Cashi looks cheap on fees and broad on networks, but you are funding a beta product

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Cashi is a virtual Visa card that spends money you already hold, mostly in stablecoins, and it is built for people who have crypto but no easy access to an ordinary bank card. On paper it scores well: no monthly fee, no Cashi fee on dollar payments, and a very wide list of networks and coins you can send to it. In practice it is a public beta that launched in August 2026, it is virtual-only, it has no ATM access, Apple Pay is not there yet, and the company behind it says it provides “technology services only” without naming the licensed issuer that actually holds the money. If you are deciding, read the sections below in order; my honest summary is that this is a card for a specific situation, not a replacement for a normal everyday card.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

Conditions are current as of 2026.

Verdict: 6.6 out of 10

My score for Cashi is 6.6 out of 10. The split matters more than the total. Cashi does two things unusually well — it costs almost nothing to hold and spend in dollars, and it accepts deposits across an unusually long list of blockchain networks — and one thing quite badly, which is that the product you are entrusting money to is still a beta, virtual-only, and structurally vague about who is regulated and where.

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

So who does this suit, and who does it not? It suits someone who already holds USDC or USDT on more than one chain, who wants a Visa number to spend that balance without touching a crypto exchange, and who can accept that the card is virtual, has no ATM, and has Apple Pay on a to-do list rather than in their pocket. The 10 out of 10 on funding is not marketing padding — that many supported networks genuinely is unusual for a card in this category, and it means you can leave your coins where they are and move them from whichever chain happens to be cheapest.

It does not suit someone who needs a physical card in a wallet, who withdraws cash, who lives somewhere where being seen paying with a crypto-linked card is a nuisance, or who is uneasy being an early user of a beta product with an unnamed issuer. It is a thin tool for everyday use, and I would not ask anyone to run their salary through it.

Will they give you the card?

Short answer: probably, if you can pass an identity check, but the card does not publish a country list or state its eligibility rules. Availability is subject to local laws, and while sign-up flags may suggest where the card is popular, they are not an eligibility list. If your country is not supported, the sign-up flow will typically indicate this.

Where you can use it once you have it is a different and clearer question. The card works “anywhere Visa is accepted”, which is the whole point of the product. The same page then adds a caveat worth reading carefully: “Certain merchant types may be restricted for regulatory reasons.” That is deliberately vague. It almost certainly means categories like gambling and, depending on the region, things like adult content or fuel dispensers. The card’s own public pages do not list which ones, so if a specific merchant matters to you, that is a question for support rather than something I can answer from what is published.

One more practical point that is easy to miss and expensive to discover later: a card that works “anywhere Visa is accepted” is still a card with an issuer in some particular country. Merchants can look up the issuer’s country from the card number, and some apply extra scrutiny or simply decline prepaid and foreign-issued cards when the issuer country does not match your billing address. That is normal for this product category, not a fault specific to Cashi, and it is the single most likely reason a payment of yours will be refused in a shop abroad.

How to get it

Short answer: sign up, prove who you are with an ID and a selfie, put at least $5 on the balance, tap the $5 activation button, and the money comes straight back as Spending Credit. Most checks take minutes; some take up to 24 hours.

The steps as Cashi describes them: sign up, verify your identity, add at least $5 to your balance, tap “Activate card for $5”, and you get $5 back as Spending Credit. That last part is worth pausing on, because it is the whole of the “fee”. You hand over $5, it leaves your balance, and $5 returns to the same balance as credit. The net effect is zero, which is why I scored cost so highly — but the money has to be there first, and the $5 must be paid from your cash balance rather than a card.

On identity: the check is described as “a quick check with your ID and a selfie”. Most people finish in minutes; some take up to 24 hours. The public pages do not describe verification tiers, do not say what will cause a rejection, and do not state whether proof of address or a minimum age beyond the usual is required. Adults can normally expect to apply — prepaid and debit cards are generally limited to people over 18 — but if you are reading this hoping for a way around the check, there is not one, and a legitimate business cannot skip it.

What you actually receive is a virtual Visa card denominated in US dollars. There is no physical card: the site says physical cards “will be available in the future”, which is as close to a promise as you will find. There is no delivery to wait for and nothing to post. If your card details are ever exposed, support says to email them, and you lose the card by email rather than by post.

Fees: what it really costs

Short answer: almost nothing to hold, nothing to spend in dollars, 1% when you spend in another currency, and nothing from Cashi when you load it from crypto — only the blockchain charges you.

The headline numbers are genuinely good. There is no monthly or annual fee, and the $5 activation is returned as Spending Credit, so it nets to zero. But the 1% currency fee is not the only cost when you pay somewhere that is not in dollars, because the card also holds a spread between what it values your crypto at and what a market exchange would. Cashi does not publish that spread anywhere on its public pages, and until it does, I cannot tell you what a conversion is really worth to you. That missing number is the main hole in the cost picture, and it is why this is a 9 rather than a 10.

