SharPay card review: cheap to open, quietly expensive to use

There are two SharPay stories to hear, and they pull in opposite directions. One is a young crypto wallet that hands you a Mastercard debit card, lets you load it with dollars or stablecoins, and charges three euros a month for the privilege. The other is a company whose public pages answer a great many questions with a shrug. Both are true at once, and the gap between them is where your decision lives.

My overall mark for SharPay is 5.9 out of 10. That is not a bad score for a service that solves a real problem; it is a middling one for a service that solves it clumsily. The card itself is competent. The fee schedule has some sharp edges. And there is a persistent information vacuum — on customer numbers, on complaint history, on how the company is financed — that I could not fill from the company’s own materials.

Who does this suit? A non-EU resident who wants a Mastercard, wants Apple Pay on it, and can put money into it in a currency that suits them. Who does it not suit? Someone in the EU, someone living in a country on the prohibition list, someone who needs a wide network of countries opened to them, or someone who wants to know exactly what happens to their money before they hand over a passport and a video selfie.

The conditions described on this page are current as of 21 October 2026, based on the license registers of the Bank of Lithuania and FINTRAC.

Verdict: 5.9 out of 10

Two things struck me as I worked through this. The first is that the strongest mark on the card — 8 out of 10 for reliability — is a mark I gave for the structure, not for the track record. SharPay is not some anonymous shell: the card comes from a licensed Lithuanian e-money institution and the payment leg sits with a Canadian company registered with FINTRAC. That matters. But I want to be honest about what my score is based on: I found no complaints and no reviews, which means the absence of bad news is not the same as a body of good news. A young service with no reviews has not yet been tested by a large number of people. Treat that 8 as “clean paperwork, unproven at scale” rather than “trusted by millions”.

The second thing is that the card is not obviously cheap. Three euros a month sounds like nothing until you line it up against the load fee, the currency mark-up and the fact that the account opening itself costs ten euros. There is no free tier and no waived-fee story here. If your goal is to spend the absolute minimum on card services, this is not that product.

Will they give you the card?

The rule SharPay applies is where you live, not what passport you hold. The FAQ states the condition plainly: you must not be a resident of a restricted or prohibited country. The prohibited list, published by SPEKA Payments Corp, includes Russia and Belarus, along with Crimea, DNR, LNR, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Iran, Cuba and Syria among others. Separately, the crypto services are described as not being for residents of the EU.

Let me be direct about what that means for different readers, because the residence rule catches people who assume it does not.

If you live in Russia or Belarus, the card is not for you. Residence is the test, and you meet it. The same applies to residents of Crimea, DNR, LNR, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. I am not going to discuss ways around this, and you should be sceptical of anyone who offers them — a service that tells you how to defeat its own eligibility rule is telling you something about how it will treat your money.

If you live in another CIS country, your position depends entirely on whether your country of residence appears on that list. Kazakhstan, Armenia and Georgia are the cases people ask about most; the list I read does not include them, but the list also has no stated end date, so the safest reading is that SharPay itself decides case by case, and the honest answer is that you should ask them before you send documents. Do not assume silence means yes.

If you are a Russian citizen living outside Russia and outside the EU, the rules as written do not exclude you by citizenship. Verification for non-EU citizens is done with a foreign passport; EU citizens can use a passport or an identity card. There is no separate citizenship rule stated anywhere on the pages I read. But note the trap: the test is still your residence, not your passport. A Russian passport does not help you if you live in a prohibited country, and it does not block you if you live in a country that is neither the EU nor on the list.

One more thing worth knowing before you fill in anything: the number of countries SharPay serves is not disclosed anywhere on its pages. That is a smaller gap than it sounds, but it means the list you care about may not be the list they have.

How to get it

The application runs in three steps: register with a phone number, email and password; complete identity verification at Level 1 and then Level 2; order the card in the app. The minimum age is not stated anywhere I could find.

What verification actually asks for is the part worth reading twice, because getting it wrong costs you a week.

• A passport — the full page, in good quality. Cropped copies are rejected outright.
• Bank statements in English.
• A questionnaire covering your turnover, the source of your funds, and any links to politically exposed persons or US persons.
• A video selfie.
• Level 2, the extra check needed for fiat accounts and cards, which can take up to 5 days on top of everything else.

The card itself comes in two forms. The virtual card is active immediately after you order it, which is the fastest route to something usable today. The physical card ships in about 15 working days, with times varying by destination — though which destinations and at what cost is not stated. You can hold up to five cards per account, according to the app store listing and the homepage. It is a Mastercard debit, issued by UAB Walletto.

