A self-custody crypto Visa that is losing its issuer at the end of 2026

Updated October 2026

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Available in US

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18+ Only

Zeal is a self-custody crypto card: a Visa debit card, virtual and physical, that spends stablecoin balances held in your own Safe rather than money sitting in someone’s bank account. On the everyday-use side it does what it says — Apple Pay, spending in 150+ countries, no added foreign-exchange fee from Zeal, up to 4% cashback in GNO. On cost, the official picture is thin but not bad. On reliability, it is the worst-scoring criterion I have on any card, and not mainly because of customer service: Gnosis Pay, which runs the card programme, has announced it is closing its consumer card at 23:59 UTC on 20 December 2026. That date sits inside the period most people would be reading this page in.

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

Verdict: 6.1 out of 10, and the score hides where the risk is

My score for Zeal is 6.1 out of 10. Here is how that total breaks down, criterion by criterion, with the reasons in my own words.

Two of those marks are pulled down by a single event rather than by anything you do. The reliability score of 2 is the one to sit with.

Who this suits: you already run a self-custody wallet, you think in stablecoins rather than in bank balances, and you want a card that draws on your own keys. You are comfortable that no bank or company can freeze your money, and equally comfortable that nobody can reverse a mistake. You are probably in a region where the programme is live, or prepared to relocate the money you spend rather than your life.

Who it does not suit: anyone whose spending has to survive the closure of the issuer’s consumer programme. If you need a card you can rely on past 20 December 2026, the answer is no — not because the product is bad, but because the programme that issues it is being wound down and the cardholder notice is short. It also does not suit people who want a regulated bank relationship: Zeal is self-custodial software and is not regulated, and your deposits are not insured.

Will they give you the card

Yes in a long list of places, no in some, and the card’s own wording is deliberately vague. Zeal states plainly that issuance “depends on eligibility and regional availability”. Spending is possible in 150+ countries — that is separate from being issued the card, and people conflate the two constantly. A card that works in 150 countries is still only *issued* in the places where the programme operates.

The card programme is live (per Gnosis Pay’s docs) in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Zeal’s own update notes have separately added card support for Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia.

Everything below is unofficial and not confirmed by the card: third-party listings describe the EEA and UK as requirements, show an order screen offering EU, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway, and say the card is unavailable in the US and much of APAC. One such site lists 36 countries available and 21 restricted, with Latin America covering Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico — and lists Bolivia as both supported *and* coming soon, which tells you how much to trust a scraped country table. Two independent third-party sources also disagree about whether Zeal has confirmed its future plans; I could not find a Zeal statement on that point.

The practical question for you is therefore: are you resident in a live region with a document that region accepts? If you are reading this from the US, the unofficial consensus is that it is not available to you at all. If you are in the EU or UK, you are inside the programme. If you are somewhere in between, you are guessing, and the honest move is to reach Zeal’s own channels before you move any money.

How to get it

The path runs through Gnosis Pay, not through Zeal alone. Zeal’s own app is the front end; the card programme, the KYC step and the limits sit with Gnosis Pay. So the practical order is: create the Zeal account, sign in with Ethereum, complete Gnosis Pay’s KYC, then request the card.

What the card’s public pages say about that sequence is limited. KYC is not stated on zeal.app; Gnosis Pay’s onboarding includes KYC after Sign-In with Ethereum, with verification handled by Sumsub. Required documents and the minimum age are not stated. Nor are KYC tiers, processing time, or the reasons an application might be refused — Zeal simply points at Gnosis Pay, and Gnosis Pay’s specifics are not published in a form I could read.

Unofficial and not confirmed by the card: full identity and address verification, age 18+, a government ID or passport plus proof of address issued within the previous three months, processed through Sumsub, with the explicit warning that uploading documents does not guarantee approval.

The card itself is a Visa debit card issued by Monavate Limited with Gnosis Pay Co Ltd, offered as virtual and physical. The virtual card is for online use and can be added to Apple Pay; accounts exist in EUR, USD and GBP. Whether you get a physical card, in which countries, in what time and at what cost — not stated, although zeal.app does say physical cards are offered. Unofficial sources say physical shipping is free with delivery time not stated; an older Gnosis Pay fee page, of unclear date, says a card purchase fee of EUR 30.23 including shipping and delivery within 10 days after shipping verification. Treat all of that as indicative only.

If you are blocked at KYC, the reason is usually regional eligibility rather than your documents — but since neither is published, you will not know which from the outside.

