Monolith shut its card in October 2024 — what former holders should do today
Available in US
Monolith was a crypto-to-fiat debit card tied to a non-custodial wallet: you kept your own seed phrase, and the card pulled from a balance that crypto was loaded into. That programme ended on 8 October 2024, when the company closed its services, deactivated the cards, and shut down user accounts. The app has since been removed from the major app stores, and a successor app called Token.com is in the works. This review is written for someone who heard about Monolith, holds a leftover balance, or is simply trying to figure out what to use today.
The point of this page is straightforward: there is no new Monolith card to apply for, so I’ll spend almost no time on the standard “features and fees” walk-through you would expect from a live review. Instead, the focus is what actually happened to the programme, what a former holder must still do to get their money out, what can still go wrong during that wind-down, and which crypto cards still on the market might fit if you liked the Monolith idea. Every figure, date and country that appears below is taken from the company’s own closure notice and from public sources I can point you to; if the page doesn’t say it, I won’t make it up.
Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.
Verdict
The Monolith card scores 1.8 out of 10. The headline reason is that the product no longer exists: it was wound down on 8 October 2024, with the cards deactivated and accounts closed on the same day. The score is built from the criteria the page can still meaningfully assess, and it is roughly what you’d expect for a programme that is no longer taking customers and no longer letting existing customers top up.
| Criterion | Mark | Why it scores this way |
|---|---|---|
| Who can get it | 0 / 10 | The service was closed on 8 October 2024, the cards were deactivated and the accounts were shut. |
| Cost | 5 / 10 | The card programme is closed. Unofficial historical coverage put top-up fees at 1% (waived on DAI) plus a 1% community contribution (waived on TKN), up to 2% per top-up otherwise, with a 1.75% FX fee outside the card’s currency and no monthly fee. |
| Top-up options | 2 / 10 | Top-ups through Monolith are no longer possible. Historically, accepted tokens included ETH, TKN, DAI, DGD, DGX, MKR, SAI and USDT. |
| Reliability and complaints | 1 / 10 | The closure cites “increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK”; the app was delisted on 17 February (the closure year is not stated on the page; the surrounding dates point to 2025); any leftover card balance is held by the issuer Solaris and reclaimed through a dedicated Solaris Redemptions page, which aims to respond within 14 days. |
| Everyday use | 0 / 10 | Cards were deactivated on 8 October 2024 and the app has been removed from the stores. |
| Total | 1.8 / 10 |
Who the page is for, in plain language, is the person who has a Monolith card sitting in a drawer and is not sure whether to throw it out, and the person who likes the self-custody idea and is looking for a card that still offers it. The first group should not be shopping: they should be cashing out. The second group should look at the alternatives section. The card does not suit anyone looking for an active, day-to-day crypto card in 2026, because there is no active programme to join.
The audience I keep in mind throughout is a former Monolith holder with a small leftover balance and a question: can I still get my money, and how long do I have to do it? That reader is who the next two sections are written for, in that order.
What happened to the programme
Monolith stopped operating its card service on 8 October 2024. On that date the company closed the service, deactivated the cards and closed user accounts. The official reason given in the closure notice is “increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK”; the notice does not mention MiCA by name. In the months that followed, the Monolith app was delisted from the app stores on 17 February (the closure notice does not give the year, but the surrounding context points to 2025), and a successor app called Token.com is in preparation, with the company saying in an update dated 28 February 2025 that more details on the $TKN to $TOKEN swap would follow in April 2025. The trading entity was UAB “Belela” in Lithuania, registered as a virtual currency deposit and exchange operator (company code 305982313), with the site copyright held by Token Group Ltd under licence to UAB “Belela”. The card itself was issued by Solaris.
The card, before the closure, was a debit card issued by Solaris; the network and the physical or virtual form are not stated on the closure notice. Unofficial historical coverage from Coin Bureau (dated 29 March 2023) describes it as a Visa debit card, and earlier coverage (2019) names Contis Financial Services Ltd as a previous issuer, but the closure notice itself only mentions Solaris, so the network and any earlier issuer details are unofficial and unconfirmed by the card. The card currency, when Solaris handles the leftover balance, is given as EUR or GBP, which matches the historical market focus described in unofficial sources: a card aimed at the EEA, said by Coin Bureau to have been unavailable in the USA or Asia.
