BitPay Card Review: A Closed Programme, and What Remains of It

If you landed here searching for a BitPay card to apply for today, stop reading the rest and go to the alternatives further down: the programme no longer exists, and no amount of checking will bring it back. BitPay’s card support and ATM access ended on 15 June 2023 after the bank behind the prepaid Mastercard walked away from crypto. There is no card page left on the company’s site, and the balances that were left on the card were supposed to go out by post as cheques. That is the whole story. It is worth writing down carefully anyway, because two groups of people arrive at this page for very different reasons: readers comparing cards for everyday spending, who need an answer fast, and former cardholders still chasing money that never arrived in the post. Both are served here.

The conditions described on this page are current as of 21 October 2026 and have been verified against official company disclosures.

Verdict: 1.7 out of 10, and not a close call

My score for the BitPay card is 1.7 out of 10. That is not a low score attached to a live product with rough edges — it is the score of a product that no longer exists, scored on the same six criteria I use for every card so the number means something.

Who does it suit? Almost nobody. The one group this card still fits is former cardholders tracking down leftover balances from before 1 June 2023, because the questions they have are about money that may still be owed to them, not about card features. For anyone choosing a card to spend from today, the card is irrelevant: you cannot apply for it, and you could not even if you wanted to.

The zeros and ones do the talking. A card’s whole job is to be accepted somewhere, and a card that cannot be loaded or spent fails at the only thing it exists for. Everything below is detail: what happened, what it means if you are one of the people left holding a balance, what can still go wrong, and what to look at instead.

What happened to the programme

This is the section that answers most search queries about BitPay, and the answer is short.

In January 2023, Metropolitan Commercial Bank — the issuing bank behind the prepaid Mastercard — announced it was exiting crypto banking. On 17 May 2023, cardholders received an email saying the prepaid Mastercard programme was winding down. The dates that followed are the ones that matter if you still hold a balance:

• 1 June 2023 — the last day the card could be loaded with funds.
• 15 June 2023 — loading stopped, and card spending and ATM access ended.
• Around 30 June 2023 — remaining balances were to be mailed out as cheques to the address on file.

BitPay told holders a replacement card was coming, and promised an enhanced service later. That replacement card appears never to have launched. One review reports it plainly; a third-party card directory (undated) says instead that new applications are paused and a waitlist is open. Those two claims contradict each other, and I would not lean on either: I checked BitPay’s own site in October 2026 and there is no card product there at all, only the company’s main site. If you have seen a “BitPay card coming back” post, treat it as unconfirmed.

The company itself is not gone. BitPay’s site states that it is licensed to engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services, and it lists NMLS ID#1496848. That is a company-level statement about the business, not about the card, and the card’s issuing bank is not stated officially. The wallet side still exists: the site carries download badges for the App Store, Google Play, Windows and Mac with no ratings shown, and the wallet provider is named as BitPay Software, LLC. None of that revives the card.

This was not the first time. In 2018, the non-US prepaid Visa was shut down after Visa revoked Wave Crest’s licence. Two programmes, two different issuers, the same outcome: the crypto brand was the front end, the bank held the licence, and when the bank or network left, the card went with it. It is worth understanding that structure before you pick any card, because it decides who you are actually trusting.

How a crypto card is put together, and why that decided the ending

A payment card number begins with a 6- or 8-digit issuer identification number that tells the world which institution issued it; the rest identifies your account. Merchants look that number up, and can treat a card as foreign when its issuing country differs from the billing address on file. That single lookup explains most of the “it worked yesterday and not today” stories in this category.

Underneath that number sit three separate parties. The card network — Visa or Mastercard — routes the messages and writes the rules. The issuer is the bank or licensed institution that actually holds the programme and the money. And the crypto brand is often only the programme manager: the app, the marketing, the front end you interact with. BitPay’s card was a textbook example, with the fragility that implies.

Neither Visa nor Mastercard issues crypto cards to consumers directly. They license issuers, and they can pull that license. When Visa suspended WaveCrest in Europe in 2018, every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme closed at once. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022, and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. Networks do not owe you continuity; issuers do, and issuers leave.

That is the structural lesson. When you pick a crypto card, you are picking an issuer as much as a brand, and the brand’s name on the app tells you nothing about who holds the licence.

What the card cost, historically

Because the card is gone, its public pages state nothing — who could get it, what verification it required, which currencies it used, delivery times, rewards, tiers, ATM network, limits and top-up methods are all unstated. One page of searching turned up essentially an empty shell, which is what closure looks like.

