BitPay card review — closed since June 2023, so who is this page for?

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

There is something worth saying plainly before anything else: the BitPay card is not a card you can apply for. The prepaid Mastercard programme run by BitPay stopped loading on 1 June 2023 and stopped spending, and card support ended, on 15 June 2023. If you landed on this page looking for a way to order one, that option does not exist. What does exist is a smaller, narrower question for two different groups of people — those who still hold crypto in a BitPay wallet and want to know what became of the balance that was meant to become card spending, and those who were about to choose a crypto card and want an honest map of what happens when one of these programmes ends. I read the card’s own public pages, its help library and the regulator-facing material, and I compared what is stated officially against what survives only in third-party write-ups. The conditions described are current as of 2026-10-20.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

I want to be careful about one thing before we go further. A shut-down card is an unusual review subject, and most of the details people search for — how to apply, what the ATM fee is, which countries it worked in — are no longer answerable from official sources at all. Where that is the case I will say the card’s public pages do not state it, rather than filling the gap. And where a number survives only because a review site recorded it before the closure, I will label it unofficial and historical, because it describes a product that no longer runs.

The score: 1.7 out of 10

The headline number is 1.7 / 10. That is not a judgement on BitPay the company, whose wallet business still exists and which describes itself as licensed to engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. That is a company-wide statement, not a statement about a card. The 1.7 measures a card programme that no longer issues cards, whose support channel is closed, and whose replacement was reported as never having launched.

A sub-2 score on a card review is a strong thing to publish, so let me explain what it is and is not measuring. The “who can get it” mark is zero because eligibility is now moot — there is nothing to be eligible for. The cost mark is three rather than zero because a real fee schedule survives, but only unofficially, and I would not price anything on it today. The reliability mark of 1 is the honest centre of gravity: a prepaid card product that ended the way this one ended is a poor bet for someone who needs a card to work next month.

Who does the score suit? Almost nobody, as a card choice. Who does the page suit? Former BitPay cardholders trying to trace a leftover balance, and readers comparing crypto cards who want to understand shutdown risk before they commit. If you fall into the second group, the honest summary is that BitPay is not a candidate any more, and the sections below on alternatives are where your actual decision sits.

What happened to the programme

The story is not a sudden failure but a chain, and the chain is the useful part — it is the same shape that crypto card closures tend to take.

In January 2023, Metropolitan Commercial Bank announced its exit from crypto banking. That bank was the kind of partner a prepaid card needs: somebody willing to hold the funds and issue the card under a network licence. Once it stepped away, the card had no issuing spine. On 17 May 2023, cardholders were emailed that the prepaid Mastercard programme was winding down. Loading stopped on 1 June 2023. ATM access and spending ended on 15 June 2023. Remaining balances were to be mailed as cheques, around 30 June 2023.

What happened next is where accounts start to diverge. One review reports that a promised replacement card never launched. CryptoCardHub, an unofficial third-party site, says new applications are paused and that a waitlist is open — but it carries no date, so I would not treat it as a live offer. The BitPay site as it stands in 2026 shows no card at all. Search results will keep serving you the wallet, the merchant payments and the old card pages in the same breath; the card is simply no longer among them.

There is precedent here, and it is worth knowing because BitPay was not the first. In 2018 the non-US prepaid Visa was shut down after Visa revoked Wave Crest’s licence. Visa also terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022, after which the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. The pattern is familiar: the network licences the issuer, the issuer is a bank that can change its mind about crypto, and the consumer is left holding a piece of plastic with a balance behind it.

On the details people usually want — who could get the card, what the KYC rules were, whether it was virtual or physical, what it cost, what it charged in fees, which wallets worked, what the rewards or tiers were, which currencies, how delivery worked, what verification looked like, what the news page said about open applications — the card’s public pages do not state any of it, for the straightforward reason that the pages are gone. The one thing still visible is the app download badges for App Store, Google Play, Windows and Mac, displayed with no ratings attached; I did not read the store ratings.