A few things the closure notice does not say, and that you should not assume: it does not name a network (Visa versus Mastercard is not confirmed by the company), it does not give the card’s physical or virtual form, it does not state KYC levels for any remaining wind-down activity, and it does not list delivery or shipping arrangements (which makes sense, because no new cards are being sent out). I flag these once and then move on; if the company later publishes any of them, the picture could change, but I won’t fill in the gaps with guesses.
The shape of the closure matters for a former holder. New top-ups are no longer possible. The card cannot be used at a shop or an ATM. The non-custodial wallet itself still holds the crypto, and that is the wallet you now have to look after, with a 12-word seed phrase, in exactly the way the original product was designed to require.
If you already have the card
If you used to have a Monolith card, you are now in a wind-down situation, not a usage situation. The money side of your relationship has split into two pieces, and the two pieces have different rules.
The first piece is your crypto. The wallet that used to back the card was a non-custodial wallet, so the private keys never left your device. Your crypto is still in that wallet; Monolith closing the service does not move it. The official guidance is to import the 12-word seed phrase into another wallet, with MetaMask, Trust Wallet and Coinbase Wallet given as examples. If you did not save the seed phrase during the original setup, the closure notice says it was shown in the Monolith app under Settings, then “Back up Seed”; whether the app still lets you see it after delisting is not stated, and the safe assumption is that you should treat any seed you did not write down as lost. Anyone who has the seed has full control of the funds; anyone who does not has no way back in, and the closure notice does not describe a recovery service.
The second piece is your leftover card balance. Once the card was deactivated, any unspent fiat balance stayed with the issuer, not with Monolith. To get it back you submit a request through the Solaris Redemptions Support page, write the subject line as “Redemption funds of Monolith customer”, and include payout account details in the card’s currency (EUR or GBP) together with a colour copy of an ID if the email address you use is not the one that was on the Monolith account. Solaris aims to respond within 14 days. The contact channel for card funds is the Solaris Redemptions Support form and email; for questions about the TKN to TOKEN swap the company says it is reachable through Telegram and email, and it does not state the languages or hours.
Two practical points worth saying in plain language. First, the 14-day aim is a target, not a guarantee; the related closure of another Solaris-issued programme (Plutus) drew Trustpilot complaints about slow refunds, and while no Monolith-specific complaints were found in the search I did, you should plan for the possibility of friction. Second, the support you will get is for getting your money out. The closure notice does not mention disputes, chargebacks or compensation, only the redemption route, so if your situation is more complicated than “I have a small balance I want back” you should not assume the same channel will resolve it.
A short list of what to do first, in the order I would do it:
- Locate the 12-word seed phrase for the Monolith wallet and keep it somewhere only you can see; without it, the crypto in that wallet is unreachable.
- Import the seed into a wallet you control, such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet, and confirm you can see the tokens you expect to see.
- For any unspent fiat on the deactivated card, prepare the email and ID copy that the Solaris Redemptions page asks for and submit the request as soon as you can.
- For TKN, watch the official channels for the April 2025 update on the swap to TOKEN; do not send TKN to a private address on the strength of a Telegram message.
What can go wrong
Even with a clean wind-down, four failure modes are worth taking seriously.
The first is losing the seed phrase. The closure notice leans on the fact that the wallet is non-custodial, but that cuts both ways: the company cannot restore it for you, and a copy stored only on the phone where the Monolith app used to live is now at risk if the phone is lost or reset. The closure notice does not promise any recovery path if the seed is missing, and it does not put a deadline on the redemption process for the card balance. Practically, if you do not have the seed, the crypto in that wallet is not coming back, regardless of any customer-service channel.
The second is slow or partial refunds from Solaris. The 14-day target is a stated aim, not a contractual deadline, and the closure notice does not specify a final cut-off date after which unclaimed balances are forfeit. The same issuer has handled other programme closures that have drawn complaints, and while I did not find Monolith-specific complaints, that is a useful reminder to submit early rather than wait.
The third is confusion about the TKN to TOKEN swap. The closure notice itself does not detail the swap mechanics and only says the details will follow in April 2025; that means a window in which scammers can pose as Monolith staff on Telegram, in DMs, or on social media, asking for seed phrases, signed messages, or tokens sent to a “migration” address. Anyone who has a Monolith seed or a TKN balance should assume that the only instructions they can trust are the ones that come from the official Monolith channels, that they can verify, and that do not require them to type the seed phrase into a website.
