help with no guarantee. Pick the network from the list in the app, not from habit.

There is a stablecoin-specific wrinkle worth knowing before you choose between the two tokens. Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option — on Tron, the token available is USDT. If you are sending on Tron, that is the one you are sending.

Paying with it every day

For a first payment, the fastest route is your phone. Premium works with both Apple Pay and Google Pay. Standard works with Apple Pay — the Visa and Mastercard versions — and Google Pay is not mentioned for it. That is the whole mobile-wallet picture, and it is a real difference between the tiers: if you are on Android and want tap-to-pay on the phone, Premium is the product that says it supports it.

What happens when you add the card to Apple Wallet is worth understanding rather than magic. Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific number held in the phone’s secure hardware, never on Apple’s servers, and generates a one-time security code for each payment. Your actual card number is not floating around. An issuer can still restrict that tokenised number — blocking it, say, for online or magnetic-stripe use — which is a legitimate safety feature but also a reason a card can decline for a reason you did not expect.

Where you can use it: almost anywhere cards are accepted, with the usual caveats that apply to any prepaid or foreign card. Merchants can look up the BIN — the six or eight digits that identify the issuing institution — and see the issuer country, and some apply extra scrutiny when that country differs from your billing address. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign cards outright for that reason. If a card that works everywhere else in your city is refused in one shop, this is often the explanation, and it is not a fault in your card.

Address verification is a related trap. The service that compares the street number and postal code you typed against issuer records is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK, and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards — which can cause declines at checkout for no visible reason.

Two everyday-use features are simply absent from Cadmos’s public pages. Rewards are not stated — no cashback rate, no points, nothing to budget around. And blocked merchant categories are not stated. If you want the card to work everywhere, including betting sites or whatever else your local rules allow, you cannot confirm from the public pages that it will.

The app itself is not much of a review subject: there is a download page, and that is what I could establish about it. App-store ratings are the kind of thing that tells you more than a marketing page, and I did not read them, so I will not pretend to have an opinion.

One thing Cadmos does publish, and it is more than most, is what happens when something goes wrong with a dispute. The terms choose French law and the courts of Paris, and commit to a 30-day good-faith resolution after written notice. What the terms do not contain is a chargeback process — the mechanism by which an issuer formally orders a merchant to refund you. Its absence from the terms is not proof that chargebacks are unavailable, but it means I cannot tell you they exist.

What can go wrong

Let us take the risks one at a time, because they are of very different sizes and lumping them together would not help you.

The counterparty question. Cadmos is Cadmos LTD, registered in Limassol, Cyprus, registration number HE 457316, founded in 2021. The card issuer is not named. No licence is named in the terms. This is the single most important thing on this page, and I want to be plain about why: a crypto card needs a licensed institution to hold the card programme, and the company marketing the card is often only a programme manager or front end. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves — they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. When you cannot see the issuer’s name, you cannot look up its regulator, and looking up the regulator is exactly what you would want to do.

The custody question — and here Cadmos is strong. The terms state that “CADMOS does not receive, hold, safeguard, or acquire title to your Digital Assets or fiat funds”, and that you hold the recovery phrase. That is the correct side of the line. A recovery phrase — typically 12 to 24 words — is an unencrypted form of the private key; anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds, and blockchain transfers are irreversible with no built-in recovery. The trade for that protection is that key loss, phishing and clipboard-hijacking malware that swaps a copied address are now entirely your problem. Self-custody does not make you safer from attackers; it moves the responsibility.

The complaints picture. I found no complaints: searches returned no Trustpilot or Reddit reviews of Cadmos Pay, and no Trustpilot page was found. Read that carefully, because absence of evidence is not evidence of quality. A company with no public complaint history may be new, may be small, or may simply have too few users to generate them. It is not a track record.

Programme closure. This is the risk that history makes concrete rather than theoretical. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022, and the FTX US debit card programme was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all its Visa programmes. Closures typically follow a pattern: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw remaining balances. One 2026 closure reported by a secondary source ended new loads on 8 July 2026 and spending on 8 August 2026 — that is a single unconfirmed source, and I include it only to show the shape of a shutdown, not as a fact.

Withdrawal and closure. You close the account by email. Critically, closure does not freeze or move digital assets — they stay in your wallet, which is the flip side of self-custody. Whether you can withdraw the balance sitting on the card itself is not stated, and this is the gap that would hurt most in a shutdown: funds already loaded onto the card, as opposed to funds still in the wallet.

Holds and declines. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds that stays for several days, typically up to seven. So a failed payment can cost you a week of available balance for reasons that have nothing to do with your balance being too low.

