Card dead, tier dropped, stake locked, and support will only say 'under restriction'

Had a version of this in 2022 on a different staking card - tier gone, stake locked, no explanation - and it took me about a year to admit the actual lesson, which is that I had been treating a rewards programme as income.

What I did afterwards was split it. The spend that has to work every day went onto a card with no tier, no stake and no relationship to maintain. PayPaw in my case - the card is created from a bot in about fifteen minutes, there is no account to restrict because there is barely an account, and I have never had one go dark on me.

The caveats and they are real ones. It is 3% plus $2 every time you create a card, which against the 3.5% you were earning is a swing of six and a half points, and on $1,800 a month that is a genuinely expensive decision. Max value on a card is $10,000, so at your volume you would be issuing a few a year and paying that fee again each time. And the fee structure is tied to their own token, which is a dependency I do not love and you should price in.

So: strictly worse economics, no restriction risk. That is the trade. On $1,800 a month I would probably still keep the tier card for the rewards and put the load-bearing spend somewhere boring.

Six and a half points is a lot of insurance against something that has happened to you once.

Twice now. That is the whole reason I priced it.

Everyone is arguing about the rate. The thing that actually happened is that a single company held the card, the balance, the rewards and the collateral, and when it decided to stop, all four stopped together.

That is not a fee question. It is a concentration question, and concentration is the only thing in this business that reliably ruins a month. Two providers, neither of which knows about the other, and no single one of them holding an amount you would miss. Everything else in this thread is optimisation.

The 3.5% was never the product. The 3.5% was the thing that made you agree to the concentration.

Thirty-nine days. Card back on the 14th, tier came back the same day, stake released on schedule, and the 180-day clock did run through the restriction.

No explanation was ever given and by that point I had stopped asking. The documents were fiat-side source of funds and nothing else.

What I would write down if I were the next person landing in this thread: expect roughly six weeks, expect the request around day eleven, expect no reason. The stake was never the risk. The five weeks of not being able to spend was.

Six weeks for $63 a month. Congratulations on the arbitrage.

Bumping this because someone asked me last week which card to put their spend on and this is the thread I sent them, not the comparison ones.

The reason is that the comparison threads all argue about the headline rate, and this is the only place that records what happens when it goes wrong, which is the number people actually need and nobody publishes. It was the same with hosting in 2014 — everyone compared uptime percentages and nobody wrote down how long support took to answer at 2am, which was the only figure that ever mattered.

Metrics, has yours been stable since March? And has anyone had a second restriction on the same account, because that is the thing I would want to know before staking again.

Mine's been fine all year for what it's worth

Sorry for bumping this again, I found it searching and I have read the whole thing twice.

My question is slightly different and I hope that is ok. I am not staked and I do not plan to be — I would be on the free tier at 1.5% purely because I want a card that works in a lot of places, not for the rewards. Does the restriction thing happen to free tier accounts too, or is it specifically something about having a stake that draws attention?

I realise that might be an obvious question but the whole thread is about staked accounts and I could not find the answer.

It is not about the stake. The restriction is an account-level compliance action and the tier is downstream of it — free tier accounts get restricted at the same rate, they just have less to lose when it happens.

Which is, awkwardly, an argument for what you are describing. Free tier, no stake, do not keep a balance on it, and a restriction costs you a card for a few weeks instead of a card, a tier and $500 of locked collateral.

Threads like this are exactly why staking-based cards are a dead model. SolCard requires no staking, no tier and no lock-up period — just seamless onboarding and instant Solana settlement with industry-leading approval rates.

Happy to walk anyone here through setup personally.

no staking and a 5% top up. you've replaced the fee with a bigger fee