Here is the full set of published figures.

Now the everyday reality, in three payments you would actually make. A coffee in your own country, priced in dollars, costs you nothing beyond the price of the coffee — 0% on USD payments. A coffee in a country whose currency is not the dollar costs you 1% on top, charged automatically, and that is the number most people will feel. A taxi abroad paid in a local currency costs the same 1% but may also be declined outright, because the card is a prepaid, possibly foreign-issued Visa and some merchants refuse those. And on top of all of it, if you funded the balance with crypto, a payment out of that balance may be a taxable disposal in your jurisdiction — I am not going to give you tax advice, but if you spend crypto-derived funds regularly it is worth reading up on the treatment where you live rather than discovering it later.

Two limits sit alongside the fees. You set your own daily spending limit in the app, up to $50,000 per day; no monthly limit is published. And the cashback categories have monthly caps, so a heavy month in one category stops paying at the cap rather than continuing indefinitely. There is only one tier — no account levels, no card tiers, no status ladder — with cashback varying by category at 3, 2 or 1%. So the card has no upgrade path to wait for, which is both simpler and less rewarding than products with several tiers.

Top up: how the money gets in

Short answer: send USDC or USDT on one of eight networks — or BTC, ETH or SOL in some cases — and pay only the blockchain’s own fee. Cash also works in 20+ currencies, with Cashi’s own fee quoted in the app before you confirm.

This is the part Cashi does best, and it is the reason to consider the card at all. You can deposit USDC or USDT on Tron, Solana, Polygon, BNB Chain, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Base; the activation article also names BTC, ETH and SOL. That spread matters in practice: whichever chain you are already using — and whichever is cheapest to move on right now — is almost certainly one of them, so you do not have to consolidate or convert first.

On cost, the position is clean. Digital-asset deposits and sends carry no minimum and no Cashi fee at all; the only cost is the blockchain’s network fee, and the card tells you who pays it in each direction. For a deposit it comes out of the sending wallet, so you send a little extra to cover it. For a send out of your Cashi balance, it comes out of that balance. You can also send digital assets back out, on the same eight networks, again paying only the network fee.

Cash behaves differently, and this is where Cashi’s fee policy changes character. Local-currency deposits and cash-outs each carry a Cashi fee that depends on the currency, the method and the amount. There is no published rate table, but the fee is quoted in the app before you confirm, so you are not guessing at the till. Minimums vary by currency. The plain USD account is the exception that is published: receiving is free, and sending or receiving is capped at 3,000 USD in any 7 days.

Two operational warnings. First, network choice is not recoverable by carelessness: a transfer sent on a network Cashi does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee. Check the network twice. Second, closing an account is final — you must transfer any remaining balance out first, and after deletion you will not be able to access your funds. The card itself cannot be permanently closed yet; the most you can do is freeze it.

And a dollar of detail that catches people out: if you send USDC to Cashi over Tron, you may find Circle no longer supports USDC there natively, since it stopped doing so in February 2024. The card lists Tron among its networks, which is true for USDT; on that chain, check which token the app actually expects before pressing send.

Paying with it every day

Short answer: it works like a normal Visa online and in store, tap-to-pay works on Android through Google Pay, and on an iPhone you type the card details in — Apple Pay is not available yet.

The card is a Visa debit card with a balance behind it, so wherever a merchant takes Visa, it should take this. What varies is the friction around it. Google Pay is supported for in-store tap-to-pay, and that is genuinely convenient on Android. Apple Pay is not available yet: Cashi’s own wording is that it is “on our roadmap”. The help centre does have a “Does Cashi support Apple Pay?” article, but the page states the position plainly enough. On an iPhone, you pay online with the card details. If you are an iPhone user, that is the practical difference that decides whether daily use feels smooth or mildly annoying.

Cashback is automatic and by category: 3% on eligible subscriptions, 2% on eligible online shopping, 1% on eligible travel, paid as Spending Credit. The caps are published with more precision than the headline suggests, which is useful. For the 2% stores, the named ones have $500 per store per calendar month and up to $10 cashback per store; other eligible stores share $500 and $10 per month. The 1% travel category is capped at $20 of cashback per month, with each booking counting up to $2,000. The 3% subscription category is monthly plans only — Amazon Prime, Google One, Canva, Uber One — one charge per service per month, and no cap is stated for it. Read those numbers as what they are: a modest, well-bounded reward, not a meaningful rebate on spending.

The app is on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Store ratings are not shown, which in itself tells you something about how new this is.

