Monolith

Monolith Review

A common argument for regular money (also known as fiat currency) as opposed to cryptocurrency is that you can’t use cryptocurrency to buy groceries and other everyday items. Well, through the use of a cryptocurrency debit card, you can. This is a review of Monolith, one of the crypto debit cards out there.

General information

The company behind Monolith is “Token”. Token is the trading name of Token Group Limited (a company registered in England and Wales (11098384)). Monolith also has a token by the same name. See more about the Tokencard cryptocurrency here.

Monolith is live and running! It is currently available in 31 different countries across Europe (EEA). It supports, inter alia, Ethereum, and any ERC20-token. There are a LOT of ERC20-tokens out there so this is definitely one of Monolith’s strengths.

The card supports two fiat currencies: EUR and GBP, and the card actually also supports Google Pay!

As a  few of its advantages, the card company mentions on its website that it is a VISA Debit Card (see more on that under VISA-card directly below) and that you can spend it at 45 million locations (anywhere that accepts VISA). These two are actually part of the same advantage, so not sure why they mention them as two different things. The third (second) advantages they highlight is that you can track your spendings in real time. This means that you get instant updates as you spend and you can view all of the transactions you have made in the app. Compared to some other crypto cards, this is an advantage. But compared to all "regular cards", this is just the way it always is.

VISA-card

Monolith is a VISA-card. This means that you can use it anywhere where VISA-cards are accepted and withdraw cash from more than 34 million cash machines across the globe. The card is also connected to a non-custodial wallet.

US-investors

US-investors may not use this card. So, if you’re an American and you’re looking to get a cryptocurrency debit card, you’ll have to resort to this crypto debit card list and pick one of the cards where there is a green checkmark in the “US Allowed”-column. It shouldn’t be that hard for you now, should it?

Picture of Card

The following is a picture of the current design of the card.

Monolith Fees

We think that this card charges fees that are quite alright. They are at least not above industry average.

There are no monthly fees, nor any insurance fees. 

The fee for topping up the card is 1%, but 0% if you top up the card with DAI or TKN-tokens.

Domestic ATM withdrawal is free up to twice a month, and then GBP 0.75 / EUR 0.85 per withdrawal. There are no fees for domestic Point of Sales (using your card at a merchant).

The most important fee of them all is the commission on spending. Monolith Card has a commission on spending amounting to 1.75%. This means that if you buy a limited edition baseball cap for USD 100, this will reduce your crypto assets with USD 101.75. This might not seem like a lot for a one-time-purchase but over a long period it can add up to substantial amounts.

For a nice overview of the fees involved with using this card, please see below:

There is a daily general spending limit, set at EUR 8,000. Also, you can't withdraw more cash than EUR 350 per day.

Concluding remarks

If this is the cryptocurrency debit card for you, congratulations.

If not, check out one of the other epic cryptocurrency debit cards in our cryptocurrency debit card list. Good luck!