Seven card apps, one order book

9 of 138 obtainable crypto cards let you open a leveraged position in the same app that issues the card. 7 of them execute on Hyperliquid — 7 front ends onto one order book. Most of them disclose it somewhere. None of them puts the count anywhere.

A crypto card used to be a spending accessory. Over the past year a different shape has appeared: the wallet app that issues the card also carries an order book, and the same login that pays for coffee can open a forty-times-leveraged short. We went through all 138 cards a person can actually get today and found 9 built that way.

The finding is not that wallets are becoming exchanges. It is narrower and more concentrated than that: 7 of the 9 route to the same venue. What the cardholder picks is a front-end. What they get underneath is one market.

Key findings

1. 7 of 9 desks execute on Hyperliquid — Hyperbeat Card, Based Card, Tria Card, MetaMask Card, Ledger Card, xPortal Card and Coin98 Fusion Card. These are interfaces onto one order book, not 7 venues. A halt or oracle failure there reaches every one of them, and only Tria has somewhere else to go: it ships a second route, on Decibel.
2. The same 7 are running someone else’s venue, and mostly say so. Every one of them documents it — Ledger, MetaMask, Coin98 and Based name the venue on the same page as the feature, xPortal and Tria a line or a page away. This is not a secret being kept, it is a dependency nobody has added up, which is why the count is the finding and not any single disclosure. The two that run their own book are Jupiter, on its own Solana program, and Revolut, through a brokerage authorised by the Bank of Lithuania.
3. “Trade and spend from one account” is true of 1, not 9. Only Hyperbeat Card defines the card and the collateral against one wallet in its own terms, whatever the other landing pages imply.
4. The card’s country list is not the desk’s country list. Ledger sells the card in the US and the UK and blocks the desk in both, so a UK holder gets a card and no desk. The case that ended a listing is Phantom, cut from this research once the two lists turned out to share no country at all.
5. 13 candidate groups were rejected, and the reasons are published below rather than left implicit. The two largest rejections are whole classes: collateralised borrowing dressed as leverage, and tokenised shares held at 1:1.

The 9 cards

Shared balance first, then the rest. On the first card the trading margin and the card sit in one wallet. On 5 the issuer states that they do not. On the remaining 3 the app has two places money can sit and nobody has published which one a liquidation reaches — the last column says so rather than guessing.

Where the orders actually go

Counting front-ends per venue. Tria appears twice because it ships two routes, which is why the bars sum to more than 9.

We have written this shape before, in the BIN-sponsor concentration research: several consumer brands, one regulated entity underneath, and a failure mode that only becomes visible on the day it fires. The difference here is that a BIN sponsor failing stops your payments, while a venue failing strands an open position with money in it — and this venue has fired.

What is at the other end

Seven of these cards route to a venue none of them is, so it is worth saying what it is. Hyperliquid describes itself as a layer-one blockchain, not a broker: its own docs call it “a performant blockchain built with the vision of a fully onchain open financial system”, running a custom consensus called HyperBFT, with the order books living in a component called HyperCore where “every order, cancel, trade, and liquidation happens transparently with one-block finality”. There is no licensed intermediary in that sentence, which is why the compensation schemes and the negative-balance rule that come with Revolut’s brokerage have no equivalent here.

It also means the costs and the failure mechanics are published once and apply to all seven, whatever the card app is called. Perps fees start at 0.045% taker and 0.015% maker and fall with rolling 14-day volume. Funding is charged every hour, paid between traders rather than to the platform, with the interest component fixed at 0.01% per eight hours — 11.6% a year, paid by longs to shorts before the premium component moves it either way. And the card app can add a fee of its own on top, through what the venue calls builder codes: Coin98 publishes 0.04%, which takes the entry cost from 0.045% to 0.085% — nearly double, disclosed in the docs and nowhere near the app screen.

Those percentages are quoted on the position, and the reader’s money is the margin, so they are worth converting once. At the 40x ceiling several of these apps advertise, a position is 40 times the margin behind it: the 0.045% taker fee is 1.8% of your margin each way, about 3.6% for the round trip before the market has moved at all, and the fixed part of funding alone runs near 1.3% of margin a day. A number that reads as a rounding error on the front page is not one by the time it reaches the money you actually put in.

The liquidation numbers are the ones worth reading twice, because they are what the leverage ceilings on the front pages actually mean. Maintenance margin is half the initial margin at maximum leverage, which the docs put between 1.25% on 40x assets and 16.7% on 3x assets — on a 40x position, a 1.25% move against you starts the process. What happens next depends on the order book: if market orders close the position and bring the account back above maintenance margin, whatever collateral is left stays yours. If they cannot, and equity falls below two-thirds of that threshold, a backstop liquidation moves the position and the cross margin to a liquidator vault, and the docs say plainly what the trader is left with then: “if the trader has no isolated positions, the trader ends up with zero account equity”. That last clause is also the argument for using isolated margin rather than cross for a position you are not watching — isolated confines the loss to the margin behind that one trade, and it is a setting in the app, not a property of the card. And if an account still goes negative, auto-deleveraging closes positions on the winning side at the previous mark price to keep the platform solvent. So “a liquidation costs you the margin” is the good case, and a profitable position being closed for you is a documented outcome rather than a hypothetical.