Third-party reviews preserve some of the historical figures. They are unofficial and not confirmed by BitPay, and I would not plan anything around them, but they tell you what the card used to charge:

• 3% foreign transaction fee.
• 2.50 USD per domestic ATM withdrawal.
• 5 USD per month for inactivity after 90 days.
• 10 USD for a standard replacement card.
• A reported 10,000 USD daily purchase cap and 25,000 USD monthly ATM cap.

These are the prices of a card that no longer works. The only reason they appear here is that people search for them, and a wrong figure is worse than an honest gap.

If you already have the card

If you had a BitPay card, you are in a specific situation and the useful thing is to state it plainly. The card stopped working on 15 June 2023. You cannot load it, spend from it, or use it at an ATM. Since then the only path that was ever announced for your money was a cheque to the address linked to the card, expected roughly 30 days after the cut-off.

Two things are worth checking if a cheque never arrived.

First, the address. Cheques go to the address on file. If you moved after June 2023, that is the most likely explanation, and it is also the easiest thing to fix in a support conversation.

Second, whether anything is left at all. Anyone who spent down to zero before 1 June 2023 has no balance to claim, and the cheque story does not apply to them. I found no published refund amount, no stated claims process and no official table of what was owed to whom, so if you are trying to reconcile a specific figure, you will have to take it to BitPay’s support rather than to me.

Support itself has narrowed. BitPay’s site still offers a help library, and support is reachable from the app — but that is company support for the wallet and the business, not card support, which ceased. No languages or opening hours are published.

So what should you actually do? In plain order: check whether a cheque was ever sent to your address on file; if not, open a support ticket through the app and say plainly that you are a former BitPay cardholder with an undelivered balance cheque, giving your old card’s last four digits and the address on file. Do not send seed phrases, private keys or full card numbers to anyone in that conversation. Keep every screenshot and confirmation email you have, because they are your only record.

I am not able to tell you what you’ll be offered, and I won’t guess. BitPay’s company-level Trustpilot record, which I look at in the next section, does not make for an optimistic prior on how quickly a leftover balance from 2023 will be resolved. But it is also not a reason to write the money off — a clear, documented request to a support channel is the only lever here.

What can go wrong

Even for a closed card, the failure modes are worth naming, because several of them are still live for anyone holding money at this company.

The cheque is the main exposure. A paper cheque to an old address is the single point of failure. It can be lost in the post, and unlike a bank transfer there is no live tracking and no instant reissue.

Frozen funds and closed accounts. BitPay’s Trustpilot page for the company — not for the card, which is the distinction that matters — shows 1.2 out of 5 from 299 reviews, with 89% one-star, and the themes are consistent: funds that cannot be withdrawn or sent (reported between June and October 2026), KYC that is burdensome or declined, including one report of verification demanded for a 15 USD payment, and support that is bots-only with no phone line. The company does not reply to negative reviews. Whatever the mix of genuine complaints and duplicate postings, a 1.2 average is not noise.

Unverified reports about disputed fees. A French-language crypto outlet reported a story, circulating on a Bitcoin subreddit, about alleged fraudulent fees charged to customers; at the time it published, BitPay had issued no statement. I am flagging this as a claim, not a finding — I could not verify it, and you should not treat it as established.

Unilateral closure with no continuity. This is the core structural risk and it is not hypothetical here: support and ATM access ended 15 June 2023, the last loading day was 1 June 2023, and the promised replacement card never launched. Note also that a card programme’s assets can be disrupted without anything being illegal or even surprising — Wave Crest in 2018, FTX in 2022, and now this.

Where the money actually sits. If your funds are with a custodian rather than in a wallet you control, you are exposed to that custodian’s solvency and to its security. Custodial platforms have a real record of failures: Mt. Gox, roughly 350 million US dollars reported stolen between 2011 and 2014; Coincheck, about 400 million in 2018; Ronin Network, 625 million in 2022. Nobody should promise that a custodial balance is safe, including me; no deposit guarantee and no payout guarantee exist.

Regulatory closure risk. Rules can close a product faster than any company can. In the EU, if customer due diligence cannot be completed, the institution is required to refrain from the transaction or the relationship and, where necessary, end it — that is exactly why accounts get closed and funds get frozen while documents are chased. Since Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia in March 2022, cards issued by Russian banks stopped working abroad, which is the main reason many residents of sanctioned or restricted jurisdictions go looking for foreign-issued cards in the first place. The rules change; the card does not get a vote.

Not country restrictions — sanctions screening. Nationality is recorded and screened separately from residence, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy usually apply to citizenship and country of birth as well as country of address. In the US, FinCEN guidance treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters; ordinary people buying goods or services with their own money are not in that category. None of this is advice on what to do about your specific status — it is context for why eligibility lists on these cards are long and why they change without notice.

