The card stopped working; the balance is the hard part

Updated October 2026

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If you landed here searching for the SORA card, the most important fact fits in one line: SORA is closed. New cards are no longer issued, the card functions inside the app stopped after Friday 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT, and if you still have money sitting in the card account, the only route described by the company is Unlimit’s support line. That is why this review is not a verdict on fees or a comparison of card networks. There is nothing left to choose. What is left is understanding what happened, what happens to your balance, and what to use instead.

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

Verdict: 2.2 out of 10, because there is no card to apply for

SORA scores 2.2 / 10. That number is not a judgment about whether the product was well built when it was live; it is a judgment about what a reader can do with it today. Anyone who was already a holder and is trying to withdraw a remaining balance scores it exactly this way. Everyone else is looking at a closed programme.

So who does this suit, honestly? Only one group: existing cardholders who are withdrawing their balance after the closure. For them the practical question is procedural — how do I get my money out, and who do I write to. For everyone else, the card does not exist as an option, and reading further is about understanding the closure or finding something else.

There is a second reason the score is low, and it is worth being blunt about it. Zero on availability is not a formality. When a programme winds down, the entity you trusted with your money is not the brand you signed up for. Here the site and apps belong to SORA Biome in Bulgaria, while the card was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd in Cyprus. That split matters when you are trying to recover a balance: the company that marketed the card says it cannot submit release requests on your behalf.

What happened to the programme

The closure was announced, not discovered. A notice dated 10 January 2026 told users that the card, the app’s card functions and the card itself would stop after Friday 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT. Ahead of that cutoff, users were told to empty their GateHub wallets. The SORA Wallet itself continues; what ended was the card programme and its functions inside the app. No cause is stated in the notice, and I did not find one stated anywhere on the pages I read, so treat any explanation offered elsewhere as unattributed.

Before the closure, this is who the card was for. Issuance was open to residents of the EEA passing KYC, and the test was residence rather than nationality — someone living in an EEA country qualified on that basis. Residents of Russia, Iran and the DPRK were not eligible, with the full list published at a /blacklist page on the site. The card itself was a physical and a digital debit card; the network it ran on is not stated on the pages I read, which is an odd gap for a card review, and I would not want to guess. KYC required a selfie, an ID document and proof of address, with no levels and no processing time stated.

The money side worked like this. You funded the card by converting XOR into EUR or by a SEPA transfer — there was no direct crypto load onto the card, only conversion through a partner, and the spread applied to that conversion is not stated. Fees dated 17 September 2024: card issuance, virtual or physical, first card €0; monthly €0; client membership €39 per year after the first year. International card payments €0.90 plus 1.1%, with the first 10 online and 10 in-store domestic payments free; top-up €0. International ATM withdrawals in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway were €1.20 plus 3%, international ATM €1.75 plus 3%, and one balance inquiry free per month. Outgoing SEPA and SEPA Instant transfers were €0.50 each.

Two things people always ask about a card like this were never settled in public. Apple Pay and Google Pay were promised for a “Phase 2”, and blocked merchant categories are not stated anywhere I read. Rewards are not stated at all. There was a single product rather than a tiered range, and the €39 per year membership “charged after 1 year” was the only paid level; the fee pages pointed to limits and replacement costs that were not actually present on the page.

If you are trying to work out what a SORA card used to feel like in daily use, the app was an iOS app named SORA and an Android app on Google Play. The app was where the card lived, and the card functions inside it ended with the programme on 30 January 2026.

If you already have the card: the balance is the whole problem

This is the section that matters if you are reading because you have money in the account. Here it is plainly: after 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT, the app gives you no access to your balance. The only route described is Unlimit support, at [email protected]. Some accounts were suspended before the cutoff, and a suspended account may still show a balance while remaining inaccessible until Unlimit completes its review. And the awkward part: SORA says it cannot submit balance release requests for users.

So the sequence to plan around is this. Contact [email protected], not the SORA support channels, because the issuer holds the account. Keep whatever confirmation you receive, as a suspension review has its own pace and the timeline is not published. If your account was suspended, expect to explain why it was flagged, and answer that directly — this is an issuer’s compliance review, not a customer-service ticket.

Support routes exist in two layers. SORA ran its support and contact pages, plus a technical support email address, in addition to Discord, Telegram, X and Reddit; the site ran in English and Español, with no Russian version, and hours were not stated. None of that is the channel that can release a balance now. It is worth being blunt about the limits of what is publicly known: the dispute process is not stated on the pages I read, spending limits were said to be on the fees page but the amounts were not on the page, and closure fees and replacement costs were never listed.

