By Ivan Nevzorov, CEO, SBSB Fintech Lawyers
What is worth $175 million in the crypto card market? Not a product, not a user base — a licensed card issuer with a BIN sponsorship and EU passporting rights.
In November 2025, Exodus Movement (NYSE: EXOD) agreed to acquire exactly that: W3C Corp, the parent company of white-label card provider Baanx and card issuer Monavate, according to CoinDesk. In January 2026, Checkout.com acquired Blue EMI, a Lithuania-based electronic money institution, expanding its own licensed infrastructure for EU card operations. And in the same month, Ripple secured an EMI licence and cryptoasset registration from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority — its own route to the same destination.
Three major crypto companies, three moves to lock in licensed infrastructure within ninety days. The pattern is not subtle: the crypto card market is becoming a licensing race — and the companies that control the licensed infrastructure will control who gets to compete.
Crypto Cards Are Replaying the Neobank Story — at an Earlier Stage
This is not the first time large players have moved to buy the infrastructure that an entire market depends on. Banking went through the same shift a decade ago. Traditional banks were hard to compete with on product, so a generation of fintechs — Revolut, Monzo, N26 — took a different approach: they built better interfaces on top of existing banking licences. Customers got polished apps, instant notifications, and seamless onboarding, but the deposits stayed in traditional regulated institutions. The press called them “neobanks” — new banks that felt new but ran on old, heavily regulated infrastructure.
Over time, the model matured. Some neobanks obtained their own licences. Compliance frameworks between the licensed backend and the distribution frontend stabilised, and regulators caught up. Today, the split between infrastructure and experience is the default architecture for consumer finance.
The crypto card market is heading in the same direction — Exodus, Checkout.com, and Ripple are building the licensed backend that smaller projects will plug into. But we are still at the very beginning. The neobank ecosystem took years to develop the compliance layer that makes the model safe: agent oversight, regulatory reporting, real-time monitoring. Crypto cards do not have that yet. There are issuers today with 50 or more agents distributing their cards across multiple markets. When I look at some of these programmes, I have to ask: does the issuer actually have the capacity to control what all those agents are doing? In many cases, the honest answer is no.
Where Regulators Are Already Targeting the Weak Point
The regulatory pressure across jurisdictions is not random — it is converging on the same weak point. In the EU, dual authorisation under MiCA and PSD2 forces crypto card issuers to meet compliance standards on two regulatory tracks simultaneously. In the UK, the FCA rejects the majority of cryptoasset registration applicants. But the enforcement actions that matter most are not about licensing thresholds. They are about what happens between the licence holder and the companies operating under it.
Quicko is the clearest case. In January 2026, Poland’s KNF revoked Quicko’s payment licence — not because Quicko’s card product was defective, but because regulators found that platforms operating through Quicko had facilitated transactions with Russian nationals in potential breach of EU sanctions. Roughly 100 crypto fintech partners and 400,000 users were affected overnight. The regulator’s message was aimed squarely at the gap between the issuer and its agent network — the same gap that exists at every crypto card programme running 10, 30, or 50 partners on a single licence.
It is already harder to connect a card-issuing provider than it was a year ago. As regulators get better at auditing this layer, it will only get harder.
What Comes Next
The crypto card market is not in crisis — it is maturing, and maturation eliminates companies that cannot adapt.
The operators I work with at SBSB Fintech Lawyers who are launching card programmes today spend more time on licence structure and partner due diligence than on the card product itself. That shift is not a sign that the market is overregulated — it is a sign that the market is starting to be regulated at all. The companies that treat compliance infrastructure as a cost centre will struggle. The ones that treat it as their core architecture will be the ones still operating when the next Quicko happens.