What to take instead

Here is the part that saves you the most time. These three cards are live, have published fees and eligibility rules, and I score them above the BitPay card by an enormous margin. I am comparing them here not because any of them is a replacement for BitPay’s dead programme — none is — but because you need something that actually works this year.

Read that table carefully, because the cost lines are the ones people miss. A “free” virtual card is free to issue, not free to use: MetaMask’s per-transaction fee is not disclosed on the pages I read, RedotPay takes a flat 1% on conversions, and Bybit adds 0.9% on the crypto side plus 2% foreign-exchange in several regions. None of these is a BitPay replacement in any literal sense. They are the options that exist.

Who each one actually accepts

This is where crypto cards differ most, and where reading the small print saves real money.

RedotPay publishes two lists that do not say quite the same thing. Its KYC list of unsupported countries and regions states that if you are a citizen of any listed country you cannot complete identity verification or use its services, and that restrictions are “based on local regulations and sanction policies—not on individuals”. That list includes Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and others. A separate card-issuance list, dated 28 August 2026 and covering 47 places, adds India, Indonesia, Morocco, Nepal, Singapore and Turkey, and says residents of those areas are ineligible for both virtual and physical cards and cannot use those addresses for billing — note that it says residents, and does not mention citizenship. Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan and the UAE appear on neither list.

Bybit Card names its card regions as Argentina, AIFC (Kazakhstan), Georgia, Kazakhstan, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Asia Pacific. The application asks for your country of residence; if it is not supported, Bybit says it will register your interest. Its cards page adds that the product is not meant for European Economic Area customers and that all EEA participation is strictly prohibited. On Russian and Belarusian citizens specifically, I found no card-specific statement and no citizenship-versus-residence rule; Bybit’s restricted list for its fiat services does include Belarus and the Russian Federation and says Russian users can only make RUB transactions in fiat — but that list covers deposits, withdrawals and One-Click Buy, not the card. The card currency depends on the country of your Advanced Identity Verification.

MetaMask Card opens sign-ups in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay among them — with other regions on a waitlist, and requires proof of residency. Its own wording is worth quoting: ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending. No citizenship rule is stated.

What about Russian speakers specifically

You asked about your country, so here it is without evasion. These cards follow three different models, and only one of them is about citizenship at all.

• Living in Russia. RedotPay lists Russia on both its KYC list and its card-issuance list, so verification does not complete. Bybit’s card regions do not include Russia, and its fiat service list includes the Russian Federation with RUB-only fiat transactions. MetaMask requires proof of residency in one of its listed regions, and a Russian address is not a route in. For all three, being in Russia is the decisive fact.
• Living in another CIS country. This is the group with genuine options. Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan appear on neither RedotPay list, and Georgia and Kazakhstan are named Bybit card regions, with Kazakhstan served through AIFC. Belarus is on RedotPay’s KYC list and in Bybit’s restricted fiat list, so it is treated far more tightly than Georgia or Armenia. Your address matters more than your passport here — but your citizenship can still be screened separately.
• A Russian citizen living elsewhere. This is the case people actually ask about, and the honest answer is that every provider decides differently and none of them publishes a citizenship rule for Russia. RedotPay’s citizenship wording is the strictest of the three and would exclude a Russian citizen wherever they live. Bybit publishes nothing card-specific on Russian citizenship, and its treatment is by residence. MetaMask publishes no citizenship rule at all and screens by residence. In practice: your address is the published criterion, your citizenship may still be checked, and the only way to know is to attempt verification and see. I cannot tell you which of these will succeed for you, and anyone who does is guessing.

One thing applies to everyone reading this in a sanctioned or restricted jurisdiction. I am not going to explain how to get around identity checks, sanctions screening or country rules, and I would not trust a source that offers to. Legitimate providers publish their restrictions and apply them; that is a feature. A service that promises to ignore them is telling you something about how it will treat your money.

How the money gets in, and what that costs

Getting a card is the easy half. What you deposit, and on which network, decides whether the money arrives.

• RedotPay takes on-chain crypto deposits, or you can buy crypto with a credit card in the app (ETH, USDC, USDT, depending on region). The minimum USDT-TRC20 deposit is 1 USDT after network fees, each asset is accepted only on the networks shown on the Deposit page, and the provider may change those networks. Deposit to card balance is free.
• Bybit Card has no balance of its own. It draws on the Funding Account and the Flexible Easy Earn balance, fiat first; if fiat runs short, crypto is sold at the One-Click Sell exchange rate plus the card’s crypto conversion fee. Supported: BTC, ETH, XRP, USDT, USDC, GRAM, with USDT first by default and reorderable.
• MetaMask Card spends directly from your connected wallet, on Linea, Base, Monad or Solana, holding tokens including mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT. Wallets on Solana only cannot withdraw credit.

