Brighty card review: a virtual crypto Mastercard for the EEA, with the small print worth reading

Brighty sells itself as a single app that holds your crypto and spends it as if it were a euro in your pocket, with a virtual Mastercard and a European IBAN attached. The product has real strengths: a free monthly card servicing fee, an EU-issued IBAN, free incoming crypto on every plan and a fee structure that scales across three tiers. It also has the kind of gaps that need answering before you sign up — an “EEA only” stamp on the marketing page, an unnamed card issuer, a help center that does not publish ATM pricing, and a Trustpilot score dragged down by unexplained account closures. This review walks through who the card suits, what it actually costs, what you can expect when you try to load and spend with it, and where you should look first if you are deciding between Brighty and the next three names in the category.

The conditions in this review are current as of 21 October 2026.

Verdict

I gave Brighty a score of 5.6 out of 10. In a sentence: it is a competent virtual card for crypto spending inside the EEA, but the absence of confirmed issuer details, the friction around Apple Pay, and a thin public ATM story keep it behind the better-known rivals.

Who it suits

• EEA residents who want a virtual card and an EU IBAN in one app, and who are willing to live inside the EEA’s regulatory perimeter.
• People who mostly pay online or in-app with euros converted from a crypto balance, and who do not pull cash from ATMs often.
• Users on the Plus or Pro tier who can take advantage of the free monthly FX allowance and the higher card spending ceilings.

Who it does not suit

• Residents outside the EEA — the NPC card page still carries the “EEA only” tag, even though the app has reached Montenegro and Andorra.
• Russian nationals living in Montenegro or Andorra — Brighty says outright that it cannot onboard them, even though the two countries themselves are open.
• People who want a physical card today. Third-party sources say Mastercard physical-card orders are not being fulfilled at the moment; the official card issuance article lets you request one but does not list a price, time or destination countries.
• Anyone who wants a transparent Apple Pay experience — Apple Pay is unavailable on the Mastercard right now; only the Visa, where available, lets you add a token to Apple Wallet.
• Anyone sensitive to account closures with limited explanation. The Trustpilot record of 3.2 from 78 reviews is led by that exact complaint.

Score breakdown

Will they give you the card

The headline rule is simple. The Brighty NPC card page is still labelled “EEA only”, which sets the frame. The app has since been opened up to Montenegro and Andorra, and the blog post that announced the move spells out a separate twist worth knowing: even in those two new countries, the app cannot onboard Russian nationals who reside there. That wording matters if you are Russian and have moved abroad — residency in an open country is not, on its own, enough.

Beyond that single line, the public Brighty pages I read do not publish a complete country list. The card page and the help center point only to “EEA only” and the two named additions, with availability noted as something that “may vary by jurisdiction.” A third-party tracker site lists 36 countries drawn from the EU and EEA plus Switzerland, Montenegro, Andorra, San Marino, Monaco and Moldova — but that list is unofficial and I would treat it as a starting point for your own search of the help center, not as confirmation.

This is a rule by residence with a nationality overlay for one specific case. If you live outside the EEA, you should expect to be blocked at sign-up. If you live in Montenegro or Andorra and you hold Russian citizenship, you will be blocked at sign-up even though your country is on the list. If you live anywhere else in the EEA, the next gate is identity verification, and that is where Brighty behaves like any other regulated fintech.

The single most useful thing you can do before downloading the app is open Brighty’s help center and search for the country you live in. If the help center does not name your country and the marketing page still says “EEA only”, read that as a “probably not yet” rather than a “no forever”.

How to get it

Sign-up runs inside the Brighty app. Verification is performed by Sumsub, the third-party identity provider named in the help center, and it happens during the application flow itself; Brighty also lists [email protected] as an email fallback if in-app verification is not available.

What you will be asked for is the standard EU customer-due-diligence bundle. A clear photograph of your identity document, with your full name, date of birth, place of birth and citizenship visible. For proof of address, a PDF of a utility bill or bank statement issued no more than three months ago; the help center rejects screenshots of those documents, so a downloaded PDF is what they want. If you do not have a recent utility bill or statement, you can send an official registration confirmation, or a second official ID that shows your address. The help center also calls out the things that get documents refused: blurry or partial scans, contradictions between documents, an address that does not match the one you typed at sign-up, expired or damaged documents, and forms with empty fields including the signature line.

