Ready Shuts Card Program After Issuer Kulipa's Sudden Wind-Down

Ready, the self-custodial wallet formerly known as Argent, shut down its card program on Wednesday after its issuer wound down without warning, co-founder Itamar Lesuisse said in a post on X.

"We were given no notice, so if you were relying on the card today, you found out at roughly the same time we did," Lesuisse wrote. Eligible card subscriptions will be refunded automatically, he said, and user assets are unaffected because Ready wallets are self-custodial.

The issuer is Kulipa, the Paris-based startup that built card programs for roughly 20 crypto wallets and fintechs. Its failure took down more than Ready: Solflare, the Solana wallet, said on Tuesday its card stopped working the same way. "Our card issuing partner Kulipa is winding down due to solvency issues," Solflare co-founder Vidor Böjthe wrote. "The debt was too deep and the company essentially collapsed."

Kulipa had raised a $6.2 million seed round co-led by Flourish Ventures and 1kx, with White Star Capital and Fabric Ventures, on April 1 — four months before it collapsed.

Kulipa did not reply to a request for comment from The Defiant by publishing time.

STRK, the token of Starknet, the network where Ready's cardholders earned cashback, fell 5% in the past 24 hours, while Bitcoin gained 1.1%, according to CoinGecko.

Three Points of Failure

The outage revives a question the crypto card sector has mostly avoided: how many programs sit on the same rented infrastructure.

"You have many card programs sitting on the same two or three vendors," Anton Lobintsev, co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure provider SquareFi, told The Defiant. "Projects have simply rented the same handful of issuer processors and BaaS providers, the same custody API. It's the easiest and cheapest way to launch, but these are three points of failure for an entire industry."

Self-custody limited the damage, Lobintsev said, but it didn't prevent it. "If your balance never left your wallet until the swipe, the vendor can die, and you're untouched. If it was pre-funded into the issuer's account, you're now a creditor in a bankruptcy estate. But self-custody still didn't stop the outage, because the issuing rail underneath it was still rented."

Both Ready and Solflare built their cards to pull funds from users' wallets at the moment of purchase, so no customer balances were held at Kulipa when it failed.

Warning Signs in June

Ready's card had already absorbed one shock from its issuer. On June 16, the wallet cut off card service for users outside the European Economic Area with about an hour's notice, after Kulipa shifted to a new issuing partner licensed only for European jurisdictions.

Lesuisse said Ready is building "the next chapter" of its product on new infrastructure "designed for greater reliability and long-term scale."

Solflare said a replacement card, with Apple Pay and Google Pay support, higher limits and cashback, will launch in a few weeks. "The card is paused, not gone," Böjthe wrote.