On the company’s side, SORA Biome in Bulgaria runs the site and apps, while Unlimit EU Ltd in Cyprus issues the card under an electronic money licence granted by the Central Bank of Cyprus, licence 115.1.3.7. That is an EMI licence, not a bank licence, and the funds are not covered by Cyprus Deposit Insurance. I am not offering a view on your legal position — that is for a lawyer or your regulator — but I would not read “EMI licensed” as “your money is bank-guaranteed”, because it is not.

What can go wrong

The obvious risk already happened to some people: an issuer suspension with money you can see and not touch. Beyond that, the structural risks of this product are the ones worth naming, because they were visible before the closure and they explain why a closure was so hard.

The first is counterparty risk. A card programme involves several parties: the network routes messages and sets the rules, the licensed issuer holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often only a front end marketing it. Here the front end and the issuer were two companies in two countries. When the front end closes, the issuer remains the party with your balance, and you may be negotiating with a company you never chose and never paid.

The second is that e-money is not bank money. An electronic money institution in the EU can issue e-money, cards and wallets but cannot lend, and it must safeguard customer funds in dedicated accounts or insure them. Safeguarded is not the same as deposited: those funds are not bank deposits and may not sit under a deposit guarantee scheme. This card sat in exactly that structure.

The third is that prepaid-style balances have no overdraft and no claim route you can assume. Many crypto cards behave like prepaid cards — crypto is converted and loaded as a fiat balance, and the card spends only that balance. That protects you from going negative. It also means your balance is a claim on an issuer, not a claim on a bank.

The fourth is the general history of this category, which is worth reading as a warning rather than as gossip. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card 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 WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Programme closures typically follow a pattern: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. SORA followed that shape. There is also crypto-specific asset risk underneath: stablecoins are not guaranteed stable — TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022 and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis — and blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit on an unsupported network or to a wrong-network address can be lost.

One thing I want to be careful about: on the complaints side, there is a Trustpilot page for soracard., and I found no Reddit or Trustpilot reports as of 20 October 2026. That is an absence of reports, not a clean bill of health, and after a closure it tells you more about where people look than about how they were treated.

What to take instead

Three alternatives came out of the same category with real scores, and I am comparing them on the things that actually differ between them: who can get one, what it costs, what funds it spends, and what it pays back. Note that all three of these score materially higher than SORA did — 7.1, 6.1 and 6.1 against 2.2 — and that the highest of them has its own constraints.

MetaMask is the least like SORA in structure and the most like it in convenience: it spends straight from a self-custodied wallet rather than from a pre-loaded balance, so there is no conversion step and no issuer holding your fiat. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain and Uruguay among them — with proof of residency required and other regions on a waitlist; the citizenship rule is not stated, and US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ. Its wording is worth quoting because it is unusually candid: “Ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending.” Fees are described as a “minimal fee for each transaction” with the amount not stated on the pages I read, no additional MetaMask fees, and no foreign transaction fee — the Mastercard rate is used. Rewards are cashback in mUSD into the Money Account: 1% on Virtual, and on Metal a headline 3% whose footnote limits 3% to the first $10,000 spent and 1% after, plus an $FLY bonus of 5X on Virtual and 7X on Metal through the Blackbird dining app.

KAST is the one with a real tier ladder, and that is where your decision gets made. Standard costs nothing; Premium is 1,000 USD a year and Private 10,000 USD a year, billed annually upfront with no monthly option. Extra virtual cards are 2 USD, a Standard physical card has a 0 USD card fee plus 40 USD delivery, and an inactivity fee of 1 USD a month kicks in after 12 months. Eligibility is residence-based with the list shown during KYC and no country list published, and there is a citizenship wrinkle that catches people out: “If you currently live in a supported country but only hold an ID from a restricted region, you may still be ineligible to pass KYC”, while dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass. Only your own ID is accepted and a VPN does not bypass this. Spending fees are unusually low — 0% stablecoin top-up, 0% card spend in USD, 0% transaction fee, 0% for Apple and Google Pay — with a non-USD foreign exchange fee of 0.5% to 1.75% depending on your residence country, the transaction country and the card programme, 0.10 USD for non-USD transactions under 25 USD, and 0.50 USD for a declined transaction. Cashback is in USD: 1.5% on the first 2,000 USD a month on Standard, 2% on the first 10,000 USD a month on Premium, 3% on the first 40,000 USD a month on Private, with KAST Points adding +1% on Premium and +2% on Private of eligible spend.