Fees: what a Zeal card really costs

Here is the awkward part: Zeal publishes no fee schedule. No fee schedule on zeal.app, none in the App Store listing. There is no official table of issuance fee, monthly fee, conversion fee or ATM fee to check against. What follows is a mix of what the card does state and what third parties report, and I have kept them separate.

Two currencies on those unofficial numbers deserve attention. The replacement fee is quoted as 4.99 in EURe, GBPe or USDCe — a *stablecoin* amount, not euros, pounds or dollars. And “200 units” for free ATM withdrawals is likewise a stablecoin unit. If you are used to ATM fees quoted in your national currency, this table does not speak your language; you would need to convert at the time.

Now, three ordinary payments, and which of those lines actually bites.

A coffee in a eurozone café. You pay, no FX fee applies because the transaction is in your account currency, and there is no separate conversion charge from Zeal. If you hold no GNO in the card Safe, the cashback is zero and nothing else changes. This is the clean case.

A 30 dollar online subscription billed in USD while your card account is in EUR. Your account balances are in EUR, USD and GBP, so the cleanest version of this is to hold a USD stablecoin balance and let the USD account pay it — again no conversion, no fee. If you instead hold only EUR and let the card cross-currency, you are still paying at the Visa mid-market rate with no Zeal markup, and you eat whatever the stablecoin itself is worth at that moment. That second-order effect is not a “fee” but it will show up on your statement.

A 200 withdrawal from an ATM abroad. This is where the unofficial numbers matter, and this is exactly the situation where you must not rely on the internet. If the first-five-free-then-2% description is accurate, the second withdrawal in a month costs 2% of the amount, and there may be a 250 per-withdrawal and 500 per-day ceiling on top. Gnosis Pay’s own ATM fee terms are what actually bind — and they are not published on zeal.app, which merely links to Gnosis Pay’s fee and limit docs, pages I could not retrieve. Zeal’s stated position is that Gnosis Pay fees may still apply even though Zeal adds no FX fee.

Two more things that cost money without looking like fees. It is a single card product with no paid tiers — no metal, no premium tier, nothing to upgrade into. And on-chain network fees for a crypto top-up are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider; that cost is set by Gnosis Chain and Celo, and by Ethereum if you bridge.

Top up: getting balance onto the card

The mechanics are simple and, in one respect, unusually clean. Zeal spends from balances in the card Safe — EUR, USD and GBP stablecoin accounts, on Gnosis Chain and Celo per the docs. The exact coins are not stated for Zeal; unofficial sources name the accounts as EURe, GBPe and USDCe. So the practical shape is: you already hold stablecoins, you send them to your own Safe, and the card draws on that Safe.

What is *not* stated: the card top-up fee and the minimum top-up; the fees on bank transfers; and the network fee for a crypto top-up. Bank transfers are handled by two different processors depending on currency — EUR transfers by Monerium ehf, other transfers by Unblock LT UAB — and neither’s fees are published. Unofficial and unconfirmed: SEPA top-ups arrive in 1–2 business days, and conversion, off-ramp and gas fees are 0% — except that bridging on Ethereum needs gas, which is a real cost and not a percentage.

The part I find genuinely good is the withdrawal side. Because this is self-custody, the funds stay in your own wallet. Earn balances in USD or EUR are withdrawable 24/7 with no lockups. What you cannot get told: the steps and fees for withdrawing the card balance, and what happens to a balance still sitting on the card when the card closes — Zeal does not state that anywhere. Given the December closure, that last silence is the one to press them on.

Paying with it every day

In normal use this is the good half of the card. Virtual Visa for online payments, addable to Apple Pay, with a physical option too. The app supports iPhone on iOS 16.2 and later (also Mac with M1+ and Vision Pro), and its App Store rating was 4.5/5 from 17 ratings when I read it on 2026-10-20, on version 0.33.3 of 1 September. The Google Play rating I did not read.

Apple Pay works with the virtual card. Google Pay is not stated by Zeal — unofficial sources say it is supported, and that Google Pay is not subject to a physical-card contactless limit. Blocked merchant categories are not stated.

The rewards are the reason some people look here at all, and they need reading carefully. Up to 4% cashback, paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain, and GNO must be held in the card Safe to qualify — so the cashback rate is a function of a token you have to buy and hold, and rates can change. The App Store listing also advertises up to 5% variable APY on EUR/USD balances, which is a different mechanism: that is an interest-style rate on balances, not a rebate on spending, and the two headline numbers should not be added together. zeal.app itself is cited as quoting up to 5% in some reviews alongside the 4% figure, which is one more reason to treat the number as a range rather than a promise.