Stablecoin risk, briefly. Stablecoins aim to hold a stable value against a fiat currency, but as it is often put, despite the name they are not necessarily stable. TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022; USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. USDT and USDC are dollar-pegged, and the BIS put about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in those two as of July 2025. Circle says USDC is redeemable 1:1 for USD and 100% backed by cash and cash equivalents, mostly in an SEC-registered government money market fund, with monthly reserve attestations by a Big Four firm; Tether describes USDT as built on multiple blockchains with reserves intended to back it 1-to-1. That is a stablecoin note, not a Cadmos note: what you hold on the wallet side is separate from how well Cadmos works.

On taxes. I am not giving tax advice, and this is not tax advice. One factual anchor from the IRS’s treatment: digital assets are property, so exchanging them for goods, services, dollars or other digital assets generally produces a taxable gain or loss, measured in local fiat currency at fair market value on the date of the transaction. Which means each card payment funded from crypto may be a separate disposal. That is a bookkeeping question with real consequences, and the answer depends on your jurisdiction — take it to an accountant who knows your country.

Support, finally, is genuinely present. There is an email address, in-app tickets under Settings, a phone number, and for Premium a 24/7 concierge by email and WhatsApp. A Premium card with no monthly fee and a concierge is, on the service side alone, a good deal.

What to take instead

If the gaps above are the problem — the unnamed issuer, the unpublished fees, the unknown country list — then the honest answer is that Cadmos is not the only card, and the alternatives may be more transparent even if they score lower on my scale. Here is how the main ones compare, with their own scores, so you can judge for yourself.

MetaMask (7.1/10) is the closest rival on score and the more transparent product. It is a Mastercard, virtual first and instant, with a metal version you can pre-order after approval and one card per user. The virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee; the metal is $199 a year. It states no foreign transaction fee and uses the Mastercard rate, with “no additional MetaMask fees” — though the per-transaction fee is described only as minimal, with the amount on a linked table. It spends directly from the connected wallet across Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, and names its tokens including USDC and USDT; Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit. It pays cashback in mUSD: 1% on Virtual, and on Metal a headline 3% that the fine print caps at 3% on the first $10,000 spent and 1% after, plus a dining-app bonus. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories, proof of residency is required, and — importantly — ineligible regions limit sign-ups but not spending. US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per its FAQ.

KAST (6.1/10) is the one that publishes the most numbers, and if your objection to Cadmos is the blank fee table, KAST is the answer. It has three real tiers with published annual membership: Standard at 0 USD, Premium at $1,000 a year, Private at $10,000 a year, billed annually upfront. Spending is 0% in USD, stablecoin top-ups are 0%, Apple and Google Pay are 0%; the only fee that normally bites is non-USD FX at 0.5%–1.75% depending on where you live, where you are spending and which programme you are on, plus $0.10 on non-USD transactions under $25 and $0.50 for a declined transaction. It supports USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD across Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and Tron, converts stablecoin deposits 1:1 at 0% spread, and pays USD cashback of 1.5% / 2% / 3% by tier, capped at $2,000, $10,000 and $40,000 of spend a month, plus points on Premium and Private. Its eligibility model is stricter and more transparent too: residence-based, shown at KYC, with citizenship separately considered — living in a supported country with an ID from a restricted region may still fail, and a VPN does not bypass it.

TokenPocket (5.8/10) is the weakest of the four on my scale and the one with the most unusual cost structure. It is a Visa or Mastercard debit card running on Arbitrum, with balances in EUR24 and USD24, virtual through Fiat24 with no physical card mentioned. The headline is unusually clean — apart from an NFT creation fee partly covered by TokenPocket where you pay “a small portion” (amount not stated), the card charges no additional fees. But depositing cryptocurrency costs 1%, which is described as refunded later through rewards or reduced transaction fees — so it is a fee now against a promise later. It is also the least transparent on eligibility in practice: Visa for a list of European countries and territories, Mastercard for Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and the UK among others, with the Americas “planned for Q2 2025”. The specific coins and networks for deposits are not listed in its FAQ.

Two things worth saying plainly about this comparison. First, KAST’s $10,000-a-year Private tier and MetaMask’s $199 metal are not comparable to a $0 monthly Premium card — they buy different things. Second, and more usefully: the pattern across all four is the same. Every one of them has blanks, and the blanks are in the same places — the issuer’s licence, the exact crypto conversion rate, the blocked merchant list. This is a young category and it is under-disclosed as a rule.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Cadmos Premium card to someone in this exact situation: you already hold USDC or USDT in a self-custodial wallet, you are comfortable with the responsibility that comes with a recovery phrase, you want to spend that balance without waiting days for an exchange to process it, and you want a Visa Signature card with lounge access at 1,300+ lounges in 500+ cities, a 24/7 concierge by email and WhatsApp, Visa Airport Companion, both Apple Pay and Google Pay, a $175,000 monthly spend limit — and no monthly fee. For that person this is a good deal, and the 1.75% FX fee is the price of admission for having a real premium card in the crypto world.

