AQUA card — closed, with balances refunded in USDT, and a short list of cards that take its place
Available in US
I went through the AQUA card programme from announcement to suspension, looked at what JAN3 published, what the beta actually offered, and what users who loaded it now need to do. The short version is that you cannot get an AQUA card today, and that any review of it has to start with that fact. The Dolphin Card, which was the payment card inside the AQUA wallet app, was suspended on 4 December 2025 and has not resumed. Everything below walks through what happened, what the card was supposed to be, what can go wrong when a programme closes this abruptly, and which other cards fit the same brief for someone who wanted a crypto-funded Visa.
Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.
Verdict
I am giving the AQUA card a score of 2.4 out of 10. The number is low for a simple reason: as a product you can actually use today, it does not exist. The beta had an interesting design (virtual Visa, no ID, funded in BTC or Liquid USDt, sitting inside the AQUA wallet), but a card you cannot get and cannot spend with does not score well, no matter how clean the original idea was. The breakdown is below.
| Criterion | Score | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Who can get it | 0 / 10 | The Dolphin Card was suspended worldwide on 4 December 2025 over a card-provider problem; no relaunch has been announced. |
| Cost | 5 / 10 | No fees were published in official material; a third-party review also did not mention issuance or monthly fees, but that is not the same as a published fee schedule. |
| Top-up options | 4 / 10 | BTC, L-BTC or Liquid USDt only, on the Liquid network, with no published minimum or top-up fee. |
| Reliability and complaints | 1 / 10 | The programme was suspended mid-life; pending merchant refunds to the card will not return, the issuer was never named publicly, and I could not find a working complaints channel. |
| Everyday use | 2 / 10 | It was a virtual Visa in USD, with Apple Pay and Google Pay planned but not working at launch and tap-to-pay unavailable. |
A few caveats on these marks. The “Who can get it” zero is not a comment on the original idea, it is the literal state of the product. The cost mark is the highest of the group only because nothing was actually published to criticise; once a programme is closed, a low fee schedule is irrelevant. The everyday-use mark reflects what was true on day one of the beta, not what it might have become. If you are a former cardholder, the score that matters to you is “Reliability and complaints,” and the section on what to do if you already have the card is where the practical detail lives.
The audience for this review, in the strict sense, is a small one: existing AQUA Dolphin Card holders who need to recover their remaining balance. Everyone else is reading this as a post-mortem and as a comparison point against the alternatives at the end.
What happened to the programme
The AQUA card, marketed as the Dolphin Card, was a virtual Visa debit card that sat inside the AQUA wallet app, a Bitcoin-focused wallet built by JAN3 (the same company associated with the Aqua brand). It was announced on 21 May 2025 as a beta for users outside the US and Canada, with the company saying it hoped to bring cards to US and Canadian users “in the coming months.” A Spotify payment from an Argentinian user was rejected in October 2025 because the card and the user’s country did not match, which the third-party reviewer at CriptoNoticias described as a consequence of the card being issued in the United States while it was officially available only outside the US and Canada.
In design, the card was a USD-denominated virtual Visa, reloadable from the AQUA app’s Marketplace section. There was no physical card and no delivery to wait for: once the beta approved an account, the card numbers appeared in the app. JAN3 did not publish an issuer, fees, or a list of blocked merchants in the beta materials, and the only published spending limit I could verify was a $4,000 USD monthly maximum. Apple Pay and Google Pay support was described as “coming in the coming months” but was not live at launch, and tap-to-pay was not available.
On 30 November 2025, JAN3’s CEO said in public comments that partners had told him all Dolphin Cards would be suspended and that the team was looking for alternative providers. Four days later, on 4 December 2025, the suspension became official: all Dolphin Cards were suspended worldwide “effective immediately,” citing an unspecified problem with the card provider, whose name was not disclosed. The announcement said other AQUA wallet services were unaffected. JAN3 said it was negotiating refunds and seeking alternative providers; searches in 2026 did not turn up a replacement provider or a relaunch date.
In other words, the programme ran from its announcement in May 2025 until its suspension in December 2025, and during that time it never reached the United States or Canada despite the original plan to do so. For a beta, the lifetime is short; for a payment product, it is a hard stop.