One category note that applies to any card in this space: MCC 7995 covers gambling — casinos, betting, lotteries — and many issuers block it by policy rather than by law, with the list varying by issuer. Zeal does not publish its blocked list. Merchant category codes in general are the four-digit numbers under ISO 18245 that classify a business, and they are set when the business starts accepting cards. If a payment you expect to work is declined, this is one of the reasons, and the other is the BIN: the first 6 or 8 digits of a card number identify the issuing institution, shops can look them up, and an issuer country that differs from your billing address can attract extra scrutiny. That is normal for a card issued in one country and used in another, and it is not a fault in the card.

What can go wrong

Read this section twice, because the first item is not a risk you manage.

The issuer is closing the card. Gnosis Pay announced it will close its consumer card and web app at 23:59 UTC on 2026-12-20 and move to B2B. The notice to cardholders is dated 2026-09-21, with other outlets reporting it 2026-09-25. Users are directed to partner apps for replacement cards — MiniPay is named — with Safe funds remaining accessible and the web app staying in limited form for withdrawals. In other words, on current plans the Zeal card stops working at the end of 2026 and your replacement is someone else’s product. One secondary report says Zeal has not confirmed its own future plans; I found no Zeal statement.

The cashback is already over. GNO cashback eligibility ends 2026-09-30 — before the closure, and, at the date of this page, before now. Any model of the card’s economics you build today should assume zero cashback.

An exploit touched card Safes. On 2026-06-01 an exploit of an ERC-1271 module affected Card Safes. This is a self-custody advantage and a self-custody risk in the same sentence: because the Safe is yours, a contract-level bug is your problem, not the platform’s, and the platform can tell you to move.

Support is thin and slow. Channels listed are Discord and X; no email, no live chat, no stated hours. Site languages are English, Français, Deutsch, Español and Italiano — Russian is not offered. Trustpilot for zeal.app is 3.5/5 from 17 reviews (the page also displays 3.7). Individual reviews mention support requests unanswered for some time in January 2026, with Zeal apologising publicly; a 2026 review describes a scam transaction with slow dispute handling; App Store reviews mention problems transferring from balance to card and slow support. The issuer’s own Trustpilot is worse: Gnosis Pay at 2.3/5 from 38 reviews, 58% one-star, with slow or unanswered tickets. Dispute handling itself is not stated on zeal.app or in the App Store listing — Zeal’s Trustpilot reply was that card disputes take time. I found no official incident report.

Your money is genuinely, entirely yours. That is the appeal and the exposure. Self-custody means no bank or company can freeze or seize funds — but lost funds are also unlikely to be recoverable. Crypto transfers are typically irreversible and a stolen private key has no built-in recovery: the network cannot freeze or return funds. A seed phrase is typically 12 to 24 words in plain form, and anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend from it. You carry the risk of key loss, phishing, and clipboard-hijacking malware that silently swaps a copied address.

The protections are thin in the ways that matter for a card. Zeal’s own security design includes biometric passkey authentication, real-time transaction alerts, an in-app card freeze, an audited wallet with its security policy on GitHub, Safety Checks and transaction previews. Deposits are not insured, in Zeal’s own words: “Your principal is at risk”. Dispute policy is unpublished; a declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to 7. Note that stablecoins are not censorship-proof either — Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity.

Who is actually behind this. The App developer is grwth lbs ltd. Zeal is self-custodial software and is not regulated. Cards are managed by Gnosis Pay Co Ltd (UK no. 14919639), and issued by Monavate Limited under licence from Visa Europe as an FCA-authorised e-money institution (UK). That structure is worth understanding rather than worrying about: in the standard arrangement for this kind of card, the card network (Visa or Mastercard) routes messages and sets rules, the issuer is the licensed bank or e-money institution that holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often only a programme manager or front end. An electronic money institution in the EU can issue e-money, payment cards and e-wallets but cannot lend. So the card is real and properly licensed; what is thin is the front end’s support and its future.

What to take instead

I would not argue you into another crypto card blindly — the category has a poor closure record generally, and one 2026 closure reported by a secondary source ended new loads on 8 July 2026 and spending on 8 August 2026 (single source, unconfirmed). Programme closures typically mean a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw. Still, if your reason for wanting Zeal is “a card that spends my own stablecoins”, these are the names worth comparing, with the caveat that every figure below is theirs, not mine.

