I went through Sergi Andrés - Abogado Cripto's review of the Xkard Essential Card, published on May 14, 2025, and the detail that stayed with me was the cardholder. The account with the Hong Kong issuer belongs to XHYPE, the company behind the card, and users sit under it as if they were staff. That arrangement is what lets you open a card with an email address.
The company behind the card
XHYPE presents itself as a marketplace of zero-knowledge services and tools, which in plain terms means products built so that personal data is not stored. At the time of the review, the site listed two other products, xViajero and xKode, and Xkard was not yet among them.
The terms and conditions name the company. XHYPE is a brand of XHYPE FZCO, registered at Dubai Silicon Oasis, DDP, Building A1, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and its anti-money-laundering policy was last updated on January 9, 2024. That address sits inside IFZA, one of Dubai's free zones.
Free zones matter for two reasons. The United Arab Emirates taxes mainland companies at 9% on profits above 375,000 AED and free zone companies at 0%, provided they meet strict licensing conditions. The creator, who says he provides services from the same free zone, treats the IFZA registration as a plus because free zone companies go through tighter checks before they get a licence. I read that as a tax decision first: the licensing checks are what a company pays for the 0% rate.
The second reason is reporting. The UAE signed the Common Reporting Standard, or CRS, in 2018, so financial institutions there pass tax information to partner countries such as Spain automatically. The creator's reading is that XHYPE is not a financial institution because it does not issue the card, so it would not report under CRS. He also notes that Dubai sits outside EU financial rules such as MiCA, the crypto regulation, and PSD2, the payment services directive.
What each tier costs and allows
The card is virtual and created inside the app, and it comes in three tiers. Essential starts at $9 a month and allows up to $25,000 without identity checks. Premium raises the ceiling to $50,000 and is billed yearly. Whale costs $50 a month and goes up to $100,000. The creator took the Whale tier.
| Tier | Fee | Spending without KYC |
|---|---|---|
| Essential | from $9 a month | up to $25,000 |
| Premium | billed yearly | up to $50,000 |
| Whale | $50 a month | up to $100,000 |
The ceiling caps how much can move through the card without identity checks, and a higher tier does not change who holds the account.
Inside the app you can read the card details, reload the card, cancel it and buy a different tier. The name fields accept whatever you type. The email address or phone number has to be real, because that is where the codes arrive.
How you fund the card and where the money sits
You log in with an email address. The funding routes on screen are USDT on Binance Smart Chain or Tron, or USD. Withdrawals run back through the same routes, and you can send funds to another Xkard user or push them out to a debit card. The creator's written description says you can pay with Bitcoin, USDT or USDC at any compatible merchant, while the funding options on screen are narrower: USDT on two networks or USD. He also says funds convert to fiat in real time at the merchant.
The balance shows in Hong Kong dollars, which points to the issuer: the card is a Visa issued by a Hong Kong company, and XHYPE holds the account there. The card that appears in Google Pay carries the name KUN, the Hong Kong issuer.
Your USDT leaves your wallet when you top up, and what replaces it is a balance inside the app, behind a corporate account in Hong Kong. The creator's description talks about users keeping control of their custody, and I don't see how that squares with the account structure: the account and the card are in XHYPE's name.
Adding the card to Google Pay took four steps:
- Open Google Pay, choose the option to add a payment card, then pick new debit card.
- Type the card number and details from the Xkard app.
- Enter the email address and the SMS code Google asks for. That contact is one the app supplied to the issuer, so it is not the same one you use to sign in.
- Pay wherever Visa debit is accepted.
Why the sign-up asks for so little
The sign-up asks for an email address or a phone number you can reach. Nothing else has to be true, and nobody checks that the contact is yours: it only has to receive the one-time code that opens the card and the second factor on larger payments.
XHYPE completed business verification, the company version of KYC, with the Hong Kong issuer and became the account holder. When you open a card you become a sub-card holder inside XHYPE's account, so the issuer's customer is XHYPE and there is no individual for the issuer to identify. XHYPE does not collect your identity because, on the creator's reading, it is not the regulated party that would have to.
On privacy, the creator says the phone number is not tied directly to the card and that intermediary servers keep both the card and the processor from seeing it. Two different claims sit behind that: not handing over a passport, and not being identifiable at all. The app does the first. The second depends on the platform, the issuer and the payment chain behaving as described.