If you already have the card
This is the section that matters to anyone whose account still shows a balance. The information below is from JAN3’s own announcement on 4 December 2025 and from the beta post that introduced the card; where a third-party source (CriptoNoticias, 24 October 2025) is the only one that stated something, I have flagged it as unofficial.
The card was reloadable and loaded with BTC, L-BTC or Liquid USDt through the Card Management page in the AQUA app. The beta post recommended a small test load first and said the balance could take a moment to update. The monthly spending limit was $4,000 USD. The third-party reviewer described on-chain BTC top-ups as needing miner fees and three to four network confirmations before crediting, with the BTC balance automatically converted to USD; the same review described the card as “nameless,” meaning the printed or displayed cardholder name did not match the user.
After the 4 December 2025 suspension, JAN3’s published procedure was this: any remaining balance would be refunded in USDT on the Liquid network, requested through a secure form on the AQUA website, paid either back to the user’s AQUA wallet or to any Liquid-capable wallet the user named. Processing starts once AQUA receives the funds from its provider, and JAN3 said it would send email confirmations. Refund fees were not published. Pending merchant refunds, the money merchants were due to send back to the card after a return or dispute, will not return to the Dolphin Card at all. The published procedure does not include a chargeback channel, and the card’s issuer was never named in public materials, so a cardholder who needs to escalate a dispute has a thin path.
If you still hold a balance and have not filed, the practical steps are: confirm the AQUA account email is current, locate the secure refund form on the AQUA website, decide whether to receive the USDT in your AQUA wallet or in another Liquid-capable wallet, and submit the request. If a merchant owes you a refund that was issued before 4 December 2025, do not wait for it to land on the card; follow up with the merchant directly, because the suspended card will not receive it.
For a reader who never managed to load the card but did pass the beta sign-up: a JAN3 account with an email verification code was the only step required during the beta, no ID documents were mentioned, and the account itself (the AQUA wallet) is unaffected by the suspension. If you want to close the AQUA account, the app is the place to start; if you only want the card gone, it already is.
What can go wrong
A few risks are worth flagging for anyone reading this as a post-mortem, because they are not unique to AQUA. The first is the structural one: a crypto card is rarely issued by the brand you know. In this case JAN3 ran the programme and the AQUA app held the front end, but the actual card-issuing institution was never named in public materials, which is unusual and which made the 4 December 2025 suspension opaque. Card networks and their licensed issuers can, and do, pull the plug on programmes: Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX in November 2022, and WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes overnight. A crypto cardholder is several steps away from the network that actually carries the payment, and any of those steps can fail.
The second is the custody question. The AQUA card was funded from crypto, but the balance on the card sat with the issuer once loaded, and any balance left at the moment of suspension had to be claimed through a refund form rather than simply withdrawn by the user. That is a custodial model: the user trusts the issuer, and the user’s claim to a balance is a promise rather than a direct control of funds. Theft and provider failure in this category of business are not hypothetical; the broader history includes Mt. Gox (around US$350 million reported stolen between 2011 and 2014), Coincheck (around US$400 million in 2018) and Ronin Network (US$625 million in 2022).
The third is the irreversibility of crypto transfers. Funding a card with BTC on a wrong network, or to an address the provider does not support, can mean the funds are lost or only recoverable through manual support with no guarantee. Topping up with USDT on Liquid is a narrower pipe than the dozen-or-so chains USDT runs on, and a wrong-chain send is a real risk for a first-time user.
The fourth is the merchant-side friction. A virtual card issued in one country and used from another can be declined because the merchant’s BIN lookup reveals a mismatch. The October 2025 Spotify rejection in Argentina, reported by a third-party reviewer, is the kind of incident that happens when the issuer country and the customer’s billing country diverge, and it is not specific to AQUA: it is the same reason some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards more generally. Address Verification Service, a check that compares numeric parts of the billing address to the issuer’s records, is mainly available in the US, Canada and the UK, and tends to be unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can produce declines at checkout even when the card is otherwise valid.
The fifth is the dispute path. Pending merchant refunds will not return to the Dolphin Card, JAN3’s own announcement says, and a chargeback process for the card was never published. A cardholder with an unresolved merchant dispute is, in practice, chasing the merchant directly, with no published route to the issuer.