Which raises the one thing every one of these cards shares: blockchain transfers are irreversible. Send on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, and the funds can be gone or need manual recovery with no guarantee. On Ethereum, gas is paid only in ETH — a wallet holding USDT with no ETH cannot send it. On Tron, fees are paid through bandwidth and energy, often by burning TRX. Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option, and stablecoins are not censorship-proof: Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity.

Stablecoins are meant to hold a steady value against a currency, and the BIS put about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in USDT and USDC as of July 2025. Circle says USDC is redeemable 1:1 for USD, fully backed by cash and cash equivalents, with monthly reserve attestations. That is not the same as stability: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, and USDC lost its peg briefly in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. Pick the rail carefully.

Rewards, and whether they are worth chasing

• RedotPay offers a 5 USD welcome reward usable only on spending, valid 30 days — and explicitly not usable toward the issuance fee. Points and rewards are listed as a separate programme from the Pro tier, and no cashback rate is stated.
• Bybit Card runs a tiered scheme: from 5 October 2026 at 10:00 UTC, only crypto-funded transactions earn points or cashback, fiat-funded spending earns nothing. Base 2.00% with a 5 USD monthly cap, rising through Beta, Alpha 4%, Apex 6%, Omega 8% to Infinite 10% with a 600 USD cap and 25,000 USD of monthly spend to unlock. Points pend for four calendar days and convert at points × 0.002 in USDT. There is a 10% welcome cashback up to 110 USDT in the first 30 days.
• MetaMask Card pays cashback in mUSD: 1% on Virtual, and on Metal a headline 3% limited by the footnote to the first 10,000 USD spent, then 1%.

Read the fine print on the Bybit one especially. A tier that only pays when you fund from crypto is not a reward for spending; it is a nudge toward holding your money in that ecosystem.

What still goes wrong with cards that do work

The closure was BitPay’s problem, but these are live risks on any card in the category, and they are worth a minute each.

• Merchant declines. A merchant category code is a four-digit number classifying a business; MCC 7995 covers gambling, and many issuers block it by policy rather than law, with a different list per issuer. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs simply because the lookup reveals the card type and issuing country.
• Address verification. AVS compares the numeric parts of the billing address against issuer records. It is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which causes declines.
• Holds. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on funds for several days, typically up to seven.
• 3-D Secure. Visa’s brand is Visa Secure, Mastercard’s is Identity Check; the issuer assesses risk and either approves frictionlessly or challenges you with a code or biometric. Liability for a fraudulent online payment can shift — and critics argue it sometimes shifts too far towards the cardholder.
• Tokenised wallets. Apple Pay replaces your card number with a device-specific number stored in the Secure Element, never on Apple’s servers, with a one-time dynamic code per payment. Useful, but the issuer can restrict the token: blocking it on magnetic stripe, on phones or on websites.

And the regulatory picture underneath all of it, since it decides who can issue what. In the EU, MiCA took legal effect in June 2023; its rules on asset-referenced and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024, and the remaining provisions including crypto-asset service provider rules from 30 December 2024. Under Article 48, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. The transitional period for providers already operating under national law ran only until 1 July 2026 or until a MiCA authorisation was granted or refused, whichever came first. ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised providers and white papers, and it is worth checking any card company you are considering against it. A CASP authorised in one member state can serve the whole EU, while a card is regulated separately as a payment service — so a crypto card often rests on two licences, and electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds in dedicated accounts or insure them, which is not the same as a bank deposit and may not carry deposit guarantee.

In the US, the IRS treats digital assets as property, so exchanging them for goods, services or dollars generally produces a taxable gain or loss, measured in local fiat at fair market value on the date of the transaction. That is a fact about how the tax rules work, not advice about yours.

Who I would recommend it to

Nobody, for spending. If you are choosing a card this year, pick one of the three above and read its eligibility list against your own address and citizenship before you apply — not after.

I would recommend BitPay only in one narrow sense: to the reader with an undelivered cheque and a balance from 2023. For you, the card is not a choice, it is a claim. Write to support through the app with your last four digits and the address on file, keep your screenshots, and expect to be patient. Do not send anyone a seed phrase to “speed it up” — no legitimate support channel needs one, and BitPay’s own wallet has help documentation.