The fees that are sometimes quoted online belong to the historical card and are unofficial. Per a CryptoSlate review: a 3% foreign transaction fee. Per third-party summaries: $2.50 per domestic ATM withdrawal, $5 per month dormancy fee after 90 days of inactivity, and $10 for a standard card replacement. BitPay itself did not disclose these on the pages available to me, and the programme is closed regardless. Worth knowing as a shape, not as a price you could ever pay.

If you already had the card

If you are one of the people holding a residual position, this is the section that matters, and I want to be honest about how thin the confirmed information is.

The last day to load the card was 1 June 2023. Since 15 June 2023 you cannot spend, and you cannot use an ATM. Officially, the card’s own public pages do not state the ATM terms, the limits, the funding routes or the withdrawal method — those pages no longer exist. Unofficially, for the historical card: a $2.50 domestic ATM withdrawal fee, and a $10,000 daily purchase cap with a $25,000 monthly ATM cap, per a CryptoSlate review. Those numbers described a product that had already stopped working by the time they were recorded, so treat them as history.

The one thing the record does show is the route out. Remaining balances were to be issued as a cheque to the address linked to the card, within roughly 30 days after the 15 June 2023 cut-off — so cheques would have been in circulation around 30 June 2023. I found no official statement of a refund amount and no claims process. That absence matters: if you are still waiting on money from 2023, the answer is not a public rule you can point to, it is a support contact.

And here is the practical limit: card support has ceased. The site still offers a help library, and support is described as reachable from the app, but nothing on those pages sets out the languages or hours for anything card-related. That combination — a wallet business that still has support, and a card that no longer does — means a question about your card balance gets routed to a company that no longer runs the card.

What I would actually do, in order:

• Contact BitPay support through the app and ask specifically about the cheque issued after the 15 June 2023 cut-off, referencing the address linked to the card.
• If that returns nothing, treat it as an unresolved claim and take that fact to whatever body handles consumer complaints where you live — an ombudsman, a financial regulator, or a chargeback route if a cheque was issued and never arrived.
• Check whether the balance ever sat in the card account at all, or in the BitPay wallet. Those are different systems, and the wallet still exists while the card does not.
• Move anything that is still spendable into a wallet you control, or into a provider that publishes its own fee schedule and support terms — which is the section below.

I want to add one caution without making it a lecture. BitPay is not a scammer and there is no suggestion of that here — this is a licensed-company product that ended for structural reasons. But a wallet balance you can see and a claim you cannot see are different risks, and the difference is worth noticing once, at the start.

What can go wrong

Beyond the closure itself, three risk patterns are worth naming, because they apply to whichever card you end up choosing instead.

Programmes end, and your money is a cheque. This is not a BitPay quirk; it is the default shape. Programme closures typically run in order: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw their remaining balances. One 2026 closure reported by a secondary source stopped new loads on 8 July 2026 and spending on 8 August 2026 — a single unconfirmed source, but the structure is the one BitPay followed. A prepaid card has no claim on a bank deposit behind it. The issuer’s licence can be withdrawn, and the network can pull the programme, and when it does, your balance becomes a payout queue.

The issuer is a bank that can change its mind. BitPay’s card died when its issuing bank exited crypto banking, not when BitPay did anything wrong. If you hold a crypto card, you are holding exposure to a regulated bank partner’s appetite for crypto, and that appetite is not a property of your card provider.

Complaints concentrate on the parts a shutdown breaks. On Trustpilot, read 20 October 2026, the BitPay company page shows 1.2/5 across 299 reviews, 89% of them one-star. These are company reviews, not card reviews, and I am separating them deliberately — but the themes are what you would expect at exactly the moment a card dies and a wallet stays open: funds that cannot be withdrawn or sent (June to October 2026), KYC described as burdensome or declined, including one report of KYC demanded for a $15 payment in October 2026, support reachable only through bots with no phone option (2026), and an account closure refused in December 2025. Some reviews promote recovery services for scam losses; those claims are unverified and should be ignored entirely. The company does not reply to negative reviews.