I did not find Reddit or Trustpilot threads specific to the AQUA Dolphin Card. The absence of complaints in public is partly because the beta was small and partly because the card was virtual and short-lived; I would not read silence as endorsement.
What to take instead
If you are reading this because you wanted a crypto-funded Visa and AQUA is no longer an option, here are three cards that filled, or now fill, the same brief. They are not the same product, and they are not all available everywhere; I have included them because they answer the question “what should I look at instead,” and the comparison is in the cards themselves, not in some hidden ranking.
TokenPocket (TP) Card, score 5.8/10. A Visa or Mastercard debit depending on country, with a list of supported European countries for Visa (Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland among them) and Mastercard for Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, the UK and others; the Americas were planned for Q2 2025. Fiat24 cards are virtual; balances sit in EUR24 and USD24; the card runs on Arbitrum. TP says it does not charge additional fees beyond an NFT creation fee that the user pays a “small portion” of, and that there is a 1% fee on crypto deposits, which the company says will be refunded later through rewards or reduced transaction fees; an FX fee is not stated. Tokens for funding are not listed in the FAQ; deposits come from the TokenPocket wallet on Arbitrum.
MetaMask Card, score 7.1/10. A Mastercard issued by Monovate, with Crypto Life as the card provider, available in a list of 45 countries and territories (Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay among them); other regions are on a waitlist. Proof of residency is required. The Virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee; the Metal card is $199 a year. A “minimal fee for each transaction” is mentioned, with no specific figure on the page I read, plus no foreign transaction fee and no MetaMask fees; the Mastercard exchange rate is used. The card spends directly from the connected wallet, on Linea, Base, Monad or Solana, with mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC, USDT and others supported (the page says nine tokens). Cashback is paid in mUSD: Virtual 1%, Metal headline 3% with a footnote that limits 3% to the first $10,000 spent and 1% thereafter; there is also a $FLY bonus through the Blackbird dining app (5X for Virtual, 7X for Metal).
KAST, score 6.1/10. Residence-based eligibility checked at KYC, with a country list shown at sign-up; if your country is not listed, the card is not available. The KYC copy spells out the rule I have seen trip up readers elsewhere: living in a supported country is not enough if your ID is from a restricted region, and dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass. VPN does not bypass. Up to 10 cards per user: a Standard Visa Platinum (virtual and physical), a Premium Visa Infinite metal, and a Private Visa Infinite gold-plated, with themed designs (Pengu, Solana, Bitcoin). Balances are in USD; stablecoin deposits are converted 1:1 with no spread. Annual membership is $0 for Standard, $1,000 for Premium, $10,000 for Private, billed annually upfront with no monthly option. An extra virtual card costs $2 in some regions; the Standard physical card is $0 card fee plus $40 delivery, while Premium and Private physical cards are included. There is a $1 monthly inactivity fee after 12 months, and renewal or reactivation fees exist (amounts not stated). Stablecoin top-ups are free, USD card spending is free, Apple and Google Pay are free; non-USD FX fees run 0.5% to 1.75% depending on residence and transaction country and card programme, with a $0.10 fee on non-USD transactions under $25 and a $0.50 fee on a declined transaction for insufficient balance. USDT and USDC are accepted on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and TRON, with PYUSD and RLUSD also named in some places. Cashback is paid in USD: Standard 1.5% on the first $2,000 of monthly spend, Premium 2% on the first $10,000, Private 3% on the first $40,000; KAST Points add another 1% for Premium and 2% for Private.
A quick way to read this list: TokenPocket is the closest in spirit to AQUA (a virtual card inside a crypto wallet app), MetaMask is the strongest on cashback and on the size of its country list, and KAST is the most “premium tier” option, with the clearest fee schedule and the heaviest annual fee. None of them is a straight replacement; the right one depends on which of those trade-offs you care about.
Who I would recommend it to
I would not recommend the AQUA Dolphin Card to anyone today, because no one can get it. The recommendation has to be about who should still care about it and who should not. If you already hold a balance, the right next step is to file the refund request through the secure form on the AQUA website and to follow up with any merchant who owes you a return that was issued before 4 December 2025; the merchant is now your only route for that money. If you never managed to fund the card, there is no action to take; the AQUA wallet app itself is unaffected by the suspension and you can keep using it as a Bitcoin wallet, or close the account through the app.