The card side has its own choices to make. The NPC card page lists a Visa wherever Visa is accepted; the help center’s card-management article separately references a physical Visa, a virtual Visa (no PIN) and a virtual Mastercard. The fees article describes the card as a virtual Mastercard. None of these pages states the card’s currency. The card-issuance help article lets you choose between Virtual Card and Physical Card from the app, but it does not publish a price, a delivery country list or a delivery time for the physical version, and the help center does not publish a replacement price either. A third-party source reports that Mastercard physical-card orders “will not be fulfilled” right now — that is unofficial, but it matches what the help center leaves unsaid.

The verification flow itself does not publish a processing time, so the realistic expectation is “minutes to a few working days”, with re-submission possible if any document fails the checks above. Two things to keep in mind before you start. First, citizenship is on the form, and it is screened separately from your residence — it is the nationality field that catches the Russian-in-Montenegro-or-Andorra case. Second, the address you enter at sign-up must match your proof of address; mismatches are an explicit rejection reason.

Fees — what it really costs

Brighty’s public pricing is split across the marketing page and the help center’s fees-and-limits article, and the two tell you different things. The NPC card page does not list fees at all. The help center’s fees article does, and that is where the table below comes from. Pricing is per plan, so the right way to think about Brighty is not “what does the card cost” but “what plan am I on, and how much of my activity fits inside that plan’s free allowance”.

A note on that last row. A third-party source publishes One as free, Plus at EUR 9 per month and Pro at EUR 18 per month, and gives a different card-purchase limit (EUR 15,000 / EUR 25,000 / EUR 50,000). The official fees-and-limits article does not publish subscription prices on the page I read, and the card limits on the official page are higher than the unofficial ones. Treat plan pricing as something to confirm in the app before you commit; the official fee numbers above are the ones to anchor on.

Several other costs are simply not published on the official pages. The ATM fee and ATM allowance are not stated for the current card; the NPC page claims worldwide ATM acceptance but does not give a fee or a free count. The fee for paying in a foreign currency is not stated either — the help center publishes an FX fee for in-app currency exchange, and a separate fee row for foreign-currency card payments is blank. The fee to top up the card from a balance, and the minimum top-up, are also not stated.

Three everyday payments

These are the situations you are most likely to meet. Where the card does not publish a fee, the cost is not stated.

• Paying for an online subscription in euros from a euro balance. There is no per-transaction fee for paying in your plan’s default currency on the published fees, so the only cost is the EUR 2.99 you paid to issue the virtual card. If the merchant bills in a non-euro currency, the fee row for that case is not stated, so the only guide is the live rate inside the app at checkout.

• A stablecoin top-up converted to euros for shopping. Incoming stablecoins are free on every plan. Once you exchange inside the app, the first EUR 2,000 of FX in a month is free on Plus, so this would sit inside that allowance and produce no FX charge. On the One plan the FX fee is 0.6% straight away, as there is no free allowance.

• A SEPA transfer out to another bank account. On the One plan, that costs EUR 3 plus 0.3%, which is subject to a EUR 10 minimum fee. The same transfer on Plus costs EUR 0.5 plus 0.3%. Savings like these are the primary benefit of the higher-tier plans.

What the table does not show you is the cost of getting the wrong card. A physical card that never arrives is a fee you have paid for nothing, which is why the absence of a published price, timeframe and delivery country list is more than an inconvenience. Check that the card you want is actually being sent to your address, in the card form you want, before you pay the EUR 2.99 issue fee.

Top up

Top-ups come in two flavours: crypto, sent on-chain, and fiat, sent through the IBAN account Brighty assigns you. The fees-on-top of the table are small enough that the practical question is not “how much does it cost” but “did I get the network right”.

Crypto top-ups are the headline. Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC and a wider list are accepted in the Brighty app, and incoming crypto is free on every plan with no monthly cap. That is a generous policy in a category where deposit fees are common; the only cost you pay is the on-chain network fee that the blockchain itself charges, which is paid to miners or validators and not to Brighty. The list of outgoing networks Brighty itself uses to send your crypto to a private wallet is broader than what is published on the top-up side: Ethereum, Tron, Bitcoin, Cardano, Tezos, Islamic Coin (HAQQ), TON, Arbitrum, Solana, Polygon and BEP20 are all listed for outgoing transfers. The same care applies in reverse: if you send USDC on a network Brighty does not show on the deposit screen, the transfer is irreversible and you may need support to recover it, with no guarantee.

