Stripe's 0% FX card: at home, yes. Abroad, not stated.
On 26 September Stripe said its stablecoin-backed cards carry 0% FX fees. One of the five cards on our board already does. The other four charge somewhere between half a percent and a little over two. Here is what Stripe's claim covers, what it leaves out, and what it changes for the cards you can hold today.
Stripe Crypto's post makes two points. The cards carry 0% FX fees. And Stripe sets up local card ranges country by country, so a purchase made at home clears as a domestic one, with no FX markup and none of the usual 1% cross-border fee.
Stripe-issued stablecoin cards have 0% FX fees.
, Stripe Crypto (@StripeCrypto) 26 September 2026
Stripe establishes local card ranges with local fees, so when customers spend in their home market, there’s no FX markup or the typical 1% cross-border fee. pic.twitter.com/wOr9eQ52JD
The mechanism matters, because it is where the saving comes from. Most stablecoin cards carry a US or European card number. When a cardholder in Mexico pays in pesos, the card network treats the purchase as cross-border, and someone charges for that: a cross-border fee, a spread over the network's rate, or both. Stripe's answer is to issue the card from a local range, so the same purchase looks like any other domestic card payment.
Now the part the post does not say. The 0% is defined for spending in the home market. Neither Stripe's post nor its documentation states what the same cardholder pays in Madrid or Dubai. Our FX criterion measures a purchase in a foreign currency, because that is where the fee lands for the reader who travels, or who lives between two countries. Measured that way, Stripe's card reads: 0% at home, not stated abroad.
Can you get one? As a consumer, not yet. The product is in private preview. An app applies to Stripe, and the app hands cards to its users. Stripe's documentation lists more than 30 countries across Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa. No EU state, the UK or a Gulf country appears on that list. Bridge, the stablecoin company Stripe bought in 2025, says it is on track for more than 100 countries by the end of 2026, and in March it named Europe, Asia and Africa as the next regions. On our availability criterion, which asks for the EU, the UK and the Gulf, that is a zero today.
Who issues it? Bridge's own release names Lead Bank as the issuer of its Visa prepaid cards, with Bridge Ventures, LLC as programme manager. The same pairing of a US issuer and a programme manager runs through our board. KAST's own terms name Third National as issuer and Rain as programme manager, and ether.fi Cash sits on the same two companies. A small group of US issuers and programme managers stands behind cards that look, from the outside, like rivals.
Here is the board as scored, with the FX fee each card charges on a foreign-currency purchase.
| Card | FX on a foreign-currency purchase | Points out of 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Wirex One | 0% foreign transaction fee on every tier; the spread on the crypto sale is shown in the app before you confirm | 2 |
| ether.fi Cash | About 1% plus a margin of up to 0.5% on the Core tier; no margin at the top tiers | 1 |
| KAST | 0.5% to 1.75% on non-USD purchases, depending on country of residence, where the purchase happens and the card programme, per KAST's fee article | 1 |
| Bybit Card (EU) | 0.5% on top of Mastercard's rate, plus 0.9% to convert crypto at the point of sale | 1 |
| RedotPay | 1.2% on non-USD transactions, plus 1% when crypto becomes spendable balance | 1 |
Four of the five sit at one point out of two. Wirex One is the only card on the board that already clears the bar Stripe just described, and it does so on a card you can apply for today in the UK and the EU, and, on Wirex's own country list, the UAE.
What changes? The scores stay where they are today, since Stripe has not put a card in a reader's hand in any market we score. The argument has moved instead. A card that charges 1% to 2% abroad now competes with a rail that prices the home-market purchase at zero, and the apps building on that rail will say so in their marketing. Stripe already issues ordinary cards locally in the UK and across most of the EU, so a European stablecoin card range is a matter of when.
Two things follow on this site. From today every card profile shows the rails behind the card: who runs the infrastructure and who holds the licence, with the source next to each. Not every card names both on its own site; where a name comes from a third party, the profile labels it. And the Monday sweep carries a new watch item: the first consumer card built on Stripe's stablecoin issuing that a reader in the EU, the UK or the UAE can apply for. When one appears, it gets a record and a score like any other card here, and this article gets a dated line.
See the list →Sources: Stripe Crypto (@StripeCrypto) on X, 26 Sept 2026. Stripe Docs, Use Stripe Issuing in different countries (stablecoin cards, private preview, more than 30 countries), checked 26 Sept 2026. Stripe Docs, Stablecoin-backed card issuing, checked 26 Sept 2026. Stripe Docs, Stablecoin-backed cards for Bridge, Privy or third-party wallets, checked 26 Sept 2026. Bridge, Stablecoin-backed cards are now integrated with Stripe Issuing, 29 April 2026. Stripe newsroom, Bridge partners with Visa, 30 April 2025. Fortune, Visa to expand card partnership with Stripe's Bridge to over 100 countries, 3 March 2026. CBL card records, checked 24 Sept 2026.