Halocard: Virtual credit cards

General Project Showcase
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Hi Privacy Guides :waving_hand: I’m Ed, the founder of Halocard. We’ve had a few members recently sign up for Halocard and recommend that we share our journey with the community.

My story: 18 months ago I wanted to buy something online that I didn’t want to appear on my bank statement. I tried a virtual card from privacy (didn’t have an SSN), a prepaid card from vanilla prepaid (couldn’t activate outside US) and a no-KYC crypto card from stealths (no 3DS, blocked by merchant). I didn’t know anything about the payments industry but I’m an Entrepreneur at heart so I decided to start a company to solve this problem. 43 meetings with banks, 7 months of development and 3 compliance audits later, Halocard was born.

What Halocard is: US-issued, virtual credit cards that are available for everyone, not just US residents. You can:

  • Create USD virtual cards with custom spending limits
  • Fund them using stablecoins, debit/credit cards and (soon) your own USD bank account
  • Pay online and in-person anywhere Visa, Apple Pay or Google Pay are accepted

What problems does Halocard solve:

  1. Merchants don’t get your primary banking information. Your payments are masked and you can set custom billing details for every card.
  2. Contain the risk of credit card fraud. You can isolate merchants and payments with dedicated and one-time use cards.
  3. Global access to reliable virtual cards. The primary options today are restricted to US residents (Privacy, MySudo), require uncomfortable compromises (Plaid, per transaction fees) and have limited acceptance (debit, prepaid).

What Halocard does not solve:

  1. Anonymity. The Visa network can still see your transactions.
  2. KYC. We are legally-bound to perform an identity check.
  3. Restriction. We can’t issue cards to regions like Russia, DPRK, China, India, etc.

How we handle customer data:

We try not to. Transaction history is called via Visa’s API and KYC details are passed through to our vendor (Sumsub) and removed from our server. We will never sell data to advertisers, data brokers or third parties. The reality as a licensed Money Services Business (MSB) is we may be compelled to provide data to the US government or Visa at any time for compliance reasons.

Common questions we get asked:

  • What details are required for KYC? (1) name, (2) address, (3) DOB, (4) expected spend (5) identity document or SSN, and (6) taking a selfie. We pushed back heavily to try to reduce the steps required to pass KYC but it turns out the US Customer Identification Program (CIP) for Banks regulation is extremely clear.
  • Can I use whatever details I want with your cards? You can set whatever billing address you feel comfortable for your Halocards and this address should match what you enter online to pass any Address Verification System (AVS) checks that payment processors have in place.
  • What are your fees? $12 / month for 12 cards. Adding funds via USDC/USDT Stablecoins is free, ACH transfers (soon) is free and debit/credit cards or Apple/Google Pay is 5% (because of the insurance required against chargebacks). There are no fees for making purchases in USD and cross-border purchases include a 1.5% FX fee from Visa.

Request for the PrivacyGuides community:

We’re a small, independent team who haven’t taken VC funding and are building a product we love and use daily. Access to Halocard is currently through a waitlist, but we’d like to open up 3 slots to the community to test drive the platform.

In exchange, we’d ask for your feedback on what you love, what you don’t love and where we can improve. We’d love for you to help inform our roadmap and how we evolve Halocard. From the demand we’ve seen so far, we seem to be solving a problem that a lot of people care about.

More details at https://halocard.co

Let me know if you’d like access to the platform.

Fire away with any questions below, we’re an open book.

Kind regards,
Ed.
Founder, Halocard

4 Likes
Is there an anonymous credit or debit card, chargeable with Monero?
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Fucking brilliant! Solving the major issue we’ve had thus far with alternatives.

As far as I know, India has no sanctions on it. Can you also share a complete list of countries whose residents are prohibited from using Halocard?

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One more question:

Could you also explain how you keep our passport, ID card, drivers license info safe and secure? Or do you simply verify once and delete what we share in full and right away?

Seeing all that was being discussed with age verification, ID verification, etc. recently, this is going to be a very obvious concern many are going to have.

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Are there plans to develop a standalone NFC Payment app, so it’s possible to pay with the virtual cards in person without google?

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Step two if far too privacy invasive for my liking, hard pass.

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Even privacy.com does that. It’s not novel. Any product/service that is aiming to provide what this or privacy.com does would need to do it.

You can’t simply discount something when said something has always been legally mandated. It’s like saying I reject having a bank account because the documents they ask for is too much for you. I don’t know what to say to that. I get why you feel this way but I don’t get what you’d rather have a company do instead.

If a reputable VPN starts doing this when it didn’t before, then yes - I’d agree with you.

