Crypto card shutdowns in 2026

Between May 2023 and July 2026, 21 cards were disrupted by something one layer above them. 17 have not come back. 4 have, in some form. When a licence, an issuer or a platform goes, every brand sitting on it is affected at once, whether or not the brand survives it.

Most crypto cards aren't issued by the brand on the front. Behind each one is a regulated e-money institution or a sponsor bank. When that upstream partner loses its licence or quits the business, every card riding on it can stop working the same day, no matter how well the card itself was doing.

We track these events in the Sweepbase dataset. Below is each verified upstream event, the cards that rode on it, and what happened to each, with a primary source you can check.

What the closure record shows

1. 21 cards have been disrupted by something one level above the brand across 9 verified upstream events. 17 have not come back. 4 came back, each on a different upstream partner from the one that failed. A new partner is what separates a card that dies from a card that moves.
2. The largest single event reaches 7 cards: “Fiat24 suspends new client onboarding, confirmed by the issuer 29 Jul 2026”. None of those 7 brands failed. All of them are issued on one Swiss licence, SR Saphirstein AG, which trades as Fiat24 and as UR and says it is not taking new clients under either name: Fiat24 Card, SafePal Card, imToken Card, TokenPocket Card, THORWallet Card, UR Card, Zoomex Card. THORWallet has since come back with a different card on another programme. SafePal, imToken and TokenPocket still document the Fiat24 route, and that route ends at the bank's closed onboarding.
3. 5 of the 9 events hit more than one card, so the typical upstream event is not a one-card accident. When several brands share a sponsor, they share a single way to stop working.
4. A white-label inherits its platform's shutdown date, not its own. Moonwell Card and Osmosis Pay closed on Cypher's date because they read Cypher's schedule, and their own documentation was still advertising the card afterwards.
5. 30 cards in the wider dataset stopped accepting new customers during 2026, from Cryptopay Card (1 January 2026) to Cardano Card (31 October 2026). Only the ones traceable to a named upstream event appear in the list below.
6. One card is deliberately excluded: Utorg ran on Quicko by its own terms of use. Its card went offline on 9 February 2026 and came back as a USD Visa provided by Wirex Limited, but Utorg's notice does not name the provider that failed, and this dataset needs two sources for every closure.

Can one upstream event freeze several cards at once?

Yes. The clearest case is Quicko. One KNF decision on 21 January 2026 reached three consumer cards we track, and took down the two still running on the rail. CEX.IO and Trustee both stopped working on the same day, 3 February: two separate brands, one licence. Trustee's card came back in part, on a card its own page says Wirex Limited issues: the virtual card is orderable again and the physical one is temporarily unavailable. CEX.IO's card has not come back at all. The third card was already gone: Mercuryo had retired its Quicko-issued card on 1 January, twenty days before the decision, and moved cardholders to a new Spend card issued with Paynetics. That successor programme closed as well: its last usable day was 10 July 2026 and card accounts closed on 11 July, which is the date our card database carries for Mercuryo. The damage reached past crypto too: Quicko Wallet ran contactless payments on Huawei watches in Poland, and those stopped until Curve Pay picked the feature up that March. It is the concentration risk we measured in our BIN-sponsor concentration analysis: when a lot of cards lean on the same issuer, they share one way to fail, even when the brand itself survives.

Which card on the Quicko rail did nobody count?

Utorg. Every published account of the Quicko collapse names the same brands, and Utorg is never among them. Its Lithuanian operator, Utrg UAB (company no. 306062887), says so itself: clause 2.4.2 of its terms of use reads that the Utorg Card “is a debit payment card account provided in collaboration with Quicko Sp. z o.o.” and that “all card issuance, card account management, fund loading, and payment processing are carried out by Quicko”.

The timing is the odd part. The same terms, dated 1 January 2026, record that the company had just suspended its crypto-asset services to pursue authorisation under MiCA, leaving the card as its one remaining product. Twenty days later the KNF revoked the licence that card ran on. The one operator here that deliberately stepped back to comply with the crypto regime was left holding a product that depended on the payments regime, and the payments regime is where the decision landed.

