Who Issues Each Crypto Card? BIN Sponsors and Issuer Banks Explained

The card in your wallet is not issued by the crypto company on the front of it. Bybit does not issue the Bybit Card. Coinbase does not issue the Coinbase Card. MetaMask, a company that does not even hold your crypto, certainly does not issue the MetaMask Card.

Every crypto card is issued by a regulated financial institution you have probably never heard of, and that institution matters more to you than the brand does. It decides whether your card keeps working, what protections your balance has, and what happens if things go wrong. Four of the 23 cards we cover have already had an issuer walk away or shut down. In every case, cardholders found out via email, with weeks of notice.

This article names the issuer behind all 23 cards we review, explains what a BIN sponsor actually is, and shows you how to find this information yourself before you order any card.

How crypto card issuing actually works

When you tap a crypto card at a terminal, at least four separate companies are involved. Almost none of them are the brand you signed up with.

The card network is Visa or Mastercard. They run the rails: the global merchant acceptance, the settlement system, the dispute rules. Networks do not issue cards to consumers and never have. They license issuance to member institutions.

The issuer is the regulated institution that actually puts the card into circulation. It holds the licence, owns the BIN (the Bank Identification Number, the first digits of your card number that tell the network who is responsible for it), and is legally on the hook for the card programme. In the US this is usually a chartered bank. In the UK and Europe it is usually an electronic money institution, an EMI, which is a lighter licence than a banking licence.

The programme manager and processor sit between the issuer and the brand. They run the actual plumbing: authorisations, card manufacturing, transaction processing. Paymentology is a well-known example; Gnosis Pay publicly uses them for processing. Marqeta plays the same role for the Coinbase Card. Cardholders almost never interact with this layer, but when people search for terms like "bybit card issuer bank baas provider," this is the layer they are trying to understand.

The crypto platform is the brand: Bybit, Nexo, KAST. It owns the customer relationship, the app, and the crypto side of the product. On the payments side it is, legally speaking, a client of the issuer.

What a BIN sponsor is

Getting your own card-issuing licence takes years and serious capital. So almost every crypto startup rents one instead. A BIN sponsor is a licensed institution that issues cards on behalf of brands that have no licence of their own. The brand handles marketing and product; the sponsor handles regulation, compliance, and the relationship with Visa or Mastercard.

This is why so many different crypto cards trace back to the same handful of names. It is a sensible model, and it is how almost all fintech cards work, not just crypto ones. But it creates a dependency most cardholders never see: if the sponsor exits, the card dies, no matter how healthy the brand is.

The consolidation nobody talks about

Here is the thing our research made obvious: 23 card brands collapse into roughly six back-ends.

• Rain / Third National issues the KAST, Solayer, EtherFi, Tria, and Karta cards, and issued Cypher's before it shut down. Rain is the infrastructure platform; the named issuer on most of these programmes is Third National, the trading name of Nimbus LLC, a Delaware company operating under a Puerto Rico money transmitter licence. Karta's programme additionally names Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, an FDIC member bank.
• Monavate (which absorbed Baanx in 2025) issues Gnosis Pay's card and runs the MetaMask Card programme in the UK and Europe. It also issues cards for OKX and others we do not yet cover.
• Unlimit, a Cyprus-licensed EMI, issues both the Holyheld and Bleap cards.
• Transact Payments Malta issues Wirex's European Mastercard and, since April 2025, the Bitpanda Card.
• Moorwand and Harmoniie issue the Bybit Card (UK and EEA respectively).
• Own-licence operators are the exception: Wirex (UK), Crypto.com's Foris entities, and the US bank-issued cards (Coinbase via Pathward, Gemini via WebBank, MetaMask US via Cross River Bank).

If you hold two crypto cards for redundancy, check the table below first. Holding Holyheld and Bleap, or KAST and EtherFi, is not redundancy. It is the same issuer twice.

Why the issuer matters to you

Your balance is probably not a bank deposit

Most European crypto cards are issued by EMIs, not banks. E-money is safeguarded, meaning the institution must hold client funds in segregated accounts, but it is not covered by deposit protection. No FSCS in the UK. No deposit guarantee scheme in the EU. If the EMI fails, you queue for the safeguarded funds in an insolvency process, which historically takes months to years and can involve haircuts for costs.

US bank-issued cards are the exception: balances on the Coinbase Card sit at Pathward with FDIC pass-through insurance, and the Gemini Credit Card is issued by an FDIC member bank. But read the small print on what exactly is covered. Your crypto is never covered by any of these schemes, anywhere. Only fiat balances at the issuer, and only sometimes.

And some cards sit outside both frameworks entirely. Third National, the issuer behind five of the cards we cover, operates under a Puerto Rico money transmitter licence. That is a real, regulated status, but it is neither a bank charter nor an EU-style e-money licence, and the consumer protections differ accordingly. The cardholder terms for these programmes are governed by Puerto Rico law.

