Fiat24 card review: how it works and why it left China

Fiat24 stopped taking new users from mainland China on June 5, 2026, and the wind-down, from the first notice to the end of new applications, took two or three days. What interests me is the economics underneath a card like this one, and why a product that cost almost nothing to use could not last. In a video published on June 7, 2026, 边际浪客 sets out how the model was paid for and what a user can check before the next card disappears.

What Fiat24 is and who stands behind it

Fiat24 is the brand. The licensed company behind it is SR Saphirstein AG, which translates roughly as SR Sapphire Stone, and the difference matters when you try to work out who owes you money if something goes wrong. Zhang Haoning, known as Harry Zhang, studied at ETH Zurich and worked at Avaloq, UBS and Coutts. Yang Lan studied economics at LMU Munich, took an MBA at IE and holds the CFA charter, and also worked at UBS. The two left Swiss banking and founded Saphirstein in 2017 or 2018.

The company's record says more than the founders' CVs. Saphirstein is audited by the Swiss financial regulator and keeps its registered capital in a settlement account at a Swiss bank, and it was the second company to receive a Swiss fintech licence. Finews, a Swiss financial title, profiled the firm in 2021. Early investors named in that coverage include China Merchants Bank and a blockchain venture fund based in Shanghai.

That licence is a lighter category than a full banking licence, but it puts a supervised company between you and the money. The product runs on Arbitrum, an Ethereum layer-2 network that settles to Ethereum and is cheaper to use, where Fiat24 runs smart contracts and NFT bank accounts. An NFT is a unique token on a blockchain, and here it stands for the account record itself. Operations, clearing and legal responsibility for all of it sit with Saphirstein, not with the wallets that hand out the card.

Where the card works and who can open it

The shutdown went out through the two partner wallets. Bitget Wallet emailed users and SafePal posted a community notice, both saying that services for people living in mainland China would stop from June 5, 2026. Users outside that group could still apply at the time, and the card was handed out by the wallets rather than sold directly by the company.

The low barrier was the selling point. Fiat24 asked for no proof of assets, set no minimum deposit, did not review personal documents strictly, charged close to nothing to issue the card and paid cashback on spending. The creator links that easy access for mainland users to the company's Chinese background, which is why the closure hit that group hardest.

The video does not spell out which documents Fiat24 asks for or what its ATM fees and spending limits are, so read the issuer's own terms before you rely on the card.

How top-ups and spending work

Funding the card takes four steps:

1. Open the card inside SafePal or Bitget Wallet.
2. Send USDC from your own wallet to the Fiat24 account.
3. The deposit converts into a Fiat24 balance, which is what the card spends.
4. From that balance you can send money to brokers such as Interactive Brokers or Charles Schwab, or to Wise to change it into another currency.

The last step is the part the creator finds remarkable. A balance that starts as a stablecoin on Arbitrum can end up as a brokerage deposit or a local-currency transfer without a bank in the middle, which is why the company calls the product fiat around the clock. Early SafePal promotion went further and said USDC could be withdrawn directly to China Construction Bank, and a memorandum between the bank's Zurich branch and Fiat24 covers an RMB cross-border payment project.

USDC is a stablecoin, a token designed to hold a value of one dollar and issued against reserves. Moving it on Arbitrum costs a network fee, which the top-up subsidy partly offsets.

The balance is not a self-custody wallet. You hold no private key to it, and the company running the account can see and move the funds under its own compliance rules. That is normal for a card, since a card has to sit inside the banking system to work at a terminal, but it changes what you are trusting. With a self-custody wallet, losing the keys means losing the money. With a card account the risk runs the other way: the balance depends on the operator staying solvent and honest.

Fees, subsidies and the cashback loop

Top-up fees are subsidised over the long term, and so is the conversion fee charged when you spend. That subsidy is what let the partner wallets advertise zero fees. Most of the extra charge added to each purchase can be claimed back as cashback into the wallet.

The creator believes the subsidy comes from Fiat24 itself rather than from Bitget Wallet or SafePal, and says he has not checked every partner platform to prove it. I would treat that as a reasonable inference rather than a confirmed fact, since the same terms turn up across different wallets.

Compare it with the usual arrangement. A traditional US card generally wants something like 1,000 dollars on deposit and charges a management fee. A fintech that advertises no annual fee usually earns something on transactions. A reseller one or two levels down charges for issuing the card on top. Fiat24 appeared to do none of that, which is the question the creator keeps returning to: where does the money come from?

Why the fees can be zero: Mastercard's volume game

The creator's answer is card-network competition. Visa holds the largest share of the card market, and Mastercard's way of catching up is to have more of its cards in people's hands, because more cardholders push more merchants to accept its rules and pay its fees.

In his reconstruction, Fiat24 signs a volume agreement with Mastercard: bring in a set number of new cardholders, say 100,000, and receive millions in marketing support. Fiat24 passes quotas down to Bitget Wallet and SafePal, perhaps 20,000 or 30,000 cardholders each, and hands out free top-up capacity when a partner hits its target. Users get a cheap card and invite friends, the issuing company turns its return on investment positive, the crypto companies get a card product without a banking licence, and Mastercard buys market share.

I would want to see the contract before treating that as settled. It hangs on the volume targets being real and met, on Mastercard keeping up the payments, and on the issuing company's compliance costs staying below the subsidy. Low fees were a way to buy customers, and buying customers has an end date.

Why the China channel closed

Two explanations sit side by side, and the creator does not say which one dominates.

The first is compliance. The company's stated aim was a payment bridge between Asian and European customers, the way Alipay connects merchants and buyers. Holding a Swiss licence and a settlement account means staying visibly within the rules. After a run of mainland regulations on overseas investment and a crackdown on cross-border flows, closing the mainland application channel quickly was the cautious move, and the creator calls it a way of protecting the company's standing. I would put more weight on this than on a funding problem, because the licence and the settlement account give the company more to lose.