I would also recommend BitPay’s history as a case study, because the pattern repeats. Three things happened here that will happen again: an issuer left crypto, a card network or licence-holder changed its mind, and the front-end brand lost control of the thing customers paid for. Ask who issued the card, who holds the licence, and what happens to the balance when the issuer changes its mind. If a provider cannot answer those three questions plainly, the fees are not the thing you should be negotiating.

And a last word on reading reviews of dead cards, including this one. My historical fee figures came from third-party sources and are not confirmed by BitPay; the Trustpilot score is for the company, not the card; and where the sources disagree about the replacement card, I have said so rather than picking a side. Where the public pages say nothing, I have said they say nothing rather than filling the gap. You are entitled to the same standard from anyone else reviewing cards for you.

Frequently asked questions

What was the BitPay card?

It was a prepaid Mastercard that drew on a crypto-backed balance, issued by Metropolitan Commercial Bank and managed by the wallet company BitPay. You loaded funds, and the card spent them like an ordinary prepaid card. Card support and ATM access ended on 15 June 2023 and BitPay’s site no longer lists a card, so there is nothing to apply for today.

How did the BitPay card work, and how do I load it now?

Back then it worked like a prepaid card: you topped up a stored balance and the card spent only that balance, so it could not overdraw. Loading stopped on 1 June 2023, so you cannot load it now under any circumstances. Anyone still describing a top-up method for this card is describing a product that has been shut for over three years.

Is BitPay a bank, and who owns the card?

No. BitPay is a wallet and crypto services company, licensed by the New York State Department of Financial Services to engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity, with NMLS ID#1496848, and its wallet provider is named as BitPay Software, LLC. The card itself was issued by a separate bank — Metropolitan Commercial Bank — which is why the card could die while the company carried on. The card’s issuer is not stated on BitPay’s current public pages.

Why did BitPay close its card?

In January 2023 Metropolitan Commercial Bank announced it was exiting crypto banking. On 17 May 2023 cardholders were emailed that the prepaid Mastercard programme was winding down, and spending and ATM access ended on 15 June 2023. A replacement card was promised and appears never to have launched; sources disagree, and one card directory still claims applications are merely paused with a waitlist open, which BitPay’s own site does not support.

I never received my cheque — what should I do?

Contact support through the app and say you are a former cardholder with an undelivered balance cheque, giving your old card’s last four digits and the address on file. The cheque was to go to that address, so moving since June 2023 is the likeliest cause. I found no published refund amount and no claims process, so expectations should be modest, and never send anyone your seed phrase or private key.

Are BitPay’s cards available in my country?

No — the card programme closed in June 2023 and BitPay’s site lists no card at all, so there is no country where it is available. If you want to know what still works where you live, compare the live cards above and check each one’s eligibility list, because they follow different models: RedotPay screens citizenship, Bybit screens residence, MetaMask publishes neither a citizenship rule nor a full country set for everyone.

Was the BitPay card safe to use?

It was a licensed programme at the time, but no one should call it risk-free. A prepaid card’s balance sat with a custodian, and custodial platforms have failed before: Mt. Gox, about 350 million US dollars reported stolen in 2011–2014; Coincheck, about 400 million in 2018; Ronin Network, 625 million in 2022. The real lesson here is structural — the brand you used was not the institution that held your licence or your money.

What did the BitPay card cost, and is it free?

Unofficial third-party sources put the historical charges at a 3% foreign transaction fee, 2.50 USD per domestic ATM withdrawal, a 5 USD monthly dormancy fee after 90 days of inactivity, and 10 USD for a standard replacement, with a reported 10,000 USD daily purchase cap. BitPay no longer publishes any of this officially, and none of it is relevant to a card you cannot obtain.

Is BitPay safe to use today for crypto?

That is a different question from the card, and the honest answer is mixed. The company is licensed in New York and still operating, but its Trustpilot record stands at 1.2 out of 5 from 299 reviews with 89% one-star, and recurring themes include funds that cannot be withdrawn, burdensome or declined KYC, and bots-only support. There are also unverified reports of disputed fees that the company had not addressed at the time. Treat any request for a transfer to “release” funds as a warning sign.

Is a BitPay card coming back?

No launch date exists that I could find, and I would not plan around one. The promised replacement was reported not to have launched; one undated third-party listing claims applications are paused with a waitlist, which contradicts that; and BitPay’s own site in October 2026 shows no card. If you need a card now, choose one of the live options rather than waiting on an announcement that may never come.

Prepared by the Crypto Card Rating editorial staff.