Good
- Works with Apple Pay and Google Pay on every plan
- Top-up fee falls to 2.3% on the Whale plan
- No inactivity fee and no card cancellation fee
- Up to $40 of free credit when you buy a card
Watch out
- No free plan, the cheapest card costs $108 a year
- Tops up with USDT only, on BNB Chain or Tron
- No cashback on any plan
- Yearly top-up caps from $25,000 to $100,000 per card
Xkard Card is a prepaid virtual card that you top up with USDT and spend online or through Apple Pay and Google Pay. It has three yearly plans from $108 to $588, a top-up fee of 2.3% to 4.5% depending on the plan, and no cashback.
Xkard is run by XHYPE FZCO in Dubai and pitches the card at people, especially in Latin America, whose bank cards get declined abroad or who keep their savings in USDT. You choose a plan, deposit USDT, and the card is issued on the spot. The plan you pick sets your top-up fee and how much you can load in a year, so the right one depends on how much you expect to spend.
Xkard Card cashback
Xkard Card pays no cashback on purchases on any of its three plans.
What Xkard gives instead is a one-off welcome credit when you buy a card: $5 on Essential, $10 on Premium and $40 on Whale. Each plan also comes with Xtraveler points, from 290 to 2,490, which can only be used for hotel and activity bookings on the Xtraveler site.
Neither reward grows with spending, so the plans are really about fees and limits. Over a year, the $40 Whale credit covers less than 7% of that plan's $588 price.
Xkard Card fees
Xkard Card charges a yearly plan fee and a commission on every USDT top-up, and the two move in opposite directions as you move up a plan.
Essential costs $9 a month, billed as $108 a year, and charges 4.5% per top-up. Premium costs $228 a year with a 3.5% top-up fee, and Whale costs $588 a year with 2.3%. At $500 of spending a month, Essential costs $108 plus $270 in top-up fees, or $378 a year, which works out to more than 6% of what you spend.
The break-even points sit high for most people: Premium beats Essential only once you load more than $12,000 a year, and Whale beats Premium only above $30,000 a year. Most people spending a few hundred dollars a month will pay least on Essential.
Xkard describes its foreign currency fee only as a "standard fee" and doesn't publish a percentage. There is no inactivity fee and no fee for cancelling a card, but plans renew every year unless you cancel them.
Each plan also caps how much you can load per card in a year: $25,000 on Essential, $50,000 on Premium and $100,000 on Whale. When you hit the cap, Xkard's answer is to wait for the yearly reset or buy another card, and there is no limit on how many cards you can hold.
Xkard Card ATM withdrawal fees
Xkard Card is a virtual card with no plastic version, and Xkard doesn't list cash withdrawals or ATM fees for it.
You can still pay in shops by adding the card to Apple Pay or Google Pay. If you need regular cash, a card with a physical version and a published ATM allowance will serve you better.
Is Xkard Card safe?
Xkard Card is custodial: once you load USDT onto the card, the balance is held by a third-party card issuer rather than in a wallet you control.
Xkard says it is not a card issuer itself. The website is run by XHYPE FZCO, a company in Dubai Silicon Oasis, and its terms are governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates, with disputes going to the courts of Dubai. Xkard doesn't name the bank or issuer behind the card on its site.
The terms are short and give Xkard wide room: services are provided "as is", and XHYPE FZCO accepts no liability for losses from using the service or from it being unavailable. Xkard says it runs a 24/7 fraud team and supports two-factor authentication, and you can lock and unlock the card or change its PIN from the web app.
Every deposit goes through anti-money-laundering screening, and USDT linked to mixers or similar tools can be rejected. Load only what you plan to spend in the near term.
Who should get Xkard Card
Xkard Card suits people who already hold USDT on BNB Chain or Tron, need a card that works with Apple Pay, and spend enough each year to make a flat plan fee worthwhile.
It is aimed at users in Latin America and other places where local cards are often declined online or abroad. Sign-up requires an ID check, so it is not a privacy card in the no-documents sense.
For lighter spenders the numbers are hard to justify, because $108 a year plus 4.5% per top-up is expensive next to cards with no annual fee and a 1% to 2% conversion charge. The comparison below shows cheaper options in your country.
Where Xkard Card is available
Xkard Card is offered worldwide, except to residents or citizens of countries under international sanctions.
Xkard doesn't publish a list of those countries, so check during sign-up if you live somewhere under broad sanctions. The ID check at sign-up is where your eligibility is decided.