Three everyday mechanics are worth knowing. Non-dollar payments are converted to dollars automatically with the 1% fee, so you never touch an exchange rate yourself. If a merchant places a hold larger than the final amount — a car rental is the standard example — the full hold is deducted at authorisation and then adjusted afterwards, which can look alarming in your balance for a day or two. And a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds that persists for several days, typically up to seven, which is annoying rather than dangerous but worth knowing before you assume money has gone missing.

There is no published list of blocked merchant categories. “Certain merchant types may be restricted” is all you get, so gambling and other restricted categories are a reasonable thing to expect trouble with, but that is an inference on my part and not something the card states.

What can go wrong

Short answer: mostly the ordinary risks of a prepaid card, plus three specific to this product’s situation — a beta-stage company with no named issuer, no physical card, no Apple Pay and no ATM.

Start with the structural risk, because it is the one that no fee schedule tells you about. Cashi says it “provides technology services only”, and that financial products are issued and managed by licensed third parties. The issuer, its registration country and its licences are not named on the public pages. That means the entity whose balance you hold, and whose name you would need in order to complain to a regulator, is not something the marketing tells you. Safeguarding and insurance arrangements are likewise not stated. If you want a plain answer to “is Cashi a bank”, the honest answer from the public pages is that it does not present itself as one, and tells you that regulated third parties stand behind the products.

Then the maturity risk. The app and the Visa card went into public beta in August 2026, with the full launch expected before the end of 2026, and Apple Pay, a physical card and expansion into Mexico planned for later in 2026 or beyond. A beta product can change its fees, its supported countries and its terms. In this category that is not theoretical: Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX in November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down; Visa suspended WaveCrest in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Closures typically follow a pattern of notice, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw what is left.

Then the complaints picture, which is empty in a way that cuts both ways. I found no Cashi-specific Trustpilot page, no Reddit threads and no news complaints — and no user reviews at all. No official incidents are recorded either. With a product this new, no complaints is what you would expect whether things are going well or not yet, so treat it as absence of evidence rather than a clean record.

The smaller operational risks, in a list I would actually give a friend:

• No ATM access. The virtual card cannot be used at ATMs, which also means no emergency cash.
• No physical card. Until one exists, a lost phone means no card and no physical fallback.
• A $50 fee to raise a dispute is steep. Asking the merchant for a refund directly is free, and the help centre says cashback is removed when a refund comes back, though the article setting that out was not read in full here.
• Time frames for disputes are not stated, so you do not know how long the process runs.
• No card replacement in the ordinary sense — if details are exposed, you email support.

On the security side, the app offers what you would expect: instant freeze, your own daily limits, online payment controls, two-factor authentication, a PIN, biometrics, real-time activity alerts, and what Cashi calls “secure account controls and continuous monitoring”. None of that protects you from the provider itself, which is the point of the paragraph above. Support is reachable by email at [email protected], through the Help Centre at help.cashi.com, on Telegram at t.me/cashi and on X. The site runs in English, Chinese, Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean.

What to take instead

Short answer: if any of the reasons above rule Cashi out for you, the alternatives below each solve the same problem differently — and if you need a bank card at all, that is a separate conversation.

Three things stand out. Bitrefill is the closest comparison and it scores slightly higher, because it ships a physical Visa and pays 2% total cashback with no cap stated — 1% on each crypto deposit and 1% on each purchase. Against that, it works in euros rather than dollars and it publishes no country list either; its terms say access is “subject to eligibility criteria” and that further requirements “established and verified by our partners, shall apply”.

UPay sells the same idea with more shapes — virtual and physical, personal and business — and claims support in 180+ countries while warning that it does not serve residents of certain countries, a list that may change with regulatory or issuer policies. Its identity partner accepts only ID documents issued by the same country as you, which is a real constraint if you live away from where you were born. No cashback is stated on the card page.

Kemy is the outlier because its virtual card carries a 3.5% plus $1 transaction fee, which is the single largest everyday cost on this list and would dominate everything good about a card. Its virtual issuance is $15 for three years plus $2 a month; the physical one is $250 plus $10 a month, one per user. It covers 190+ countries with “a few restrictions apply”, and lists a deposit fee for the main account as 8% in the summary and 5% in the section, which is a conflict I would want resolved before depositing anything.

And the option none of these comparisons mention: if you can get an ordinary bank card, a bank card is cheaper, more accepted and more regulated than all four. This category exists because people are locked out of that, not because it is better.

Who I would recommend it to

Short answer: to someone holding stablecoins on several chains who needs a Visa number quickly and can live with a virtual-only beta card — and to nobody who needs cash, a physical card, or certainty about who is regulated.