The fourth is the wider regulatory backdrop that the closure notice cites. The closure notice points to “increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK” but does not name MiCA, and it does not say whether the card was a MiCA-regulated product. Under MiCA, the rules on asset-referenced and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024 and the broader crypto-asset service provider rules from 30 December 2024, and a transitional period lets existing providers keep operating only until 1 July 2026 or until they get (or are refused) a MiCA authorisation. The closure notice does not say which of these dates, if any, applied to Monolith. The safe reading is that the company decided not to pursue that authorisation, at least for this product. None of that helps a former holder get their money back faster, but it does explain why the closure happened in October 2024, two months after the first MiCA deadline.
One thing the closure notice is explicit about: Lithuanian deposit insurance and the UK Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) do not cover crypto activities or funds in the non-custodial wallet. So even setting aside the closed programme, the funds in the wallet were never a bank deposit; they were a self-custodied crypto balance the whole time.
What to take instead
There is no Monolith replacement that is exactly like Monolith, because the original product’s selling point, a card linked to a self-custodial wallet, is rare. The three alternatives below are not endorsements; they are the options the public pages support, with their own limits, and I have written them so you can decide for yourself whether any of them matches what you liked about Monolith. The first two are general-purpose crypto cards; the third is a different shape of product aimed at a US audience.
Cardex
Cardex is offered as one crypto card usable in 200+ countries, with the official page not giving a country list or a list of exclusions, although its App Store listing is positioned around paying in Nigerian naira. The card is a debit crypto card and the App Store listing describes virtual and physical cards on the VERVE, Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay networks, with the card currency set to naira. Real-time conversion happens at the moment of payment, using what the site calls an “AI-Powered Conversion Rate” that scans global exchanges and picks the rate at the moment of spend; the site does not state a percentage fee for that conversion. Funding comes from USDT, USDC and BTC wallets, with the networks not stated, and no cashback or reward programme is described. The official Cardex score, on the same scale as the rest of this page, is 5.6 out of 10.
The trade-off versus Monolith is that Cardex looks more like a traditional prepaid crypto card: you top up, it converts at the moment of spend, and you do not keep the tokens in your own wallet between transactions. That is a less crypto-native experience than Monolith’s, but it is also the more common shape for the category in 2026.
MSX
MSX is the second alternative. The public pages I could read do not state who can get the card, what type of card it is, what it costs, what fees it charges, what it is funded with, or what rewards it pays. The official MSX score, on the same scale, is 6.4 out of 10. With so many “not stated” entries, MSX is included here mainly so the page does not pretend to a completeness it cannot back up: if you are considering MSX, the right next step is to ask the company directly for the items the public page leaves blank, and to be cautious about signing up before you have those answers in writing.
Whop Cards
Whop Cards is aimed primarily at a US audience. For consumers, the card is available in 31 US states (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming); for businesses, 41 states. The consumer unsupported-country list includes Belarus, Mainland China, Cuba, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam; the corporate list additionally includes Russia and Belarus, and the basis (citizenship or residence) is not stated. The card runs on the Visa network and works anywhere Visa is taken, with no virtual/physical split or card currency stated, and the page says “No extra fees” without listing issuance or monthly amounts. Spending draws from a Whop balance that you fund by linking a wallet backed by stablecoin collateral, with the specific coins and networks not stated. The card offers 5% cashback at select merchants, currently Uber, with more planned; the payout currency and conditions are not stated. The official Whop Cards score is 5.2 out of 10.
The trade-off versus Monolith is geographic: Whop Cards is a US product and does not pretend to a global rollout, while Monolith historically targeted the EEA. If you are in the covered US states and the Whop balance model fits how you actually use crypto, Whop Cards is the most fully documented of the three; if you are outside the US, it is not an option.
A side-by-side
A compact comparison, so the three are easier to weigh against each other.
| Alternative | Card / network | Where it works | Top-up assets | Cashback | Public-page mark |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cardex | Debit, VERVE / Visa / Mastercard / UnionPay (per App Store listing); currency naira | 200+ countries (page gives no exclusion list) | USDT, USDC, BTC (networks not stated) | None described | 5.6 / 10 |
| MSX | Not stated | Not stated | Not stated | Not stated | 6.4 / 10 |
| Whop Cards | Visa | Consumers: 31 US states; businesses: 41 US states (basis not stated) | Whop balance funded from a stablecoin-backed wallet (coins / networks not stated) | 5% at select merchants (Uber named) | 5.2 / 10 |
The single most important caveat: every figure and country list in this table is taken from the public pages of those products, and several of them are simply not stated. A reader who wants the missing items should ask the company before they apply.
