Kulipa shuts down abruptly: 120,000 crypto cards dead overnight
Paris-based card issuer Kulipa ceased operations on 29 July, four months after a 6.2 million dollar seed round. More than 120,000 cards from around twenty partners, including Solflare and Ready, stopped working from one day to the next. Users' balances survived — thanks to one architectural choice.
A card issuer collapsing is neither a hack nor a crash, but it hits your wallet just as hard. Paris-based Kulipa ceased operations on 29 July over solvency problems. Kulipa did not issue cards to consumers itself; it supplied the infrastructure that let around twenty wallets and crypto firms issue cards of their own — among them Solflare and Ready. Reporting puts the number of cards rendered unusable at more than 120,000.
Four months after the funding round
In early April, Kulipa raised 6.2 million dollars (roughly €5.4 million) in a seed round co-led by Flourish Ventures and 1kx. Solflare says it worked with Kulipa to find a buyer and explore ways to continue the service, without success. From funding round to shutdown was roughly a quarter.
The architectural choice that made the difference
The striking part of this shutdown is what did not happen: users did not lose their money. Kulipa ran a self-custody model and held no customer balances. Your funds stayed in your own wallet and were only drawn down at the moment you paid with the card. When the issuer failed, there was nothing sitting at Kulipa to lose.
Set that against the alternative. With a card you top up in advance, your balance sits with the issuer. If that issuer fails, your money becomes a claim against a bankrupt company and you join the queue of creditors.
What did go wrong
The communication. Ready cardholders reportedly got around one hour of warning before their cards stopped. A working payment card is not a subscription you can cancel later — switch it off without notice and people are left standing at the till.
What to watch for
Behind almost every crypto card sits a chain: you → wallet or app → card issuer → card network → bank. The name on the card is rarely the party carrying the risk. Two questions are worth asking before you apply: does the provider hold a balance for you, or is money only drawn at the moment of payment? And what happens to that balance if the issuer fails?
Solflare says it will launch a new version of its card within a few weeks, with Apple Pay and Google Pay, higher limits and cashback — again with self-custody.
Caveat
Users keeping their money is a property of this specific model, not a general guarantee for crypto cards. The figure of more than 120,000 cards also comes from reporting rather than a statement by Kulipa itself; the precise number of affected users has not been confirmed.
Sources: Wu Blockchain, Bitget News (Solflare statement), Startup Fortune, Finextra. Converted at USD→EUR 0.8675. Last checked: 2 August 2026.