When a charge is disputed or a card is blocked, the customer on the account is XHYPE, so the complaint runs through a company in a jurisdiction you do not live in, on terms you accepted in an app.
What the card costs beyond the subscription
The subscription is the visible cost: $9 a month at the bottom of the range and $50 at the top. The creator's written description puts fees at 2.3% to 5%, with no breakdown of which charges that covers and no cashback rates, so check the fee schedule and the reward terms before you rely on the card. A range that wide means the gap between 2.3% and 5% shows up on a normal month of spending.
Crypto cards usually make their money on the conversion between the asset you hold and the currency the merchant charges, and on top-ups and cash withdrawals. A quoted percentage can hide a spread. When you compare one card with another, compare the all-in cost of a purchase and of a cash withdrawal, not the headline monthly fee.
Currency conversion matters more here than on a euro card. The balance is denominated in Hong Kong dollars, the card runs on Visa, and the merchant may charge in any currency. Each hop can hide a spread, and none of them is under your control.
The licence sits with the Hong Kong issuer
Any Visa card is a chain of separate businesses. The issuing bank holds the licence and issues the card. The payment network, Visa or Mastercard, carries and settles the transactions. A processor on the merchant side handles the terminal, Redsys in Spain. A payment processor connects the others through APIs. Each piece has its own licence or authorisation, and not all of them come from the same authority.
XHYPE does none of those jobs. It markets the card and brings customers to the Hong Kong issuer. The creator calls it a commercialiser of the issuer: the regulated activity stays with the Hong Kong company and XHYPE sits outside it. Customer identification duties attach to the regulated activity, and XHYPE does not carry out that activity, so no classic KYC applies to it.
The creator calls this a legal gap that the company found, and he expects competitors to copy the model within a short time. He gives the regulatory section 4.5 out of 5 and says the company built the legal base before the product, which he sees as the right order.
My reading is that the argument assumes regulators keep accepting the split. A supervisor in another country can take a different view of who counts as the financial institution for reporting purposes, and a change in that view would change the no-KYC feature.
What the creator's scores are worth
He scores company structure 4 out of 5, functionality 3 out of 5 and regulation 4.5 out of 5, for a total of 3.83 out of 5, or 7.66 out of 10.
The 4 for structure came after he raised it from 3, on the argument that free zone companies face stricter checks. The 3 for functionality is about missing pieces: he wants more ways to fund the card, naming Lightning, Bitcoin and Ethereum, and he wants a native app from the App Store. He says the app itself works and that he has been paying through Google Pay without trouble.
He withholds the last half point for regulation because the company does not have ten years of history and has not been through regulatory inspections in several countries. I read the scores as a judgement on how well the structure is built, which is a different question from what happens to your money if the issuer or the platform stops working.
The risks I would weigh
- The balance sits with the platform behind a corporate account, so a freeze or a failure takes the sub-card with it. No deposit protection is described.
- The issuer is in Hong Kong, the company is in Dubai, and you are somewhere else, so recourse runs across borders.
- Spending crypto is a disposal in many countries and can produce a capital gains bill even when the card reports nothing.
- A made-up name can fail a merchant check or complicate a dispute, and it may sit badly with the issuer's terms.
- The email address and phone number are the security. Lose access to them and you lose the second factor.
- The split between marketer and issuer has to keep being accepted. If a supervisor reads it differently, the no-KYC feature goes with it.
- The rate you get at the till is set inside the chain, not by you.
Together these explain why I would keep the balance small and treat the card as spending money in transit rather than a place to store value.
What to check before you sign up
Get the full fee schedule in writing before you fund anything: card issuance, top-up, conversion spread, ATM withdrawal, inactivity and cancellation. The subscription is the easy number. The rest decides whether the card is cheap or expensive in a normal month.
Ask who holds the balance, what happens to money left on the card if you cancel it, and what happens if the issuer closes the account. Ask which countries and merchant categories the card supports, because a card that works online and a card that works at an ATM are different questions.
Keep your own records. Every top-up and every purchase is a transaction you may have to explain to a tax authority, and the platform's silence does not remove the obligation.
Use an email address and phone number you control and can recover. Start with an amount you would not mind losing while you test the card, and check the site address before you type card details anywhere.
The Essential card's $25,000 ceiling is the maximum the provider will let through without identity checks. I would top up what I plan to spend, watch what a month of real purchases costs once conversion is included, and judge the card on that.