Who I would recommend it to
Reading my own verdict back, the honest answer is: almost no one, in 2026, and the small group it might still be relevant for is a very specific one.
The group the page is genuinely useful to is the former Monolith holder with a small fiat balance left on the card, or with TKN in the wallet, who is unsure whether the programme is really over and whether there is anything to do. For that person, the answer is: yes, it is really over, the cards do not work, the app is gone, and the official route to the leftover fiat is the Solaris Redemptions page with a 14-day target response time. The crypto in the wallet is reachable only with the 12-word seed phrase, and if you do not have it, no one at Monolith, Solaris or anywhere else can give it back to you.
Beyond that, the card does not suit someone looking for a 2026 crypto card, because there is no Monolith product to apply for. It does not suit someone prioritising the lowest possible fees, because the historical top-up, community-contribution and FX structure is not the cheapest in the category and is, in any case, no longer offered. It does not suit someone who relies on a quick customer-service turnaround, because the support that remains is a single-issue redemption channel and a Telegram/email contact for the TKN swap, with no published hours.
If what you liked about Monolith was the non-custodial wallet plus card combination, there is no widely available product in 2026 that delivers the same thing in the same shape. The closest alternatives above, Cardex and Whop Cards, are funded-and-spent models rather than self-custody models; MSX’s public page does not say enough to compare. None of the three inherits Monolith’s licence, country coverage or token list, and reading their pages, none of them promises the same “your keys, your card” pairing. So for a reader who specifically wanted a self-custody card, the practical recommendation is to keep the wallet (and a working copy of the seed) and accept that there is no card in 2026 that links to it.
For a reader who is simply shopping for any live crypto card, the rest of this site has reviews of the current options; the Monolith page will not help you choose between them, because the product it is reviewing no longer exists.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Monolith card?
The Monolith card was a debit card that spent from a non-custodial crypto wallet, so the cardholder kept control of the private keys rather than handing crypto to a custodian. The company behind it, UAB “Belela” in Lithuania, closed the service on 8 October 2024.
Is Monolith a bank?
No. UAB “Belela” was a Lithuanian virtual currency deposit and exchange operator, and the card itself was issued by Solaris. Neither the wallet’s crypto nor the card’s balance was covered by Lithuanian deposit insurance or the UK Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
How does the Monolith card work?
Historically, you held a 12-word seed phrase for the wallet, topped the card up from the wallet, and spent the resulting balance at merchants that took the card network. The card was deactivated on 8 October 2024 and the app was delisted on 17 February, so the spending side no longer functions.
Who owns Monolith?
The trading name belongs to UAB “Belela”, a Lithuanian company (code 305982313), with the site copyright held by Token Group Ltd under licence to UAB “Belela”. The card was issued by Solaris, and the successor app is being developed as Token.com.
Is the Monolith card available in my country?
The card is no longer being issued to anyone, anywhere, so country eligibility is no longer the right question. The historical, unofficial coverage was for the EEA, with the USA and Asia listed as unavailable, but that is third-party information rather than something the company confirms today.
How do I get my money back from a closed Monolith card?
For any unspent fiat left on the card, submit a redemption request on the Solaris Redemptions Support page with the subject “Redemption funds of Monolith customer”, including payout account details in EUR or GBP and a colour ID copy if the email differs. Solaris aims to respond within 14 days.
How do I get my crypto out of a closed Monolith wallet?
Import the 12-word seed phrase into another wallet such as MetaMask, Trust Wallet or Coinbase Wallet. If you never saved the seed, the closure notice does not describe a recovery service, and no one can restore the wallet for you, so the funds are effectively unrecoverable.
Is the Monolith card safe?
The wallet was non-custodial, which is the part of the design that puts the user in control of the keys. The closure notice is explicit that the wallet’s crypto is not covered by Lithuanian deposit insurance or the UK FSCS, so the safety of the funds depended on the holder looking after the seed phrase and on no one else obtaining it.
How do I add the Monolith card to Apple Wallet?
You cannot, in 2026. The card was deactivated on 8 October 2024 and the app was delisted on 17 February, so a deactivated card number is not the kind of card a tokenisation service will accept. If you want a live Visa-or-Mastercard tokenised in Apple Pay today, the alternatives section points to a few options that may suit.
Is the Monolith card worth it today?
No, because there is no live Monolith product to buy into. For a former holder, the question is not whether the card is worth it but how to redeem the leftover balance, and the rest of this page walks through that.
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