MetaMask — score 7.1/10, and the strongest of the four on availability. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories (Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay among them), others on a waitlist; proof of residency required, and the site’s own framing is that ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending. Citizenship rule not stated; US and UK sign-ups temporarily closed per its FAQ. Mastercard, virtual card issued instantly, with a Metal card pre-orderable after approval, one card per user. Virtual free with no annual or maintenance fee; Metal $199/year. Fees are described as “minimal fee for each transaction” with no amount published, no additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee. Spends directly from the connected wallet on Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, with tokens named including mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT; Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit. Cashback 1% on Virtual; Metal’s headline is 3% but the footnote caps it at 3% to the first $10,000 spent and 1% after, plus a $FLY bonus 5X/7X through the Blackbird dining app.

KAST — score 6.1/10, same total as Zeal but a different shape: a membership ladder instead of a single product. Up to 10 cards per user, Visa Platinum (Standard), Visa Infinite metal (Premium), Visa Infinite gold plated (Private), plus Pengu, Solana and Bitcoin designs; account balance in USD with stablecoin deposits converted 1:1 at 0% spread. Annual membership 0 USD / 1,000 USD / 10,000 USD, billed annually upfront with no monthly option; extra virtual card 2 USD; Standard physical card 0 card fee plus 40 USD delivery; inactivity fee 1 USD per month after 12 months. Fees: stablecoin top-up 0%, card spend in USD 0%, transaction fee 0%, Apple/Google Pay 0%, non-USD FX 0.5%–1.75% depending on residence country, transaction country and card programme, non-USD transactions under 25 USD 0.10 USD, declined transaction 0.50 USD. Tokens USDT, USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and TRON — though its Terms say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”, which conflicts with the rest. On eligibility KAST is the strictest of the three: its KYC list is residence-based, and its own wording is that if you live in a supported country but hold an ID from a restricted region you may still fail, while dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass; only your own ID counts and a VPN does not bypass it. Cashback 1.5% / 2% / 3% on tiered monthly spend caps, paid in USD when a transaction is authorised.

Rizon — score 6.7/10. It says services are “intended for people who live in and are domiciled in” the U.S. or LATAM countries and may be restricted elsewhere, while also claiming 122+ countries supported — a contradiction worth asking about. Virtual, physical and metal (coming soon), Visa Platinum; card currency not stated, though USD and EUR accounts exist. Prices are deliberately opaque: virtual, physical, additional and replacement are all “check app for the price”, account maintenance is free, and an Emerald subscription starts at $5.59/month. Fees: deposit free, card spend in USD free, non-USD 1.7% + $0.1, trading fee 1.7% — and the same lines at Emerald rates of 1.02% and 0.85%, where the page is garbled and should be verified. Funding coins and networks not stated. Cashback 2.5% on eligible purchases including ATMs, redeemable from a cashback balance, plus RizPoints, with payout currency not stated.

Two structural observations. First, every option here is a prepaid-style card: it draws on a stored balance rather than a bank account, so it cannot overdraw, which is also why some merchants decline them — a prepaid or foreign BIN can be refused at the till because the lookup reveals what it is. Second, all four depend on a licensed issuer behind a crypto front end, and none of them makes that issuer permanent. Payment-services law is separate from crypto regulation: in the EU, MiCA — Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, which ESMA says took legal effect in June 2023 — covers the crypto side, while the card is regulated as a payment service, so a card like this often rests on two licences. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution, and its transitional period let providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026 or until they receive or are refused authorisation, whichever came first. EMIs must safeguard customer funds by segregating them or insuring them, but those funds are not bank deposits and may not be covered by a deposit guarantee scheme. If that layering is new to you, it is worth understanding before you pick a name, because it is the layer that failed here.

Who I would recommend it to

To someone who already holds stablecoins in a self-custody wallet, spends in EUR, USD or GBP, lives in a live region, and is looking at the card as a spending tool for a fixed window rather than as a financial account. Under those conditions the product is good: no added FX fee, spending at the Visa mid-market rate, Apple Pay, a single straightforward product with no tiers to pay for, funds that no one can freeze, and Earn balances you can withdraw 24/7 without lockups.