I would recommend Cashi, without much hesitation, to a person who already keeps USDC or USDT spread across Tron, Solana or Base, who wants to spend that balance directly rather than pushing it through an exchange, and who is comfortable being an early user. If you spend in dollars, the cost is effectively zero, and the network coverage is genuinely better than anything else I looked at. Add the 3/2/1 cashback and the zero-fee stablecoin deposits, and the value proposition is real.

I would recommend it with a caveat to a person who travels and wants one card that works everywhere: the acceptance is Visa’s, but the currency fee is 1% off-dollar, some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards, no ATM is available, and Apple Pay is not there. Work out how much of your spending is in dollars before you commit.

I would not recommend it at all to someone who needs cash, who has lost their card and has no physical backup, who is uneasy about an unnamed issuer, or who intends to run anything close to their main spending through a product that its own company calls a beta. Nor would I recommend it to someone whose documents come from a country different from where they live: KYC partners in this category increasingly check that, and Cashi’s own list of who it serves is not published, so you may only find out at the application stage.

Nothing here is a reason to try to get around an identity check or a country rule. There is no version of this that works without passing the checks honestly, and trying to defeat them is the fastest way to lose access to a balance you have already funded.

The pattern in this whole category is worth holding on to: a card number, an issuer, a licence, and a company. The card number is easy to get; the issuer and the licence are what actually protect your money, and they are exactly the details Cashi does not publish.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Cashi card?

Cashi is a virtual Visa debit card that spends a balance you hold, mostly in stablecoins. You load the balance from USDC, USDT or cash, then use the card number online or in store wherever Visa is accepted. It is not a bank account in the ordinary sense: Cashi says it provides technology services only, and the financial products behind the card are issued and managed by licensed third parties.

Is Cashi a bank, and who owns it?

Cashi does not present itself as a bank. Its public pages say it provides technology services only and that financial products are issued and managed by licensed third parties, without naming the issuer, its registration country or its licences. One report describes the company as Hong Kong-based, though a release datelined Sharjah, UAE, and neither claim is confirmed by the card’s own pages.

Does the Cashi card require KYC?

Yes. Sign-up involves “a quick check with your ID and a selfie”, and most checks finish within minutes while some take up to 24 hours. The public pages do not describe verification tiers or list rejection reasons. There is no legitimate way around this step, and anyone offering to bypass it is not offering a working account.

Which countries is the Cashi card available in?

The site and help articles do not publish a country list, and availability is stated as subject to local laws. Country flags in the sign-up flow include Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Spain, Ghana, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, but that is an interface detail, not a stated eligibility list. Your nationality may also be screened separately from where you live.

How do I activate the Cashi card?

You need at least $5 in your cash balance. Tap “Activate card for $5” and the $5 is returned to you as Spending Credit, so the activation costs you nothing net. There is no physical card and no delivery — you get a virtual Visa immediately, and the $5 must come from your cash balance, not from a card.

How much does the Cashi card cost to hold and to use?

There is no monthly or annual fee. Spending in dollars costs 0%, spending in another currency costs a 1% conversion fee, and crypto deposits carry no Cashi fee — only the blockchain’s network fee. Cash deposits and cash-outs each carry a Cashi fee quoted in the app, and raising a dispute costs $50. The crypto conversion spread is not stated publicly.

Can I use the Cashi card at an ATM or add it to Apple Wallet?

Neither, at the moment. The virtual card cannot be used at ATMs, so there is no cash withdrawal. Apple Pay is “not available yet, but it’s on our roadmap”; Google Pay works for in-store tap-to-pay, and on iPhone you pay online with the card details.

Is the Cashi card safe to use?

The app offers instant freeze, spending limits, two-factor authentication, a PIN, biometrics and real-time alerts, which is a reasonable set of everyday controls. But Cashi says it provides technology only, does not name the licensed issuer holding funds, and does not state safeguarding or insurance arrangements. It has also been in public beta since August 2026, so I would not treat it as a place to hold money you cannot afford to lose.

How do I withdraw money from Cashi or close my account?

You can send digital assets out on eight networks, paying only the network fee, or withdraw cash in more than 20 currencies with a fee quoted in the app; USD account sends also carry a fixed bank fee plus a small transfer fee, capped at 3,000 USD in any 7 days. To close the account, transfer any remaining balance out first — after deletion you will not be able to access your funds — and note the card can currently only be frozen, not permanently closed.

Is the Cashi card worth it?

Worth it if you hold stablecoins across several networks, spend mainly in dollars, and want to use crypto without going through an exchange — the funding support and the zero-fee dollar spending are the strongest features. Less worth it if you need cash, a physical card, Apple Pay, or reassurance about who is regulated. It scores 6.6 out of 10, which reflects a genuinely good cost and funding proposition inside a product that is still a beta.

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