The rejection triggers are listed, which is refreshingly honest: a poor-light video selfie, a hat, glasses or filters, a cropped document, or anything that is not a passport. Document review runs from 1 to 72 hours. So the realistic timeline is: you register, you wait up to three days for documents to be checked, you wait up to five more days for Level 2, and then either the virtual card appears in your app the same minute you order it or the plastic card turns up a fortnight and a half later. Replacing a virtual card costs 1.00 EUR. Replacing a physical one has no stated price, which is worth a support ticket before you need it.

Fees: what it really costs

Here is the whole schedule, and I want to present it without commentary first so you can do your own arithmetic.

There is one tier. No card tiers and no plans are named — pricing is listed per product, so you are not choosing between a basic and a premium version of anything. You are opening a payment account for ten euros, issuing a card for one euro, and paying three euros a month for it.

Now let me walk three ordinary days through that table, because a fee list on its own does not tell you what the card costs to actually live with.

A coffee in your own currency, say the euro. If you spend in EUR, there is no foreign-exchange mark-up, which is the good news buried in that table. But every payment is funded from a balance you loaded, and loading from card to card costs 2.00 EUR plus 1.99% each time you do it. A three-euro coffee is the worst possible thing to load money for. This card does not suit micro-payments from a loaded balance.

A meal abroad. Spend 40 EUR in a currency that is not the euro and the 2.99% mark-up applies to a personal card. On 40 EUR that is roughly 1.20 EUR, added to whatever the merchant’s own network pricing does on top. This is the number people notice first, because it is the number that recurs. Note that SharPay’s own page lists 1.00% for the same mark-up on payments — I could not reconcile the two figures, so treat 2.99% as the number to plan around until the company explains the difference. What the spread is beyond that mark-up on other-currency purchases is not stated.

Getting cash out. ATM withdrawals are possible; the FAQ says so. No fee and no allowance are listed on the fee page. I am not going to guess at a number for you. If cash matters to you — and for many readers it does, in cash-heavy economies or when a terminal is out of order — this is the first thing to ask about, in writing, before you rely on it.

Two limits you will hit sooner than you expect. Card spending on terminals and online is capped at 10,000 EUR a day and 30,000 EUR a month, which is generous for ordinary life. SEPA crypto transactions are capped at 14,500 EUR a day. Crypto bought by card has its own monthly limit, and the amount is only visible in the app. And buying USDC with a Mastercard or Visa costs 4% to put in and 3% to take out — that route exists, and it is expensive.

Then the two figures that will not appear on any receipt. A chargeback — the mechanism that gets your money back when a merchant takes it and does not deliver — carries a 40 EUR handling fee. A personal account closure costs 25.00 EUR. What happens to the balance on closure is not stated, which is exactly the sentence you want to read before you need it.

How to top up

Nine assets are accepted: EUR, USDT, USDC, BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC and BCH, with DAI and TUSD also named on the price page. That is a genuinely broad list for a card, and it is the main reason the top-up score lands where it does.

The catch is the sentence the FAQ uses when you get to the deposit screen: select the currency and network. It does not say which networks. That single omission causes more lost money in this industry than almost any other gap, and it is worth dwelling on for a moment.

Crypto transfers are irreversible. If you send USDC on a network the provider does not support, or send it to an address belonging to a different network, the funds are gone — there is no chargeback and no network-level freeze waiting to undo the mistake. It may be recoverable through a support request, with no guarantee. So the practical rule is: read the network list in the app immediately before you send, match it exactly, and send a small test amount first. If you hold tokens on Ethereum, remember that sending an ERC-20 token requires a little ETH in the wallet for the network fee, or the transfer simply will not go through.

Two more details from the funding pages. XRP and Stellar transfers need a memo or tag, which people forget and which is why those two coins generate more support tickets than the rest. And if you top up in a crypto that is not the card’s currency, it is exchanged automatically at the system exchange rate — the rate SharPay’s system gives you, at the moment you do it, which is not the same as a rate you chose.

The minimum top-up is not published. The FAQ tells you to read it in the top-up input field when you get there, which is honest but not much help if you want to know in advance whether a small test transfer is even possible.

Transfers out run to SEPA, cards, e-wallets and crypto, processed from 1 to 60 minutes. Card transfers are only possible if the card was previously topped up.

Paying with it every day

Everyday use is where SharPay scores best, and it earned that. Contactless works. Google Pay and Apple Pay both work — which, for anyone who has been declined an ordinary card or who has been offered one with the wrong kind of number, is the single most valuable feature on the page. You can withdraw cash at an ATM. The card is a plain Mastercard debit rather than a novelty product with a strange network nobody’s terminal understands.

Apple Pay deserves a note of its own. When you add the card to a phone wallet, the card number is replaced by a device-specific number stored in the phone’s secure hardware, never on Apple’s servers, and each payment carries a one-time code. The issuer can restrict that tokenised number — blocking it on certain channels, for instance. In practice this is the most secure way to hold and use a card like this, and the fact that both wallets are supported makes SharPay a reasonable companion to a phone.