I would not recommend it to anyone planning spending past 20 December 2026, anyone who needs a bank-like relationship with published dispute handling and support hours, anyone who holds USDT or USDC mainly on chains Zeal does not run — remember ERC-20 fees are paid only in ETH, so a wallet with USDT and no ETH cannot send, and a transfer to a network the provider does not support can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee. Nor to anyone who wants to be paid in fiat and treat this as their only card.

The honest one-line version: this is a well-built interface over a programme with a published end date, and if you are still reading about it, the decision is mostly about what you do before 20 December 2026, not about which card you pick.

On tax, one practical caution only — not advice, just a heads-up. If your spending is funded from crypto, each card payment may be treated as a separate disposal, with gain measured in your local currency at fair market value on the date of the transaction, and short-term treatment for holdings of a year or less. If that is new to you, ask a professional in your own jurisdiction before the transactions pile up.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Zeal card?

Zeal is a self-custody crypto card: a Visa debit card, offered as virtual and physical, that spends stablecoin balances held in your own Safe rather than a bank account. Zeal is the app and front end; the card programme is run by Gnosis Pay, and the card is issued by Monavate Limited. You spend from balances in EUR, USD and GBP stablecoin accounts, on Gnosis Chain and Celo per the docs. Spending works in 150+ countries.

How does Zeal card work?

You hold your own crypto, convert or top up a balance into your Safe, and the card draws on that balance like a prepaid card, so it cannot overdraw. Payments are processed on Visa’s network and settle at the Visa mid-market rate with no additional FX fee from Zeal. Cashback of up to 4% is paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain and only if GNO is held in the card Safe.

Is Zeal a bank?

No. Zeal is self-custodial software and is not regulated. The card sits with Gnosis Pay Co Ltd (UK no. 14919639), and the issuer is Monavate Limited, an FCA-authorised e-money institution in the UK licensed under Visa Europe. Because it is an e-money structure, customer funds must be safeguarded, but they are not bank deposits and deposits are not insured — Zeal’s own wording is that your principal is at risk.

Who owns Zeal?

The App developer is grwth lbs ltd, and Zeal’s card programme is run by Gnosis Pay. In practice the ownership question matters less than the operating one: your balance lives in your own Safe, so the card company cannot move your funds, but neither can it guarantee the card keeps working. Gnosis Pay has announced it is closing its consumer card and web app at 23:59 UTC on 20 December 2026.

How do I get the Zeal card, and does it require KYC?

Create a Zeal account, sign in with Ethereum, then complete Gnosis Pay’s KYC, which is handled by Sumsub. Zeal does not state its own KYC requirements, document list, minimum age, tiers, processing time or refusal reasons — it points to Gnosis Pay. Unofficial sources describe full identity and address verification, age 18+, and a government ID or passport plus proof of address issued within the previous three months, with no guarantee of approval.

Is Zeal card free?

Officially, nothing is published — there is no fee schedule on zeal.app or in the App Store listing, which is itself the most important fact about the cost. Unofficial sources say ordering the card is free, physical shipping is free, the monthly and annual fee is 0, and a replacement card costs 4.99. Gnosis Pay’s own ATM fees may still apply on top of Zeal adding no FX fee.

Where can I use the card?

Spending works in 150+ countries, but issuance “depends on eligibility and regional availability”. The programme is live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, and Zeal’s updates have added Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia. Unofficial listings say the card is unavailable in the US and much of APAC. Spending abroad is not the constraint; being issued the card is.

How do I add Zeal card to Apple Wallet?

Apple Pay is supported with the virtual card, per the App Store listing, and unofficial sources say Google Pay works too, without a physical-card contactless limit. If a wallet payment declines, note that Google Pay and card-not-present payments are treated differently by some merchants, and that the issuer can restrict a tokenised number — for example block it for website or phone use.

Is the Zeal card safe?

The security design is genuinely good: biometric passkey authentication, real-time transaction alerts, an in-app card freeze, an audited wallet with its security policy on GitHub, plus Safety Checks and transaction previews. What it cannot do is protect you from everything — dispute handling is not published, blockchain transfers are irreversible, and self-custody means lost funds are unlikely to be recoverable. Deposits are not insured, and stablecoins are not censorship-proof: Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list.

Can I withdraw money from Zeal, and how do I delete my account?

Because funds stay in your own wallet, your Safe balance is always yours to move. Earn balances in USD or EUR are withdrawable 24/7 with no lockups. What Zeal does not state is the procedure or fees for withdrawing the card balance, or what happens to a balance left on the card when the card closes — which is worth asking before 20 December 2026. Account deletion is not covered by any published Zeal policy I could find.

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