Fiat top-ups go through the EU IBAN. SEPA costs 0.3% with a EUR 10 minimum, Faster Payments costs 0.3% with a EUR 10 minimum and SWIFT costs 0.7% with a EUR 50 minimum. There is a monthly incoming-fiat cap of EUR 100,000. The fee to top up the card balance from the fiat account, and the minimum top-up, are not published.

If you are funding the card with USDC, two extra checks are worth a minute.

• USDC on Tron (TRC20) was discontinued by Circle in February 2024. If Brighty’s deposit screen accepts “USDC over TRC20” on a third-party basis, that is not native Circle USDC and the redemption path differs.
• ERC-20 tokens such as USDC on Ethereum need ETH to pay gas. A wallet holding USDC but no ETH cannot send; if your crypto sits on an exchange that auto-handles this, the user experience is hidden but the rule still applies.

A practical sequence that holds for any crypto card: open the app to the deposit screen, copy the address and the network as the app shows them, send a small test first, then send the full amount once the test is visible on the account.

Paying with it every day

The card that fits the most common case right now is the virtual Mastercard. It works at online checkouts wherever Mastercard is taken, and that is the day-to-day experience Brighty is built around.

Mobile wallets are where it gets complicated. Apple Pay is unavailable for Brighty Mastercard cards (the help center dates this to 26 May 2026 and explains it as a technical issue); Apple Pay is available if you have a Visa version. Google Pay works for Mastercard. If contactless in-store payments matter to you, that single line rules out the Mastercard for in-store use on iPhones until Apple Pay is restored, and that is a real limitation for people who do most of their spending at a physical terminal.

Cash is the second gap. The NPC card page claims worldwide ATM acceptance, but no ATM fee, no free ATM count and no ATM-supported currencies are published on the official pages. A third-party source records historical Visa rates (Plus at EUR 3.50 inside the EEA and EUR 3.50 plus 3.5% outside; Pro at EUR 3 inside the EEA and EUR 3 plus 3% outside) and flags that the Mastercard does not currently have a dependable ATM feature. The combination is unhelpful for a budget. If you do not need to pull cash from an ATM, this is a non-issue; if you do, treat the ATM cost as something to verify with support before your first withdrawal.

Cashback is the third gap. The NPC page says “keep earning on your crypto while using it” but it does not publish a rate, a payout currency or a payout schedule. Unconfirmed reports mention a base 0.5% in USDC across all tiers, with 1.25% to 1.75% on selected categories and a monthly cap that scales with your tier (20 / 60 / 100 USDC for One / Plus / Pro), paid the following month into a Reward Box, and reversable if a purchase is refunded or charged back. That is unconfirmed and should not be relied on; the official line today is that there is an earnings promise without published numbers.

Two more everyday pieces. The app store rating on the Turkish App Store page is 4.9 from 9 ratings — a thin signal, but a positive one. There is no public dispute or chargeback article in the help center, which is not unusual for a prepaid crypto card but it is also worth noting that no card-specific dispute process is described.

What can go wrong

Brighty positions itself as a financial-technology company, not a bank. That sentence from the NPC page is the right place to start this section, because it sets the regulatory ceiling. Brighty holds the customer relationship, the brand, the app; accounts, cards, custody and the on- and off-ramp are operated through licensed partners that Brighty does not name on the public pages I read. A 2024 press release puts the head office in Switzerland and points to crypto-exchange and digital-asset custodian licences there, but those licence numbers are not on Brighty’s own pages, so I would treat that as background rather than as something to verify a service against. A third-party source identifies the Mastercard programme as issued by UAB Monavate; that name is unofficial too.

