Monolith (formerly TokenCard)
A 2017 ICO that kept a Visa card running for five years
A London-based non-custodial Ethereum wallet app with a Visa debit card for UK and European users, funded by a token sale in May 2017.
- Capital raised (announced)
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
- Customers served, by the company's count
- Estimated
Company-reported cumulative European customers served, 2019–2024; not simultaneous or daily active users.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| TKN token sale | 2017 | Not disclosed |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mel Gelderman | — | Co-Founder & CEO, token.com (since October 2021) | Oct 2026 | |
| David Hoggard | — | Not established | Oct 2026 |
Timeline
2 May 2017
May 2019
Issued through Contis Financial Services; the company was renamed from TokenCard to Monolith the same year.
17 August 2019
He told CoinDesk the team had done it through sales of ether in 2017 and later by borrowing DAI against ether rather than selling it. CoinDesk reported a team of 24, 19 of them engineers.
8 October 2024
How it ended
Pivoted away
The company closed Monolith on 8 October 2024, deactivating every card and closing every account; wallets remained reachable through users' own seed phrases. Its notice said rising regulatory requirements in the EU and UK made the service hard to keep running without significant investment, and that it was moving on to a successor app, Token.com.
What happened next
- Aftermath28 February 2025
The company told TKN holders that details of swapping into the successor app's token would follow in April 2025.
Still alive
Open spot
Monolith (formerly TokenCard) is gone. Is your crypto card still running?
Spotlight your project here.
Sources
10 sources behind this page.
- 1TokenCard ICO Raises USD 16.7 Million In 30 Minutes 13 Seconds · Bok Consulting Pty Ltd · May 2017
- 2Monolith (TKN) Review: Complete Card Solution for DeFi · Coin Bureau
- 3This ICO Startup Didn't Die During Crypto Winter. It Has DAI to Thank · CoinDesk · Aug 2019
- 4"TokenCard" (an Ethereum based VISA-DEBIT card) – ICO sells out in less than an hour, probable partnership announced by Bancor · EtherWorld · May 2017
- 5Monolith · IQ.wiki · user-editable
- 6LinkedIn profile of Mel Gelderman · LinkedIn (self-published profile, viewed by a person) · user-editable
- 7Mel Gelderman (@MelGelderman) account record · Mel Gelderman on X (account id 2148914485), retrieved via twitterapi.io
- 8Monolith | Customers (closure notice) · Monolith (company website, retrieved after the closure)
- 9X account lookup: @monolith_web3 · twitterapi.io (X data provider)
- 10Search of @MelGelderman posts mentioning Monolith or TokenCard, 2017 to 2021 · X, retrieved via twitterapi.io
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.