Are crypto cards safe? Custody explained
Crypto cards don’t all hold your money the same way. Before you put money on one, the most important safety question is who’s holding it.
2 min read
In this guide3 sections
Custodial vs self-custodial
Every crypto card falls on one side of this line.
Custodial
- The company holds your crypto for you, like a bank or an exchange
- Easy to use, and easy to recover if you lose your phone
- You’re trusting the company, and whoever regulates it
- If the company fails or freezes accounts, you lose access too
Self-custodial
- Your crypto stays in your own wallet until the moment you pay
- You keep control of your keys
- Lose your recovery phrase and nobody can get it back for you
- Can still carry smart-contract risk
Neither is automatically safe. Plenty of custodial cards are perfectly reputable, and self-custody has risks of its own. What matters is knowing which one you’re using. Our self-custodial list shows the cards that let you keep control.
Questions worth asking
- Who issues the card, and are they regulated?
- Where is your money actually held?
- What happens to it if the company goes under?
- Is the card available, and legal, where you live?
- If a card calls itself “self-custody”, does it really hold nothing for you? Some still hold your balance.
A few simple habits
Only keep on the card what you plan to spend soon. Do the identity checks early (why every card asks), stick to one account, and make sure the card is available in your country before you put money on it.
See what each card pays back at your spend.
Open the calculator