For someone who was attracted to the original pitch (a virtual Visa, no ID, BTC or Liquid USDt funding, no physical card), the closest live options are TP Card for the same wallet-app feel, MetaMask Card for a free Virtual tier and a real cashback structure, and KAST if you want a physical card and a published fee schedule and are willing to pay for the higher tiers. None of those cards replicates the no-ID onboarding AQUA used during the beta, and that is a feature I would not expect to find elsewhere in 2026, because the regulatory environment in both the EU and the US is moving toward stronger customer due diligence, including sanctions screening and proof of address.
Frequently asked questions
What is the AQUA card?
The AQUA card, also called the Dolphin Card, was a virtual Visa debit card that sat inside the AQUA wallet app, a Bitcoin wallet built by JAN3. It was announced on 21 May 2025 as a beta for users outside the US and Canada, and was suspended worldwide on 4 December 2025 over a card-provider problem that the company did not name. As of 2026, no relaunch has been announced and no replacement provider has been named.
How does the AQUA card work?
In its beta form, the card was funded with BTC, L-BTC or Liquid USDt, topped up through the Card Management page in the AQUA app, and spent as a USD balance against a virtual Visa card number. The monthly limit was $4,000 USD. Apple Pay and Google Pay support was planned but not live at launch, and tap-to-pay was not available. After the 4 December 2025 suspension, the card stopped spending and loading, and remaining balances are being refunded in USDT on Liquid through a request form.
Is AQUA a bank?
AQUA is not a bank. The brand sits on a Bitcoin wallet app developed by JAN3, and the card was issued through an unnamed partner under the Visa network. The card-issuing institution was never disclosed in public materials, which is one of the reasons the December 2025 suspension left cardholders with a refund procedure rather than a direct account to manage.
Who owns AQUA?
AQUA is the wallet-app brand associated with JAN3, the same company that markets the Aqua wallet. JAN3’s CEO made public statements about the card suspension in late November and early December 2025, and JAN3 is the entity that published the refund procedure. The card-issuing partner has not been publicly named.
Is the AQUA card available in my country?
During the beta the card was offered to users outside the US and Canada, with some merchants in certain countries unsupported. The card was officially described as USD-denominated and the third-party reviewer described it as issued in the United States, which led to cross-country declines (a Spotify payment from Argentina was rejected in October 2025 because the card and the user country did not match). The card is not available anywhere today, because the programme is suspended.
Does the AQUA card require KYC?
During the beta, sign-up required only a JAN3 account with an email verification code; no ID documents were mentioned in the beta post. A third-party review (CriptoNoticias, 24 October 2025) is consistent with that, describing the sign-up as email-only. That level of onboarding is unusual for a payment product and would not be expected to survive a move into a more heavily regulated market.
How do I get a refund from a suspended AQUA card?
The procedure published on 4 December 2025 is: file a request through the secure form on the AQUA website, choose to receive the USDT either in your AQUA wallet or in any Liquid-capable wallet, and wait for the email confirmation. Processing starts once AQUA receives the funds from its card provider, so the timing depends on that upstream step, and the announcement did not name a fee or a deadline.
How do I top up the AQUA card?
You cannot, because the card is suspended. During the beta, top-ups went through the Card Management page in the AQUA app, using BTC, L-BTC or Liquid USDt on the Liquid network. The beta post recommended a small test load first, and a third-party review said on-chain BTC top-ups needed miner fees and three to four network confirmations before crediting.
Can I add the AQUA card to Apple Wallet or Google Pay?
Not at launch. Apple Pay and Google Pay were described as “coming in the coming months” in the May 2025 beta post and were not live when the card was suspended in December 2025. Tokenised mobile wallets (Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific number stored in the Secure Element) are a standard feature of modern cards, and the absence of a working implementation was a notable gap in the beta.
Is the AQUA card safe?
Theft and provider failure are general risks in the category, and the December 2025 suspension is the obvious example. Pending merchant refunds will not return to the card, a chargeback process was never published, and the issuer was never named, which left cardholders with limited recourse. The AQUA wallet app itself was described as unaffected by the suspension, so funds held in the wallet (rather than on the card) are a separate question, governed by the wallet’s own custody model.
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