None of that is hypothetical either, which is the part a concentration argument usually cannot show. On 26 March 2025 the venue’s validators voted to delist the JELLY market and every open position in it was settled — the documented behaviour, since “when an asset is delisted, all positions are settled and open orders are cancelled”. The venue then announced that long holders would be refunded “as if their position settled at the closing price of 0.037555”, which is itself the admission that the actual settlement went against them. On 10 October 2025 the first cross-margin auto-deleveraging in the venue’s history closed positions on the profitable side; the venue’s own account posted only that uptime held, and the description of the ADL came from its founder’s personal account. And order entry has failed outright more than once — the status page records 37 minutes on 29 July 2025 when “orders were delayed in being sent to the nodes”, among several earlier outages. A card app cannot route around any of it.

One pot or two

This is the property that decides how far a bad trade can reach, and it is the one thing the marketing blurs. “All from the same account you save and spend from” is Hyperbeat’s own line, and Hyperbeat is the one card here where the terms back it: they define both card spend and perp trading against the same Pay Wallet. Even there, the issuer stops short of the sentence a reader wants — card credit is collateralised into lending protocols while perp margin sits on the venue, and nothing published says a liquidation on one side reaches the other.

Five more document a split themselves, and three of those give it away in the small print: a minimum deposit to open the trading account. MetaMask asks $10 into a Hyperliquid account, Coin98 5 USDC into a dedicated futures account, Tria $10. A minimum deposit is a reliable tell, because money that has to be moved was never in one place. Based says it outright instead — card and trading wallets cannot be converted into one another, and card withdrawals are not enabled — and Revolut needs no tell at all, because its CFD cash sits in a segregated client-money account, a legal separation rather than a product one.

Based is the card that most looks like an exception and is not. Its web terminal offers a “Unified Account” where “a single balance per asset covers everything: perps, spot, and cross margin” — which is a setting on the trading side, not a bridge to the card. The FAQ answers the actual question directly: card and trading wallets are separate, cannot be converted into one another, and card withdrawals are not enabled at all. Read the FAQ, not the product page.

Note how often “self-custody card” describes the wallet rather than the money already loaded to spend. Coin98 pairs a self-custody wallet with a card balance held by its issuer, which it says plainly. Ledger and xPortal are the other kind of answer: Ledger’s card is provided by Baanx and Ledger does not say where the card balance sits, while xPortal documents topping up a perps account without ever stating that the card balance is a different pot. Reading those two as separated is our inference, not the issuer’s statement. Tria’s card is not a debit balance at all, but a 0% APR credit line against collateral.

The two country lists

Two of these cards publish a coverage map for the card and a different one for the desk, and a third card was cut from the research when the two maps turned out not to overlap anywhere. Quoting one number for both is how a comparison page tells a reader they can trade when they cannot.

The table below carries 4 rows because two different problems live in the same field. Ledger and Revolut are the genuine article: card and desk sold to different countries. Hyperbeat and Tria are a second kind of trouble, where the card’s own documents disagree with each other about whether a US resident may hold it at all.

Two run their own book, one is regulated

Two entries run their own book rather than someone else’s — Jupiter on its own Solana program, and Revolut — but only Revolut trades under a licence written for the job. Its CFDs run through Revolut Securities Europe UAB, authorised by the Bank of Lithuania, at rates it says it generally offers: 1:20 on major indices and on gold, 1:10 on other commodities, 1:5 on single stocks. Negative-balance protection comes with that regime, and the same page states it: the margin-close-out rule “makes sure your account doesn’t fall into a negative balance”. It applies because the licence requires it for retail clients, which makes it firmer than a promise a firm writes for itself. The other 8 desks carry no equivalent and no compensation scheme. The seven of them that publish a ceiling at all run from 40x to 250x — a different instrument from a 1:5 CFD on a single stock, and not a multiple of it.

The low rates are a feature of the regime, not a verdict on the product — but they are the reason these 9 do not belong in one undifferentiated table.

What we left out, and why

13 candidates or candidate classes were cut, and the reasons are published because most of them are cards a reader would expect to find here.

Questions this research answers

Methodology

We started from every card in the Sweepbase dataset that a person can obtain today — 138 of them — rather than from a shortlist, because the prose in our own database is not a usable signal here. The word “trading” appears on 15 live rows, seven of them exchange cards whose desk was never in question, and it is missing from rows that do belong here. Matching on it would have produced a different list, wrong in both directions.

Each card was checked against its issuer’s own site, docs and help centre, and every inclusion carries a verbatim quote with the URL it came from. Claims that only third parties made were rejected — a claim about an issuer has to come from the issuer.

Two things had to be true of every row, and the second is the one that keeps catching us out: the quote has to exist on the page cited, and that same page has to carry the figures the row publishes. A real sentence attached to a page that does not support the row is still a sourcing error. Every row was read three times against that standard, each time by someone who had not seen the previous read.

What we have not done: opened a position on any of these desks. Every fee, liquidation and balance claim here comes from documents, not from trading.

Sources: issuer sites, product documentation and help centres, each linked per row in the dataset and read on August 5, 2026. Card-level facts come from the Sweepbase dataset; scoring is explained in the rating methodology. Spot an error? Report a correction.

About the author: Mihail B. is the founder and editor of Sweepbase. He holds the Tria Card, which appears on this page and is one of two cards here that Sweepbase has an affiliate arrangement with — the other is Hyperbeat. This page carries no affiliate links; the category listing does. How we verify is described on how we test.