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Hi Ed, what benefits does your service offer over the free virtual cards from providers such as Revolut or Wise?

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I absolutely have the right to not use a service that requires me to upload government issued I.D.

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The right to choose to not use something and discounting something are two different things here.

But alright.

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Why is there a minimum balance requirement? Seems way less convenient to have to manage another account with its own balance, rather than just directly charging my debit card or bank account

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Can you explain more about how transaction history works? So after I do some transactions, how long do you ‘store’ that data? Is it kept indefinitely? not stored at all? or temporarily stored?

About the KYC, so you use a third party to validate/check the info, then does that third party hold on to and store my personal data?

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We’ve been hearing this feedback a lot and appreciate the kind words.

I should’ve used the word Restrictions. Card networks place restrictions on where cards can be issued. Jurisdictions like Russia and North Korea carry sanction risk, whereas India and China have an unfavourable regulatory environment they choose not to participate in.

The complete list can be found here: Is Halocard available in my country? | Halocard

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Thank you for asking this. We don’t keep data used for the verification (KYC) process. We collect it and submit it to our KYC provider Sumsub (their privacy policy) who verifies it and facilitates the document scan and selfie verification.

Once completed, we receive a token with either PASS or FAIL that we store as proof verification was completed. We only retain a user’s name, number and email to help manage their account.

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Been through the same loop almost exactly. Outside the US there are no options for this. Grateful someone was frustrated enough to actually build this. I’ve added myself to the waitlist. Interested in giving you real-world feedback.

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Hi! I’m not sure such an NFC payment app exists. If you want to pay contactless (via NFC) at a merchant, you need either a physical card that supports NFC or Apple/Google Pay on your phone. We only support Apple & Google Pay for in-person payments right now (rather than physical cards) because they’re more secure (every payment is tokenized) and can be setup immediately from any Halocard virtual card.

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Thanks for your question. Both Revolut & Wise are great products, but Halocard is used for different reasons.

  • If you’re not based in the US, you cannot get a US-issued Revolut or Wise card.

  • Halocard issues virtual credit cards which give you the highest probability of acceptance at US merchants relative to international debit and prepaid cards.

  • A number of our users don’t enjoy giving their information to large banks and have concerns over how their data is used.

We have a number of customers actively using their Wise and Revolut cards to fund their Halocard account, for one or more of the reasons above.

Does that help answer your question?

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Hey Ed, thanks for doing this! I’m always heartened to see a new addition in the Privacy Tech space

I’d like to ask about your KYC provider:

Can you speak a bit towards the vetting & selection process you used when choosing this provider?

I’m under no illusions: KYC is an inherently de-anonymizing & non-private process, by definition

Regardless, I see some elements in their Privacy Policy that do give me pause as a KYC compliance layman:

…we may process some Personal data to develop and improve existing Services to prevent and detect fraud and other illicit activities, including by means of artificial intelligence…

…Sumsub may process biometrics to verify whether the facial images submitted to it are likely to belong to the same person… for this purpose, extracting facial features from uploaded or recorded facial images…

we use our Liveness check to determine if the User isn’t holding a mobile phone, showing any signs of constraint, or attempting to defraud the system using emulators, static images, or ‘deep fakes’. As a rule, Users are prompted to blink, smile, or move their device while passing Liveness

This sounds as though Sumsub may collect user biometrics & feed it into some undisclosed AI processing system… or am I reading too far into this?

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We also like the simplicity of directly charging a bank account, but the reality is that would require connecting an existing US bank account via Plaid. This isn’t an option for the majority of the world who live outside the US and early our research showed people are highly skeptical of giving a 3rd party their banking password. The only way to create a truly global solution was to allow people to fund their account however they want —stablecoins, debit/credit card or bank transfer — and all Halocard accounts will come with a functional US bank account in Q2 2026 to make that last method a little easier.

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Will it be the standard 2-3 days time frame for this ACH option?

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They were asking if you plan to develop an app to handle NFC payments, or an NFC payment feature baked into the halocard app. Some banks have done this by integrating NFC payments into their app. This would benefit many GrapheneOS users because google pay is not possible with GOS due to limitations imposed by Google. Anyway sounds like the answer is no.

That’s… surprising. I used to have my privacy.com account linked to my debit card without the use of plaid. Whenever I made a payment it would just charge the debit card directly. They only stopped doing this a few years ago, I guess because the VC money ran out and they couldn’t absorb the transaction fees anymore. But it at least was possible.

This is interesting, but unless it comes with a large network of ATMs to enable easy cash payments, I don’t think it will be worth it to me personally since cash is easily the most private payment option apart from maybe monero. I use a credit union as my primary account that is part of the largest ATM network in the US.

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