Two structural facts sit underneath all of this. First, crypto transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen private key has no built-in recovery — the network cannot freeze or return funds. Custodial platforms have a real record of failure: Mt. Gox at about US$350 million reported stolen across 2011–2014, Coincheck at about US$400 million in 2018, and Ronin Network at US$625 million in 2022. Second, the reversal rights you might expect do not necessarily apply. US debit card rights come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z; prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed. When a prepaid card’s issuer simply stops, you may be in the weakest of those positions rather than the strongest.

On identity checks and privacy, one clarification that is often muddled: nationality is recorded and screened separately from residence, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy are applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as to the country on your address. That is why a card can be open to residents of a country and closed to citizens of it. I am not going to explain how to get around either list — the answer, if a name appears on one, is that the card will not serve you, and the alternative is to pick a provider whose published eligibility covers you.

One more thing the card’s shutdown illustrates, about funds rather than cards: EMIs must safeguard customer funds, by segregating them or insuring them, but such funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by deposit guarantee schemes. BitPay’s own status is separate: the site states it is licensed to engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services, and the wallet provider is named as BitPay Software, LLC. Nothing official identifies the card’s issuer.

What to take instead

If you are choosing a card today, the BitPay card is off the table, so here is what the working alternatives look like measured against the same kind of criteria. Three of them, and they are not variations on one product — they are three different bets.

The ordering here is worth pausing on. MetaMask scores highest partly because its model is structurally different: it does not hold your balance, so a shutdown does not strand your funds — it holds the card number and the MetaMask card itself. RedotPay and Bybit are closer to what BitPay was, balance-based cards, and both carry the same shutdown risk in principle. BitPay’s own score was 1.7. Higher still does not mean safe.

RedotPay (6.9 / 10) is the closest structural replacement: virtual and physical cards, Visa debit in the Singapore terms, with a USD card on a USD BIN and an HKD card on an HKB BIN. Funding is on-chain crypto deposit, or buying crypto in the app (ETH, USDC, USDT, region-dependent); USDT-TRC20 minimum deposit is 1 USDT after network fees, each asset is accepted only on the networks shown on the Deposit page, and those networks can change; the deposit fee to card balance is free. Costs: virtual card application 10.00 USD, physical 100.00 USD (not cancellable or refundable once paid), virtual replacement 5.00 USD first and 10.00 USD each later, account maintenance waived, and the 5 USD welcome reward cannot be used toward the issuance fee; the paid tier RedotPay Pro is 12.90 USD monthly or 129.00 USD annual. Fees: 1.00% transaction fee for crypto conversion, waived on default-currency transactions and 1.20% on non-default currency; small authorisations of 1.00 USD or less have the first 5 per card per month waived then 0.2 USD; declined transactions have the first 3 per month waived then 0.5 USD; some merchants carry 1.5% with a 0.50 USD minimum, first 3 per month waived — Gulf Health Counsel, Free Fire, PUBG Mobile, Brawl Stars, eFootball, Facebook Ads, Discord. That fee table is effective 1 December 2025. On eligibility, two official lists word it differently and you should read both: a KYC list states that citizens of the listed countries or regions cannot complete identity verification or use the services, based on local regulations and sanctions policies, not on individuals — it includes, among others, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, the United States, Venezuela, Zimbabwe. A card-issuance list dated 28 August 2026, 47 places, adds India, Indonesia, Morocco, Nepal, Singapore and Turkey as residents ineligible for both virtual and physical cards, and states they cannot be billing addresses; citizenship is not mentioned there. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Serbia are on both lists. Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan and the UAE are on neither.