I would not recommend it, without hesitation, to someone who needs a card to work everywhere without surprises, who wants published fees, who needs a named bank and a named regulator behind the plastic, who needs to know how long delivery takes, or who wants to file a chargeback through a documented process. If any of those describe you, read the “what to take instead” table before you order anything.

And my one request to Cadmos, if I may: publish the country list, the issuance fee, the crypto conversion rate, and the issuer’s name. Four lines. That single change would move this card several points up my scale, because right now the gaps are not costing me confidence in the product — they are costing me confidence in what I am being asked to rely on.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Cadmos card?

The Cadmos card is a crypto payment card that spends stablecoins directly from a wallet you control, rather than from a bank account. You top it up with USDC or USDT on the Arbitrum, Solana or Tron networks, and the balance settles in fiat at the merchant. There are two products: Premium, a Visa Signature card at $0 monthly with a 1.75% FX fee, and Standard, a Visa or Mastercard whose prices are shown only on the order screen.

Is Cadmos a bank?

No, and it does not present itself as one. The company behind it is Cadmos LTD, registered in Limassol, Cyprus, number HE 457316, founded in 2021. What the public pages do not do is name the card issuer or any licence. A card needs a licensed bank or e-money institution to hold the programme, with the crypto brand often acting only as a front end. That missing name is the first thing to ask about.

Does the Cadmos card require KYC?

Yes, and how much depends on which product you order. The KYC requirements differ by card product and are shown on the order screen itself; they can include a government ID, personal information and a proof-of-liveness check. Proof of address and an age requirement are not stated on the public pages. If due diligence cannot be completed, regulated institutions are expected to decline the relationship, which is why accounts can be frozen pending documents.

Can I get the Cadmos card in my country?

Possibly, but you cannot find out from a published list, because there is none. Availability depends on your eligibility and on the options shown in the app — so the practical test is to download it and look. The one clear rule in the terms is that you must not be in a country under a US embargo. That is a prohibition rather than a whitelist, so being outside it does not by itself mean you are inside.

How much does the Cadmos card cost?

Premium has $0 monthly fees, no subscription and no maintenance charge, plus a 1.75% foreign-exchange fee. Issuance fees and the crypto conversion fee are not stated. For Standard, nothing is published at all except that cross-border and FX fees follow its programme terms — the actual figures appear on the order screen. ATM fees are not stated for either tier. Because of these gaps, the real cost of the card cannot be worked out from public information.

How do I top up the Cadmos card?

You send USDC or USDT from your own self-custodial wallet to the card, on one of the three supported networks: Arbitrum, Solana or Tron. Your wallet balance stays self-custodial until a top-up is approved, after which the funds convert into a spendable balance. Top-up fees and minimums are not stated. Be careful with the network: a transfer on an unsupported network, or to another network’s address, can be lost, since blockchain transfers are irreversible.

Is the Cadmos card safe?

The custody side is the strongest part of the design. The terms state that Cadmos does not receive, hold, safeguard or acquire title to your digital assets or fiat funds, and you hold the recovery phrase. That removes counterparty risk but transfers full responsibility to you: anyone with a 12-to-24-word seed phrase can restore and spend the wallet, with no built-in recovery. The weaker side is disclosure — no issuer named, no licence named, and no complaints found, which is not the same as a good track record.

Can I add the Cadmos card to Apple Wallet?

Yes. Premium supports both Apple Pay and Google Pay, and Standard supports Apple Pay in its Visa and Mastercard versions, with Google Pay not mentioned for it. Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific number stored in the phone’s secure hardware, never on Apple’s servers, and uses a one-time security code per payment. Note that issuers can restrict a tokenised card for online or magnetic-stripe use, which can cause unexpected declines.

What are the limits on a Cadmos Premium card?

The Premium monthly spend limit is $175,000. For Standard, Cadmos states no cap on wallet balance and no cumulative transfer cap of its own; card limits are set by the programme and shown in the app, so you have to look them up rather than read them. The currency the card is denominated in is not stated, and neither is any minimum top-up. Declined payments can also leave a hold on funds for several days, typically up to seven.

Is the Cadmos card worth it?

For self-custody users spending USDC or USDT from their own wallet, yes — a $0 monthly Visa Signature with lounge access, a 24/7 concierge, a $175,000 monthly limit and both mobile wallets is genuinely strong, and it scores 7.0 out of 10. For anyone who needs published fees, a named issuer and licence, a confirmed country list, or a documented chargeback process, the answer is no. The product may well be fine; it is the disclosure that is not.

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