Zeal is the simplest of the three and publishes the least. Spend is said to work in 150+ countries, but issuance “depends on eligibility and regional availability”, and the card programme is documented as live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. It is a Visa card with a virtual card for online use that you can add to Apple Pay, accounts in EUR, USD and GBP, and no published fee schedule — which is itself a decision factor, since you cannot model the cost. On fees it says it charges no additional FX fee and converts at the Visa wholesale rate, though Gnosis Pay fees such as ATM may still apply. Rewards are up to 4% cashback paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain, which requires you to hold GNO in the card Safe to qualify and can change; the App Store also advertises up to 5% variable APY on EUR and USD balances.

My honest read across the three: MetaMask suits you if you want to spend from your own wallet without an issuer in the middle, KAST suits you if you want cashback tiers and can justify the membership, and Zeal suits you if you want a straightforward Visa and accept that you will not find the fee table published. What none of them should be confused with is SORA — none of them will pay out a closed account.

Who I would recommend it to

Not to a new applicant, because there is nothing to apply for. If you were reading about SORA because it looked like a way to spend crypto through an ordinary card, take that need to one of the three above and check the eligibility lines for your own country and your own ID document, because that is where each of them differs most from the old SORA rule of residence within the EEA.

I would recommend this page to a current holder in one specific sense: as a description of what the published position is, so you know that the app route is closed, that Unlimit support is the channel, and that SORA itself says it cannot file a release request for you. Everything past that — how long a review takes, what you are entitled to, what happens if your account stays suspended — is not stated in anything I read, and I would not invent it. Ask the issuer, keep the answers, and if you are dealing with a sum you cannot afford to be uncertain about, get advice from your own regulator or a lawyer rather than from a review page.

Frequently asked questions

What is the SORA card?

SORA was a crypto-linked debit card with a physical and a digital version, funded by converting XOR into EUR or by a SEPA transfer. It was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd, an electronic money institution in Cyprus, while SORA Biome in Bulgaria ran the site and apps. The card programme has now closed and the card functions inside the app stopped after 30 January 2026, so it cannot be obtained or used.

Is SORA a bank?

No. SORA is a crypto brand and programme front end; the card was issued by Unlimit EU Ltd under an electronic money licence from the Central Bank of Cyprus, licence 115.1.3.7. An electronic money institution can issue e-money and cards but cannot lend, and the funds were not covered by Cyprus Deposit Insurance, so this was never a bank deposit relationship.

How do I withdraw money from SORA now?

After 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT the app gives no access to balances, and the only published route is Unlimit support at [email protected]. Suspended accounts may show a balance but stay inaccessible until Unlimit completes its review. SORA states it cannot submit balance release requests on users’ behalf, so you are contacting the issuer yourself.

Can I still apply for a SORA card?

No. Issuance is closed, and the card plus the app’s card functions stopped after 30 January 2026 at 18:00 GMT. There is no waiting list and no restart announced in anything I read. Anyone offering to sell you a SORA card or top up an old account is selling something the programme no longer supports.

Was SORA card free?

Partly. The standard fees dated 17 September 2024 made card issuance free for the first card, both virtual and physical, with no monthly fee. But client membership was €39 per year after the first year, international card payments cost €0.90 plus 1.1%, and ATM withdrawals cost €1.20 plus 3% domestically and €1.75 plus 3% internationally.

How did you top up the SORA card?

Two ways: converting XOR into EUR through a partner, or a SEPA transfer. There was no direct crypto load onto the card, and the conversion spread was not stated on the pages I read. Ledger load was €0 with no published minimum, and SEPA outgoing and SEPA Instant outgoing transfers each cost €0.50.

Is SORA card safe?

Safety has two meanings here and both deserve care. Your crypto in SORA Wallet was self-custodial, meaning you keep the keys, and the app mentioned two-factor authentication and biometrics. But the fiat balance sat with an EMI that was not covered by a deposit guarantee scheme, and as of the closure some of those balances are inaccessible. Self-custody protects the crypto; it does not protect a prepaid card balance.

What can I use instead of the SORA card?

MetaMask, KAST and Zeal are the three I compared here, scoring 7.1, 6.1 and 6.1 out of 10. MetaMask issues a Mastercard that spends straight from your own wallet with a free virtual card, KAST offers Visa tiers from free to 10,000 USD a year with USD cashback, and Zeal offers a simple Visa with up to 4% cashback in GNO. Each has its own eligibility rules you must check for your country and ID.

Is SORA Wallet also closed?

No, and this distinction matters. The closure covered the card, the app’s card functions and related services; SORA Wallet itself continues. Users were told to empty their GateHub wallets before the cutoff, which was a separate instruction from the card shutdown.

Where can I get help with SORA?

For a balance, [email protected], because Unlimit EU Ltd is the issuer holding the account. SORA’s own channels — its support and contact pages and technical support email address, plus Discord, Telegram, X and Reddit — existed for the card programme and run in English and Spanish with hours not stated. Published hours and response times for either side are not something I found.

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