When the issuer walks away

This is not a theoretical risk. It has happened four times to cards on this site.

Binance, December 2023. The Binance Card in Europe was issued by UAB Finansinės paslaugos Contis, a Lithuanian EMI in the Solaris group. When Contis wound down its Lithuanian entity, the entire Binance EEA card programme died with it. Cardholders were emailed and told to destroy their cards by 20 December 2023. Binance, one of the largest companies in crypto, could not save its own card, because it was never Binance's card.

BitPay, twice. BitPay's first card, a Visa product, was discontinued in 2018 when its issuer Wave Crest lost Visa network access. Its second, a Mastercard issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank, wound down in June 2023 when Metropolitan exited crypto banking entirely in the post-FTX banking retreat. Three years later, new applications are still paused and no replacement issuer has been announced.

Plutus, October 2025. Plutus terminated its own contract with issuer Modulr, citing undelivered banking features, and suspended card spending through a migration to a new provider. Customer funds were returned, but the card went dark for months. Even when the brand initiates the change, the cardholder eats the disruption.

Ready, July 2026. Ready's card, along with the Solflare card, stopped working when their shared issuer Kulipa wound down. Ready's self-custodial design meant user funds were never at risk, which is the model working exactly as intended, but the card itself is gone and no relaunch date exists.

Add Cypher, whose card died in August 2026 after the company was acquired by Nium, and roughly a fifth of the cards we have reviewed have been killed or suspended by events at the issuer or platform layer within three years.

The pattern to internalise: self-custody protects your money, not your card. In every one of these cases, the crypto was fine. The payment rail is the fragile part.

The full table: who issues all 23 cards

Verified against cardholder agreements and official disclosures, August 2026. Where a card operates different programmes by region, we list each.

A note on RedotPay: its cardholder terms describe Hong Kong and Singapore Visa programmes contracted through RedotPay's own entities, but do not name the licensed institution sponsoring the BIN. Of the 23 cards we cover, it is the only active one where we could not identify the issuer from public documents. We do not think that is good enough, and we have said so in our review.

The issuers, grouped

Third National / Rain: the crypto-native stack

Five active cards on this site (KAST, Solayer, EtherFi, Tria, Karta) run on Rain, the stablecoin-settlement card platform, with Third National as the named issuer on most programmes. Third National is the trading name of Nimbus LLC, a Delaware company holding a Puerto Rico money transmitter licence. It is not a bank, and these programmes say so in their terms.

What you get: fast issuance, crypto-native features, self-custody designs, Visa settlement in stablecoins. What you give up: bank-grade protections and, in the EU, MiCA-aligned licensing; these are US-governed programmes serving international users. Whether that trade is acceptable depends on how much you leave on the card. Our view: fine for spending balances, wrong for savings.

Monavate: the self-custody specialist

Monavate issues Gnosis Pay (Visa) and runs the UK and EEA MetaMask programme (Mastercard), having merged with Baanx, the long-time programme manager for Ledger's CL Card and others. Both flagship programmes are genuinely self-custodial: Monavate settles the fiat leg while your assets stay in your own wallet until the moment of purchase. UK cards come from the FCA-licensed entity, EEA cards from the Lithuanian one. Processing for Gnosis Pay is handled by Paymentology.

Unlimit: two cards, one issuer

Holyheld and Bleap are separate products from separate companies, but both are issued by Unlimit's Cyprus-licensed EMI. Worth knowing if you were planning to hold both as backups.

The exchange EMIs: Moorwand/Harmoniie, DiPocket, Foris, TPML

Bybit's card splits by region: Moorwand Ltd in the UK, Harmoniie SAS in the EEA under Moorwand's Mastercard licence. Nexo uses DiPocket, a Lithuanian EMI. Crypto.com is unusual in owning its issuers: the Foris entities hold their own FCA and MFSA licences, and Foris MT is a Visa Principal Member in its own right. Transact Payments Malta quietly issues for both Wirex's European programme and, since 2025, Bitpanda.

The US banks: Pathward, WebBank, Cross River, Comenity

American crypto cards look structurally different because US law effectively requires a chartered bank behind consumer card programmes. Coinbase uses Pathward, Gemini uses WebBank, MetaMask's US card uses Cross River Bank, and Crypto.com's US credit card uses Comenity Capital Bank. These are the only cards we cover where a card balance can carry FDIC pass-through insurance. The crypto side still is not covered, and never is.

Five things to check before you order any card

The crypto card market is younger and more fragile than its marketing suggests. Knowing who actually issues your card is the single cheapest piece of due diligence available to you, and almost nobody does it. Now you can.