The second is pressure. He does not rule out panic from the market turmoil around the time of the announcement, or a problem inside the company's funding, and he warns that existing users are not automatically safe just because they already hold a card.

For anyone holding a balance, the lesson is the same either way. A card that stops taking new users has not necessarily stopped working, but its operator is under stress, and a balance left on the account is a claim on that operator.

What happened to the other virtual cards

Fiat24 is one entry in a longer list of card programmes that disappeared or changed shape.

Infini Card was the star of 2025. Its founder ran the project under his own name on X, with a following built as a crypto research blogger, and the pitch was yield on spending plus very low fees. Issuing a card cost nothing or a dollar or two, and most of that went back to users who invited others. When the cards stopped, the founder explained why: compliance and risk-control costs were rising, fraud and telecom scams kept coming, and a model built on low fees and subsidies for anyone who asked produced almost no revenue. He said the consumer card business took 99 percent of the company's cost and time for close to zero income. PANews reported the suspension and the refunds on June 17, 2025. The company later came back with a card for business users, who have to pass company-related verification first.

WildCard built its name on Alipay and WeChat top-ups, which made it usable for people with no overseas bank account and no appetite for a wire transfer. In June and July 2025 foreign exchange authorities moved against it, freezing large sums, and its upstream card supplier was cut off after what the creator describes as malicious reporting. Almost a year later the money is still unresolved, but the service runs again in a different form: instead of giving you a card, it binds a card to your ChatGPT subscription and lets it charge as the subscription renews. The new setup runs through Stripe, and the creator expects an overseas company to be collecting. For someone who mainly wants to pay for AI tools, that removes most of the difference.

Bingo Card is the one the creator underestimated. It worked well for AI payments, had a high success rate on a T-Mobile prepaid purchase he had struggled with elsewhere, and worked with Alipay and PayPal. He suspects a UnionPay background helped. It was also mass-reported by users who did not understand what they were reporting, and its RMB top-up channels were shut. Rather than leave users stuck, it offered individual customers a Fucang Bank account with a discount and six months of free management fees; migrated users could keep topping up by cross-border remittance, and anyone who did not migrate could spend down the balance already on the card. The creator also previews an upcoming Fucang Bank project built around global spending and subscriptions, with cross-border remittance top-ups and a card that builds a US FICO credit score.

BinPay is the case that ended badly. The creator flagged it early as a small startup with weak backing, told viewers to use it only if they could not pass verification anywhere else, and to top up as they went. It has now run off with user funds. Its team page listed three members, and the creator says the personas were generated from synthetic face data. A fake founder page is worse than no page at all, because it borrows the trust people place in a real company. Rough edges are one thing; an invented team is another. Depay and OneKey Card went through their own shutdowns earlier; the creator did not use either and puts them down to the same economics.

How to judge the next virtual card

Four checks would have caught most of these failures, and I would run them before opening any account:

1. Trace the people behind it: WildCard's founder was a former technical partner at Tiger Brokers, Infini's founder operates under his real name on X, Fiat24's registration is on file, and Bingo can be traced to Fucang Bank. BinPay had three invented founders.
2. Work out where the card sits in the chain. Fiat24 can issue its own cards, which puts it upstream. Infini was most likely a fintech working with a bank. Bulk-issuing platforms may be resellers a level or two down.
3. Read the licence carefully. A registration number on a website is a starting point, not a guarantee.
4. Keep the balance small and top up as you go, which is the advice the creator gave for platforms he did not fully trust.

What a US MSB licence tells you

For a platform operating in the United States, MSB registration is the entry threshold, administered by the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. It can cost as little as around 10,000 dollars and take about a month, and it only fits a non-custodial setup where the service supplies the front end and matching code while the user keeps control of the funds. Anyone who wants to hold customer money and move it for residents of each state needs a money transmitter licence there, and covering all 50 states costs somewhere between 2 and 5 million dollars.

The gap between 10,000 dollars and 5 million dollars is where the ambiguity sits.

A platform that says it is MSB compliant probably holds only part of the picture, and may hold none of the state licences that matter for a custodial account. The creator uses the licence as an auxiliary signal: present is a plus, absent is a minus, and present but vague is a minus as well. Fiat24 answers to a Swiss regulator. WildCard and BinPay show no obvious licence, and one of them came back for its users while the other did not.

What I would do with a card like this

The creator's own read is that the supply of these services has not dried up. Over a longer window he sees no clear decline, more of a shifting balance, and he argues that most payment needs can still be met by spending a little more or accepting more hassle. I find that convincing, with one caveat: the products that survive tend to be the ones that charge something, because a card that earns nothing has to be paid for by someone, and that someone is usually a subsidy with an expiry date.

What I would do with a card like this is unglamorous. Keep the balance at a level you would not mind losing, and top up before a purchase rather than parking a month of spending on the card. Write down the legal name of the issuer, not the brand, and look it up in a company registry. Prefer a card issued close to the top of the chain, where the operator has a licence to lose. Treat cashback as a discount that may end, never as a return you can count on.

Tax is the part that catches people out, and it has nothing to do with the card company. Spending crypto through a card usually means the provider sells the coins for you at the moment of the transaction. In many countries that sale counts as a taxable disposal, so the gain or loss since you acquired the coins has to be reported even though no money reached your bank account. Rules differ by country and the record keeping is yours, so keep the purchase prices and the spending dates somewhere you will find them at tax time.

June 5, 2026 is the date I would keep from all of this: a card that looked permanent stopped taking new users from one large market in two or three days. The balance you leave on the next one is the part you control.