Can Elios block certain transactions?
Card payments can be declined, like with any Visa card. This can happen if a payment exceeds your spending limit, if your card is frozen, or where our issuing partner is required to decline for regulatory reasons, such as sanctioned merchants or restricted countries.
What Elios cannot do is lock your funds. Your wallet is self-custodial, and you always retain the ability to withdraw your stablecoins on chain using your own keys, independently of Elios.
What activities are prohibited?
Prohibited activities may include:
- Illegal goods or services
- Sanctioned activity
- Fraud
- Money laundering
- Terrorist financing
- Scams
- Unlicensed financial activity
- Restricted gambling
- Attempts to bypass compliance controls
The full list is available in the Elios terms here.
Are Elios balances insured?
No. Elios balances are not bank deposits, and they are not covered by deposit insurance schemes such as FDIC or similar programs. This is true of stablecoin balances generally, wherever they are held.
The protection model is different. Your balance is held in USDC, a fully-reserved digital dollar issued by Circle, backed one-for-one by cash and short-term US Treasuries, with reserves attested publicly every month. And because Elios is self-custodial, there is no Elios balance sheet your funds sit on: your stablecoins are in your own wallet, so there is no intermediary whose failure could take your funds down with it. Deposit insurance exists precisely to protect against that intermediary risk, which self-custody removes at the source.
Funds deposited in Earn vaults carry additional considerations, as they are deployed into DeFi lending protocols. See our Earn entries for how that works and what the risks are.