metamask card declines everything and the USDC is still sitting in my wallet

I spend a lot of time in this board asking other people for evidence, so here is mine, in advance.

MetaMask Card. Worked since March. On Monday every charge started declining. The wallet still holds the USDC — I can see it, I can move it, I can send it anywhere I like. Nothing about the wallet is frozen because there is nothing to freeze.

What changed on my side: last Friday I moved the bulk of my stablecoins between chains to chase a better rate on something unrelated. That is the only thing.

What I want to know is whether the card is bound to a chain in a way that is not obvious from the app, because if it is, that is a design detail nobody writes about and it just cost me four days.

yes. it is. that is the whole thing

Then say the rest of it, because the app does not.

The card spends from your wallet, which means at authorisation time something has to pull from a specific token on a specific chain with a specific allowance already approved.

It supports Linea, Base and Solana. When you set it up you approved a spending allowance against one of them. Move your usdc off that chain and the allowance is still there, still valid, still pointing at a balance that is now zero. From the card's side you have no money. From the wallet's side you have all of it. Both screens are telling the truth.

Open the card settings, look at which chain and which token it is set to spend, and either bridge back or re-point it and re-approve. The re-approval is a transaction, so it costs gas and it is not instant.

That is exactly it. Set to Linea, the usdc is on Base.

Worth adding that the allowance is per token as well as per chain. People bridge back, find it still declining, and it turns out they came back as a different USDC contract.

self custody is amazing but this is the third thread this month where the answer is an allowance

Be your own bank. Also be your own back office.

Re-pointed to Base, re-approved, one transaction, about forty cents of gas. Card authorised on the first attempt eleven minutes later.

So: four days of declines caused by a setting that is two screens deep and is not surfaced anywhere in the failure. The card does not say insufficient balance on the configured chain. It says declined.

Marking this solved. For anyone searching: if a MetaMask Card stops spending and your wallet still shows funds, you have not been frozen, you have moved your money out from under an allowance.

This is the good version of the failure, and it is worth saying so.

Nothing was held, nothing was reviewed, nobody made a decision about you. A configuration stopped matching reality and you fixed it yourself in one transaction without asking anyone's permission. Compare that to any thread on this board where the answer is week six of an autoresponder.

The cost of self-custodial rails is that you have to understand them. That is a real cost. It is not the same kind of cost as having no recourse.

A small practical addition; light KYC still applied at issuance here, so this is self-custodial in the funds sense but not in the identity sense. Worth being clear about which of the two you were buying.

Thank you for writing this up properly. I had the same thing in May and assumed I had been shut down, then it started working again when I bridged funds back for an unrelated reason. Never knew why until now.