The same third-party source is also where the issuer names typically get confirmed, and that leaves a single channel of evidence. In a category where Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX in November 2022 after FTX’s collapse, and where WaveCrest was suspended by Visa in 2018, closing every WaveCrest-issued programme overnight, the identity of the partner matters. Visa and Mastercard can suspend a programme, the issuer can lose its licence, and the card programme can end with the kind of short transition period that has been seen elsewhere (a 2026 closure reported by one secondary source had new loads ending on 8 July 2026 and spending stopping on 8 August 2026, although that is a single unconfirmed source). Programme-closure risk is not unique to Brighty, but Brighty gives you less public information to size it.

Customer complaints paint a consistent second picture. Trustpilot’s nl-be page records 3.2 stars from 78 reviews. The recurring themes are account closures with little explanation (Brighty’s responses cite policy and regulation), unpaid referral bonuses (Brighty’s responses cite suspected referral abuse), and instant transfers that take hours. Some customers praise the cashback. Card-specific complaints are absent from public discussions on Reddit. If a Trustpilot scrape is part of your decision-making, accept the pattern but discount individual cases.

Security is run as custody, not self-custody. Brighty tells customers that funds are held in segregated accounts that are “specially secured”, and it works with penetration testers. No insurance is mentioned on the official page, no two-factor authentication is mentioned on the FAQ I read, and the safety guarantees are tied to the issuer and custodian partners. The card itself can be frozen or terminated inside the app — freeze is temporary, termination cannot be reversed. Card termination is final and irreversible; if a card is terminated by either side, the path to recover any balance is the closure-and-deletion policy the help center describes (user-initiated closure is “scheduled for permanent deletion within 30 days”, and the help center does not state what happens to a remaining balance at that point).

Support is email-only at [email protected] with a help center at help.brighty.app; no phone, no live chat and no published hours. The help center is published in English, French, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian and Spanish — Russian is not in that list. Offboarding reasons that Brighty lists officially include suspected fraud, unclear source of funds, partner-provider concerns, and PEP or sanctions status, which is the standard KYC language.

One sentence to keep at the front of your mind: custodial crypto cards are only as safe as the issuer, the custodian and the partner bank standing behind them, and “segregated accounts” is a custody term, not a deposit-guarantee term — EU deposit guarantee schemes do not cover e-money held by an EMI, even if it is segregated.

What to take instead

If Brighty does not fit — whether because of the EEA-only rule, the Russian-national carve-out in Montenegro and Andorra, the Apple Pay gap or the limited public information about the issuer — three alternatives cover most of the rest of the field. I have pulled each from what their own pages publish; where the official pages are silent, I have noted it as “not stated”.

RedotPay

• Score: 6.9 / 10.
• Eligibility: RedotPay runs two lists. The KYC list names countries whose nationals cannot complete identity verification at all (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Serbia are on this list, alongside a wider set of sanctioned and high-risk jurisdictions). The card-issuance list, dated 28 August 2026 and 47 places long, adds India, Indonesia, Morocco, Nepal, Singapore and Turkey and bars residents there from either virtual or physical cards, although citizenship is not mentioned. Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan and the UAE are on neither list. If your country is on either list, do not assume a work-around.
• Card: virtual and physical, with a Visa debit under Singapore terms. Cards come in USD and HKD flavours.
• Cost: USD 10.00 for a virtual application, USD 100.00 for a physical application (not cancellable or refundable once paid), USD 5.00 for the first virtual replacement and USD 10.00 for each later virtual replacement. No monthly or annual fee and no inactivity fee are published. There is a paid Pro tier at USD 12.90 per month or USD 129.00 per year.
• Spending fees: 1.00% for the crypto conversion on top-ups; default-currency card transactions are fee-waived; non-default-currency transactions are 1.20%. Small authorisations (USD 1.00 or less) are free for the first five per card per month, then USD 0.20. Declined authorisations are free for the first three per month, then USD 0.50. A small number of merchants carry a 1.5% fee (min USD 0.50) on the first three transactions per month: Gulf Health Counsel, Free Fire, PUBG Mobile, Brawl Stars, eFootball, Facebook Ads and Discord.
• Funding: on-chain deposit in the cryptocurrencies the app accepts (USDT-TRC20 has a 1 USDT minimum after network fees); buying crypto with a credit card inside the app (ETH, USDC, USDT, with region limits); depositing to the card balance itself is free.
• Rewards: a USD 5 welcome reward that is valid only on spending and only for 30 days; no published card cashback rate.

