How Peanut Card Funding Works

Your balance lives in your own passkey-controlled smart wallet on Arbitrum — Peanut never holds your money. To make card payments instant, only up to your card limit is parked in a dedicated collateral account with two keys: yours and Rain's, our card issuer. Everything above the limit never leaves your wallet. Money leaves collateral in exactly two ways: it pays for a purchase you made with your card, or it goes back to your wallet — and going back needs your key (your passkey) plus Rain's co-signature. Rain cannot send your money anywhere else.

The Peanut Card is currently in closed beta, rolling out gradually through a waitlist. Check if you're eligible to skip the waitlist at peanut.me/shhhhh.

Why a collateral account?

The Visa network authorizes a card payment in milliseconds. It cannot wait for an on-chain transaction to confirm. So when you pay with your Peanut Card, the merchant sees an instant yes/no from the card processor — not from your wallet.

For this to work safely, the card needs a pool of funds it is allowed to draw from without asking your wallet. That pool is the collateral account.

• Only up to your card limit is ever parked in collateral.
• The rest of your balance stays in your smart wallet — fully self-custodial, always accessible to you for sends, payment links, requests, withdrawals, and crypto transfers.
• You can raise or lower your card limit at any time from the Card screen. Raising it tops up collateral from your wallet automatically. Lowering it does not move the difference back automatically — the excess stays available for card spending until you withdraw it manually (it also returns to your wallet if you cancel the card).

The short cool-down between collateral pulls

Card payments spend directly against the collateral that is already parked, so they are never subject to a cool-down. The cool-down only comes into play when another kind of payment needs to pull funds out of your card collateral — a P2P send, a QR payment, a request payment, or a crypto withdrawal larger than your wallet balance. Each pull is authorized by a one-time signature from our card issuer, and to prevent that signature from being reused, the next collateral pull is locked for roughly 2–3 minutes.

In practice this means:

• Card payments are never blocked by the cool-down. Paying with your Peanut Card is a card-network authorization, not a collateral withdrawal — back-to-back card payments work normally.
• The payment that triggered the lock completes normally. The cool-down applies to the next collateral pull.
• Payments covered by your wallet balance never touch collateral and are unaffected.

If you see the "Please wait" message and the in-app timer, that is what is happening. Once the timer hits zero, you can pull from collateral again.

How to avoid the cool-down

If you regularly chain payments that pull from collateral (e.g. several sends or QR payments in a row while your wallet balance is low):

• Keep enough in your wallet. Payments covered by your wallet balance skip collateral — and the cool-down — entirely.
• Lower your card limit so less of your balance sits in collateral, then withdraw the excess back to your wallet (lowering the limit alone doesn't move it back).

Card payments themselves never need a workaround — the cool-down doesn't apply to them.

Are my funds safe?

Yes — and it helps to distinguish the two places your money can be:

• Your smart wallet (everything above your card limit) lives on Arbitrum, backed by your device passkey. Only you can move funds out of it — it never leaves your control.
• Your collateral account (up to your card limit) is a dedicated smart contract with two keys: yours and Rain's, our card issuer. Money leaves it in exactly two ways — paying for a purchase you made with your card, or going back to your wallet, which needs your passkey signature plus Rain's co-signature. Our card terms give Rain standard rights to settle card charges you've made from your collateral — that is what Rain's key is for — and nothing more: Rain cannot use your collateral for anything else. If you cancel the card, your collateral returns to your wallet.

For the full security and custody model see Security & Fund Safety.