SolCard Pay Charges 5% From Platinum to Non-Platinum
SolCard has added card-to-card transfers between its own users. Pick a recipient by their @tag, enter an amount, and the balance moves from one card to the other without a wallet address, a network choice or an onchain fee. Two conditions sit on top of it: not every card can receive, and one direction costs money.
Only Platinum cards can receive a payment
The @tag routes to a receiving card, and that card has to be Platinum. Anyone on a lower card can send but cannot be paid, so a transfer between two SolCard users only completes if the person on the receiving end has upgraded. The tag itself is set once and cannot be changed afterwards: lowercase letters, up to twelve characters. Display name, profile picture and receiving card stay editable.
Recipients see the tag, display name and picture. Legal name, email and account ID are not shown to the other side.
The only fee runs from Platinum down
Payments between accounts of the same card type cost nothing, and a non-Platinum account paying a Platinum account costs nothing. A Platinum account paying a non-Platinum account is charged 5%, taken out of the amount: send $100 and the recipient gets $95. If the payment fails after the fee was deducted, the fee returns to the card.
A fee normally lands on the party holding the cheaper product. Here it lands on the premium one. What it produces is a one-way free lane: money moves upward into Platinum cards at no cost and downward at a 5% toll. Since receiving already requires Platinum, the only way to be paid at all is to hold the tier, and the only way to send money out of it without a 5% cut is to send it to another Platinum holder.
For a group splitting a bill, that changes who should be collecting. Whoever holds Platinum is the cheapest person to pay, and the worst person to be reimbursed by.
Minimums and the $5 that has to stay behind
A payment is at least $1.00, or $20.00 when a Platinum account is paying a non-Platinum one. The sending card must keep $5.00 on it, so the most that can be sent is the balance minus five dollars rather than the balance. Larger payments carry sending limits and may ask for a face check before they go through.
The balance being moved is the same one the card spends from, topped up with wBTC or wETH, USDT on Tron, USDG, EURC or the other assets SolCard accepts. Nothing leaves the card account during a transfer, which is why there is no network fee and no address to get wrong.
Whether any of this is useful comes down to the tier question rather than the feature. Two Platinum holders get free instant transfers between cards they both already spend from. A Platinum holder repaying someone on a lower card pays 5% for the privilege, and at that price an ordinary stablecoin transfer to the recipient's wallet is usually cheaper, at the cost of the address, the network choice and the top-up on the other side.
Sources: SolCard Pay: Send Money to Friends by @tag, X announcement.