The pattern is a card that costs more to get than Brighty, but is more explicit about who can use it and about the spending fees you will pay. Compared with Brighty’s EEA-only story, RedotPay covers a wider range of countries — but it also bars residents of more places, and the rule is messier than a single residency test.

Bitpanda

• Score: 6.5 / 10.
• Eligibility: a verified Bitpanda account and residence in a euro-area country are required; users verified through “Bankident” cannot order. Russia and Belarus are not stated. The rule is by residence, not by nationality.
• Card: physical Visa debit only, EUR only, one active card at a time. No virtual card is mentioned.
• Cost: account opening is free, the monthly cost is free and the first shipment is free; reissue is EUR 5.90 (lost or stolen is EUR 9.90 per FAQ); each additional physical card is EUR 10.
• Spending fees: non-EUR transactions carry a EUR 0 fee on top of the published Bitpanda fee page, but Visa’s own mark-up still applies. Crypto conversion fee or spread is not stated on the public card page.
• Funding: chooses a main asset (cryptocurrency, precious metal or EUR) with an optional fallback, and auto-converts at payment. Crypto Indices are excluded. The minimum payment is EUR 1.
• Rewards: the body of the card page says 1% cashback on crypto spending; the page summary says “up to 2%”; fiat, stocks, metals and stablecoins are excluded; the payout currency is not stated. That is an unresolved conflict on the source page, and I would treat it as “unconfirmed” until Bitpanda’s app confirms a rate at the moment you spend.

Bitpanda’s narrower use case is also its strength. If you are a euro-area resident who wants a euro-only physical Visa and a clear asset-to-spend link, the simpler product is easier to reason about. If you want Apple Pay, multi-currency spend or a card that works outside the eurozone, you have run out of road.

Wirex

• Score: 6.7 / 10.
• Eligibility: card availability “depends on your region”, and an official country list could not be verified in this round. The site serves 130-plus countries. Singapore terms bar cash withdrawals in Singapore and bar transactions with “Prohibited Countries” (Iran, Cuba, Syria and others). The residence country you enter must match your ID; no clear citizenship rule and no statement on Russian or Belarusian passport-holders was found.
• Card: one virtual and one physical card at a time. Metal cards are Visa Signature debit cards; Singapore terms call for Visa elsewhere; in the rest of the network the brand varies by region (“Visa or Mastercard”). Card currency is not stated; card validity is not stated.
• Cost: card issuance is free in the UK, EEA, APAC, Singapore, Australia and “Other”. The metal card carries a GBP 45 order fee with free DHL Express delivery to the UK and a EUR 45 delivery fee elsewhere. There is a one-off GBP 30 administrative fee for accounts that breach the General Terms of Service. Fees are “subject to change”.
• Spending fees: the fee page does not publish an FX rate; the card page says “no foreign exchange fee” and the help center refers to in-app rates shown before confirmation. Exchange fees vary by pair and liquidity.
• Funding: fiat deposit by SEPA (EUR), Faster Payments (GBP), ACH (US) and PIX (Brazil) is free. The homepage mentions 200-plus cryptocurrencies, but the supported coins and networks for deposit are not stated on the article I read.
• Rewards: Cryptoback in WXT, the Wirex token — Standard 0.5%, Premium 3%, Elite up to 8% on the metal card. Cash withdrawals, cash advances, crypto purchases, gambling, refunds and a long list of MCCs are excluded from the cashback calculation.

Wirex is the strongest of the three on a published rewards scheme, but the rewards are paid in WXT rather than in a stablecoin or fiat, which is worth pricing in if you would otherwise hold or sell the reward. Where Wirex is weaker than Brighty is in fee transparency — the absence of a published FX rate means you need to check the rate in the app each time you spend.

The card you choose depends on where you live, what currency you spend in, and how much you want the rewards rate to be in something you can sell tomorrow. If your priority is a free monthly service and a published FX rate that drops as you climb tiers, Brighty is a credible answer; if you need broader geographic reach, RedotPay’s published country rules are easier to reason about; if you want a euro-only physical debit and a simple asset-to-spend link, Bitpanda is the cleanest product; if you want a card-linked rewards scheme in a published token you can track, Wirex is the most explicit.