Bybit Card (6.0 / 10) is the exchange-bound one, and its price list is the most intricate of the three. Cards: virtual and physical, with a virtual card obtained first, no physical card in Peru, rolled out in phases. Networks and currencies vary by region — Argentina Mastercard prepaid in ARS; AIFC, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Australia and Mexico “Mastercard credit card” (as written); Brazil and Peru Visa prepaid; Asia Pacific Visa credit; card currency USD for AIFC, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Australia and Asia Pacific, ARS, MXN, BRL, and PEN or USD in Peru. Validity ranges from 3 years to 6 years by region. Cost: virtual issuance free in all regions until further notice, no annual or cancellation fee listed with a value; physical issuance or replacement Australia 29.99 USD, Argentina 5 USD/USDT, Georgia 29.99 USDT, Kazakhstan (AIFC) 29.99 USDT, Asia Pacific 5 USDT, Brazil and Mexico none; VIPs holding a physical card in Australia, Kazakhstan (AIFC), Georgia or Asia Pacific pay no issuance or replacement fee, and the cards page states auto interest and no annual fees. Fees: crypto conversion 0.9% over the One-Click Sell rate in Australia, Asia Pacific, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Brazil and Mexico; 0.5% in Argentina; Peru not supported. FX fee on top of the network rate: 2% Australia, Asia Pacific, Georgia, Mexico; 2% “International Fee” in Kazakhstan (AIFC) on purchases outside Kazakhstan even in USD; 7% Argentina; 1.5% Brazil; 1% Peru, with FX padding of 0% for the Australia group and Mexico, 5% Argentina, 1% Brazil and the excess refunded. Argentina adds VAT 21% on foreign digital services, a 30% tax on foreign transactions and provincial gross-income tax of 1%–13.2%. Funding: no balance of its own — it draws on the Funding Account and the Flexible Easy Earn balance, fiat first, and if fiat is insufficient crypto is sold at the One-Click Sell rate plus the conversion fee; BTC, ETH, XRP, USDT, USDC and GRAM with a reorderable default priority of USDT over USDC over GRAM over BTC over ETH over XRP. Rewards from 5 October 2026, 10:00 UTC: only crypto-funded transactions earn points or cashback, fiat-funded spending does not, with tiers Base 2.00% capped at 5 USD, Beta 2% capped at 50 USD at 500 USD spend, Alpha 4% capped at 150 USD at 3,500 USD, Apex 6% capped at 250 USD at 9,500 USD, Omega 8% capped at 400 USD at 12,500 USD, and Infinite 10% capped at 600 USD at 25,000 USD; points pend four calendar days, cashback in USDT equals points × 0.002, Auto Cashback must be on, Pay Later instalment bonus adds 1%, welcome 10% cashback up to 110 USDT in the first 30 days, referral 20 USDT or 10 USDT. On eligibility, one line matters more than the rest: the cards page states the product is not meant for European Economic Area customers and that all EEA customer participation is strictly prohibited. Regions listed in the help center are Argentina, AIFC (Kazakhstan), Georgia, Kazakhstan, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Asia Pacific; unsupported countries are registered as interest rather than refused outright. Bybit’s separate restricted list for fiat services includes Belarus, the Russian Federation, Serbia, China and the United States — that list covers deposits, withdrawals and One-Click Buy, not the card as such, and no card-specific citizenship rule was found.

MetaMask (7.1 / 10) avoids the stored-balance problem entirely: it spends directly from the connected wallet, on Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, with mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT named among the tokens. Cost is free for the virtual card with no annual or maintenance fee, and $199/year for Metal; fees are described as a minimal per-transaction fee with no additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee, Mastercard’s rate applying instead, though the amount was not stated on the pages read. Cashback is paid in mUSD into the Money Account — 1% on Virtual, 3% headline on Metal but limited by footnote to 3% on the first $10,000 spent and 1% after — plus a $FLY bonus of 5X on Virtual and 7X on Metal via the Blackbird dining app. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories; elsewhere there is a waitlist. Proof of residency is required, ineligible regions limit sign-ups rather than spending, and US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per FAQ. One card per user, and a Solana-only wallet cannot withdraw credit.

Three of these products illustrate the fee category more usefully than the numbers alone. On-chain network fees for your deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider. Address verification is mainly available in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines — and some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs outright because the BIN lookup reveals the card type and issuer country. That is the same mechanism that makes a card issued in one country look foreign in another shop, and it is worth remembering before you read a decline as a fault in your balance.

Who I would recommend it to

Honestly? Almost nobody, and the reasoning is short. I would not recommend the BitPay card to anyone as a card to hold, because you cannot hold it — support and ATM access ended 15 June 2023, the card is no longer on the site, and the replacement is reported as never having launched. If your search led you here with a plan to apply, spend more time on the alternatives above; you are choosing from live products, not from this one.

