Solflare Card holders found out at the checkout. Cards began declining on Tuesday, and the explanation reached them hours later from Solflare's Vidor: Kulipa, the company that issued the plastic, is winding down over solvency issues and can no longer support the program.
Balances stayed put. The stablecoin card sitting on top of those balances stopped working anyway, with no notice.
Kulipa mattered more than its size suggested. It had issued over 120,000 cards since February 2025 and signed roughly 20 customers, among them Flutterwave, nSave, Solflare and Ready, formerly Argent.
On April 1 it announced a $6.2 million seed round co-led by Flourish Ventures and 1kx, and the same day it announced a deal to push stablecoin cards across Africa with Flutterwave.
The June warning went out with one hour of notice
Six weeks before the wind down, Ready Card users outside the European Economic Area lost the ability to spend. That cut landed on June 16 with roughly an hour of warning, and Ready named Kulipa, its regulated e-money issuer, as the cause.
Most coverage filed it as an issuer change. Read against Tuesday, it looks more like a company pulling back to the one jurisdiction where its licence and its float still held. Solflare's card ran in 31 countries, mostly Europe and the UK, which is exactly the ground Kulipa had kept.
| Date | Kulipa milestone |
|---|---|
| July 2024 | $3M pre-seed, Argent partnership announced |
| February 2025 | Card issuing infrastructure goes live |
| April 1, 2026 | $6.2M seed announced, 120,000+ cards, 20 customers, Flutterwave Africa deal |
| June 16, 2026 | Ready Card spending cut for non-EEA users, about one hour of notice |
| July 28, 2026 | Wind down over solvency, Solflare Card declines at checkout |
Volume grew 70% a month right up to the end
Kulipa's lead investor published the growth number in April: 70% month over month in transaction volume. The stablecoin card business runs on float.
The issuer pre-funds settlement with the networks, pays merchants before the on-chain leg clears, and carries the gap on its own balance sheet. Kulipa itself listed pre-fundings and settlement among the complexity it handled. Faster growth widens that gap, and the $9.2 million it had raised in total does not carry a widening gap for long.
Self custody covered the balance and left the payment exposed
Solflare and Ready both shipped non-custodial products, and both told users something true this week: your funds are safe. They are. Nothing in the stablecoin card rail ever touched the keys.
What self custody does not cover is the permission to spend, which lives with a licensed issuer, a BIN sponsor and a card network, and disappears the moment one of them files. TON users met a version of this when the chain closed its only bridge and 148,000 wallets had to move. Uphold's CredEarn customers met a harsher one.
Kulipa has published nothing. Its site still sells card programs to wallets. The live questions for cardholders are refunds on prepaid tiers and whether Solflare, Ready and Flutterwave can move to another issuer; Ready refunded its Metal subscribers 120 USDC within about ten business days in June.
Wind downs pay out slowly, the way Poolin's 11,700 creditors are waiting on a $52 million opening bid against $163.7 million owed. Flutterwave has said nothing about the Africa rollout it announced on April 1.