Who I would recommend it to

Brighty is a reasonable card for an EEA resident who wants a virtual Mastercard for online spending in euros or in a stablecoin-funded euro balance, an EU IBAN for SEPA in and out, and a fee structure that does the right thing as you upgrade. The Plus tier is the one I would actually point at, because the EUR 2,000 free FX allowance and the lower SEPA out-fee justify the jump from the One tier for any user who runs more than a few hundred euros a month through the account; the Pro tier makes sense only if the higher card-spend ceiling and the wider free-FX envelope match how you actually use the card.

Three reasons the card is harder to recommend as an everyday driver. The “EEA only” stamp on the marketing page and the lack of a published country list mean the first thing you have to do is verify your own eligibility, and if you are a Russian national living in Montenegro or Andorra you already know the answer is no. Apple Pay is unavailable on the Mastercard today, which knocks out iPhone-based in-store contactless for the default card. The third-party record on the issuer and the Trustpilot pattern on unexplained closures leave the reliability question open in a way that the official pages do not close.

Read it this way. The fee structure is the strongest public case for Brighty. The eligibility, mobile-wallet and reliability story is the case for treating the app as one option among several rather than the one. If those three gaps do not bite you, the card earns its place in your shortlist; if any of them does, the three alternatives above each give you a route around one specific gap at the cost of giving up something else.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Brighty card?

The Brighty card is a virtual Mastercard (and, where available, a Visa) issued through the Brighty app, tied to an EU IBAN account that can hold both euros and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDC. Brighty markets it as a single app for holding and spending crypto.

How does the Brighty card work?

You fund the account from a crypto deposit or from the EU IBAN, the app converts the balance at spending time, and the virtual card charges the merchant through the Mastercard or Visa network. It behaves like a prepaid card in that it spends from a loaded balance and cannot overdraw.

Is Brighty a bank?

No. Brighty says on its public pages that it is a financial technology company, not a bank. Accounts, cards, custody and the on- and off-ramp operate through licensed partners that Brighty does not name on the public pages I read; a third-party source identifies the Mastercard programme as issued by UAB Monavate.

Who owns Brighty?

Brighty is operated by the company behind the brighty.app domain, which a 2024 press release puts in Switzerland and ties to crypto-exchange and digital-asset custodian licences there. Licence numbers are not published on Brighty’s own pages.

Is the Brighty card available in my country?

The NPC card page is labelled “EEA only”, and the app has been extended to Montenegro and Andorra. The full official country list is not published on the public pages I read; a third-party source lists 36 countries drawn from the EU, EEA, Switzerland, Montenegro, Andorra, San Marino, Monaco and Moldova. The most reliable test is to open the help center or app and search for your country before you start sign-up.

Can I use Brighty in Russia?

The Brighty public pages do not extend the service to Russia. The “EEA only” labelling and the absence of a published country list make this an exclusion in practice, and the KYC checks at sign-up are the gate that enforces it.

How do I get a Brighty card?

You download the Brighty app, create an account and complete the in-app verification (the help center names Sumsub as the verification provider). Verification asks for a clear photo of your identity document and a recent utility bill, bank statement or equivalent for proof of address; the virtual card itself is then issued at EUR 2.99.

Does Brighty require KYC?

Yes. Identity verification runs in-app at sign-up, and the published document checks cover name, date of birth, place of birth, citizenship, address and proof of address. The help center publishes explicit reasons for rejection so you can pre-check your own documents.

How do I add Brighty to Apple Wallet?

You can add a Brighty Visa card to Apple Wallet today; Apple Pay is currently unavailable for the Mastercard cards the help center describes (as of 26 May 2026). Google Pay works for the Mastercard.

How much does the Brighty card cost to use?

The virtual card costs EUR 2.99 to issue, and the monthly card service fee is free on every plan. In-app currency exchange carries a 0.6% / 0.5% / 0.4% fee above a free monthly allowance on the One / Plus / Pro plans; ATM fees, foreign-currency payment fees and the minimum top-up are not published on the official pages.

How do I delete my Brighty account?

User-initiated closure is scheduled for permanent deletion within 30 days, per the help center. The help center does not state what happens to a remaining balance in that period, which is worth resolving with support before you start the closure flow.

Created by the ”Crypto Card Rating” editorial team.