The card did stop. On 9 February 2026 Utorg's support notice said its “current card payments provider has been facing external challenges” and that the Utorg Card was offline. The card came back as a different product: a USD Visa in place of the old Mastercard, with every old card switched off, provided by Wirex Limited. We are still not listing Utorg among the closures above. The notice does not name the provider that failed, no second source ties the outage to the Quicko decision, and the card is obtainable again. Utorg stays in our issuer directory, and out of the count.

Mobilum is in a similar position. Its app terms say “The sole provider of payment services via the Application is Quicko”, the KNF withdrew Quicko's authorisation in January, and Mobilum has not said who provides its card now. No source shows that its card stopped, so it is not in the count either.

Fiat24 paused onboarding, and its partners' cards stopped with it

The largest group here began in mid-2026, and nothing in it is officially dead. SR Saphirstein AG, the Swiss FINMA-licensed fintech bank that trades as Fiat24, posted that “due to maintenance works” it is not accepting any new client applications. On the Fiat24 side that reaches five cards, because Fiat24 runs onboarding and KYC for every card built on its rail: its own Fiat24 Card plus the SafePal, imToken, TokenPocket and THORWallet white-labels all push applicants through the same funnel. Fiat24 was still not taking new applications in October 2026.

The partners have gone two ways since. SafePal, imToken and TokenPocket have announced no suspension and still document the Fiat24 route, which ends at the bank's closed onboarding. We list them as closed to new applicants and treat those entries as contested, because nobody has submitted an application to watch one fail. THORWallet came back with a different card, a Mastercard on the Unblock programme. THORWallet names Atomo Sarl as the operator of that programme but not the issuing bank, and it still lists the Fiat24 card beside it, closed to new clients.

The same company runs a second consumer brand, UR, on the same licence, and UR froze as well. Its help article on temporary changes, created on 22 July, says “we're not opening new retail or corporate accounts during this period” while its compliance team reassesses the rules UR operates under. That adds UR's own card and the Zoomex Card, which Zoomex issues through a UR account, to this group: 7 cards in all. UR's FAQ still describes opening an account, and Zoomex has said nothing about its card.

The bank's own words do not describe a shutdown. Fiat24 published a signed statement on 29 July: “Since 14 July, we have temporarily paused Crypto Top-Up” and it will “temporarily suspend new client onboarding”, while “our core services remain fully operational”. Every formulation is temporary. The bank named its own reason (volume outgrew its internal compliance and support capacity), and its FINMA fintech licence is intact. Existing cardholders keep working cards. If onboarding reopens, the 6 entries still marked closed come off the list.

The entry is dated 29 July, the day the bank confirmed the onboarding suspension itself. That is a confirmation date. “Since 14 July” attaches to Crypto Top-Up in the bank's statement, and the sentence about onboarding carries no date at all. Archive captures show no banner on 14 May and the banner in place by 23 July, and nothing narrows the start further. One partner has published a notice: imToken's card service notice, signed 20 July in three languages, announces a top-up and currency-exchange outage and adds that “card payments are not affected”. An update dated 30 July reads: “Multi-currency exchange is available again, Crypto Top-Up remains paused, and card payments continue as usual.” No partner has said applications are closed. Earlier versions of this entry carried different dates. Dataset corrections are logged in the data changelog.

The partner pages kept moving after the pause. SafePal edited its “how to open a Fiat24 IBAN account” walkthrough on 5 August 2026, and imToken's FAQ was updated the day before and said anyone can apply. Fiat24 runs both onboarding flows and says it is not accepting new clients. Only an application would show which page is right, and nobody has submitted one.

Closed cards, Cypher replacements and Wirex

Methodology

Every closure here is checked against a primary source: a regulator notice, an issuer announcement, or the card operator's own words. We leave out anything we could not confirm, including cards reported dead that are still running and acquisitions that were announced but have not closed. The full card dataset is on our dataset page.

Regulator notices and card-operator announcements are linked inline above. The methodology standard is documented at sweepbase.net/methodology.

About the author. Mihail B. runs Sweepbase, an independent crypto-card comparison and research project tracking 178 cards across regions, networks, and BIN sponsors. New research drops are announced on his personal LinkedIn and the Sweepbase company page.