There are two readers I would still point at this page.

The first is a former cardholder with a leftover position. For you the relevant content is the balance route — cheques to the address linked to the card, around 30 June 2023, no published refund amount and no published claims process — and the fact that card support has ceased while the company’s wallet support has not. Take that to support first, and if support gives you nothing, take it further. I am not giving legal or tax advice and this page is not that; I am telling you the published record is thin, and thin records are worth escalating.

The second is someone comparing crypto cards who has been warned about shutdown risk, or who has been burned by one before. The general lesson is not “avoid crypto cards” — MetaMask scores 7.1 out of 10 in the same comparison, and its self-custody model is genuinely different in kind. The lesson is narrower and more useful: prefer a provider that holds less of your money, publishes its fee schedule in a currency you recognise, and can tell you today who its issuing bank is. Everything BitPay taught by accident is on that list.

Frequently asked questions

What is the BitPay card?

It was a prepaid Mastercard that drew on a balance you loaded yourself, converting crypto into fiat spending power. The programme ran through BitPay with an issuing bank behind it. It no longer exists: loading stopped 1 June 2023 and spending, ATM access and card support ended 15 June 2023, after the issuing bank exited crypto banking in early 2023.

How did the BitPay card work?

You converted or loaded a fiat balance onto the card, and it spent only that balance — the prepaid model, so it could not overdraw. It behaved like a stored-value card rather than a debit card tied to your bank account. Crypto conversion happened at the point of loading, and the card’s public pages no longer describe the terms.

Is BitPay a bank?

No. BitPay describes itself as licensed to engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services, NMLS ID#1496848 — a company-level statement about a wallet and payments business, not a banking licence. The issuing bank for the card was a separate institution, and BitPay’s public pages do not now identify one for the closed card.

Who owns BitPay?

The company is a private business; the wallet provider is named as BitPay Software, LLC. There is no parent bank above it, which is exactly why its card depended on a partner bank that could withdraw. That partner’s exit from crypto banking in January 2023 is what ended the card.

Can I still apply for a BitPay card?

No. The last day to load was 1 June 2023 and card support ceased on 15 June 2023. A third-party site says applications are paused with a waitlist open but carries no date, and I would not treat it as live. BitPay’s own site in 2026 shows no card. Look at the alternative cards compared earlier in this page instead.

Does the BitPay card require KYC?

The card’s own public pages do not state it, because those pages are gone — the identity rules applied to a product that no longer exists. Under EU rules generally, customer due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether you are a politically exposed person. Platforms can also decline you if that cannot be completed.

Why did my BitPay card balance not arrive?

The published route was a cheque to the address linked with the card, roughly 30 days after the 15 June 2023 cut-off — so around 30 June 2023. No official refund amount and no claims process were ever stated, and card support has stopped. Contact support through the app and then escalate to your local consumer ombudsman or financial regulator.

What fees did the BitPay card charge?

Only unofficial figures survive, for a card that no longer works: 3% foreign transaction fee, $2.50 per domestic ATM withdrawal, $5 per month dormancy fee after 90 days of inactivity, and $10 for a standard replacement. BitPay did not disclose these on the pages available. For live fees, the live cards above publish theirs properly — 0.9% conversion at Bybit, 1.00% at RedotPay.

What are the limits on the BitPay card?

Not stated officially, since the card and its terms pages are gone. Unofficial historical figures were a $10,000 daily purchase cap and a $25,000 monthly ATM cap, per a third-party review of a product that had already closed. If you need a card with known limits today, choose one that publishes them — MetaMask’s virtual card is free with no maintenance fee, RedotPay’s is 10.00 USD.

Is it safe to hold crypto with a provider like BitPay?

There is no suggestion BitPay was dishonest — but custody always carries counterparty risk, and the record is long: Mt. Gox at about US$350 million reported stolen, Coincheck about US$400 million in 2018, Ronin Network US$625 million in 2022. Transfers are typically irreversible with no built-in recovery. The BitPay card’s own shutdown is a milder version of the same lesson: when an issuer leaves, your balance becomes a payout queue.

Content created by the «cryptocardsearch.com» team