There is no cashback, and no rewards programme is described on the pages I read. Nothing is stated about rewards, which means nothing.

Merchant categories are restricted according to the SPEKA prohibited-activities list, which covers illegal gambling services including illegal online casinos and sports betting, adult content, and similar. This is standard and sensible, but it means the card is not a way to reach categories a mainstream card declines on purpose. Some merchants also decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards, because the issuer identification number at the front of the card number reveals the card type and the country it was issued in. If a shop declines you on a SharPay card, that is a category policy or a foreign-BIN policy, not necessarily anything wrong with your account.

The app is the SharPay Wallet app on Google Play and the Apple App Store. The homepage claims a community of more than 15k+ users. Store ratings and the number of ratings were not shown in the text I read, so I cannot tell you whether users rate it well or badly. That is a real gap, and given that I found no reviews anywhere, it is the gap I would most like closed.

Two things that make ordinary life easier. If your account is debited twice for one payment, the money goes back automatically. And the FAQ confirms you can block and unblock the card in the app if it goes missing.

What can go wrong

Start with the company structure, because it explains everything else.

GTM Exchange Ltd, in Cyprus, designs and operates the SharPay website and app. The card itself is issued by UAB Walletto, in Lithuania, under Bank of Lithuania e-money licence no. 33. Payment services are provided by SPEKA Payments Corp, in Canada, registered with FINTRAC as MSB M22046940. No dated events came up in any of this — no enforcement action, no fine, no licence withdrawal that I could find.

That arrangement is normal for this category and better than most. What it means for you is that the money sits with the payment institution, not with the brand whose app you open. The practical consequence is that a problem with SharPay the app is not automatically a problem with your balance.

Which brings me to the word that matters: custodial. Your balance is a payment or e-money account held at the provider. If the provider fails, your money is at risk in a way that a wallet in your own hands is not. This is not a scare tactic — it is the central trade-off of the category. Custodial platforms have a real history: Mt. Gox, about US$350 million reported stolen between 2011 and 2014; Coincheck, about US$400 million in 2018; Ronin Network, US$625 million in 2022. The alternative — holding the keys yourself — is not free either, because a seed phrase of 12 to 24 words is an unencrypted key, anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend from it, and blockchain transfers have no built-in reversal. What safeguarding or insurance SharPay offers is not stated. That is a gap I would want answered before loading anything substantial.

On identity checks, know what you are agreeing to. KYC is not a formality bolted on afterwards; regulated businesses must verify customers and keep monitoring them, and where due diligence cannot be completed, the institution is expected to decline the transaction or end the relationship. So an account freeze pending documents is a normal outcome of this process, not necessarily a sign that something has gone wrong. SharPay may also ask for proof of funds. The safeguards on the card itself are the ordinary modern set: one-time codes at login, 3-D Secure 2.0 for online payments, card freeze and unfreeze in the app.

Now the difficult part. When I looked for complaints, I found none — and I looked hard enough to say so honestly. No official complaint record exists. A dedicated search for SharPay complaints across Reddit and Trustpilot returned only unrelated brands such as Shop Pay and OnePay. A Trustpilot search returned Shieldpay and b-sharpe, and no SharPay page at all. No user reports and no news came back.

Read that carefully. It is not a clean bill of health. It is a service with no public track record either way. The category has a documented pattern of abrupt endings — Visa terminated its agreements with FTX in November 2022, and the FTX card programme was wound down; WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018 and all its programmes closed. Programme closures typically follow a shape: a notice period, then loading stops, then spending stops, then users are asked to withdraw what is left. One 2026 closure reported by a secondary source had new loads ending 8 July 2026 and spending stopping 8 August 2026 — single source, unconfirmed. Read that as a description of how these endings usually unfold, not as a prediction about SharPay.

The number that would hurt most in such a scenario is the 25.00 EUR personal closure fee, and the fact that what happens to your balance on closure is not stated. Combined with the missing safeguarding statement, that is the single most important thing to raise with support before you fund the account.

One reassurance that is genuinely reassuring: cards issued by Russian banks stopped working abroad after Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia in March 2022, which is the main reason people look for foreign-issued cards at all. A Mastercard from a licensed Lithuanian institution sits outside that particular problem. That is the need SharPay fills for non-EU residents, and it fills it genuinely. Whether the specific fill is worth 5.9 out of 10 is your call.

Support, for what it is worth: a phone number in Cyprus, email addresses on the site, a website widget, and social media channels. The website runs in English, Ukrainian and German. Russian-language support is not stated, and hours are not stated.

What to take instead

If SharPay’s fee schedule or its disclosure gaps do not sit right with you, there are three routes with public pricing that I can compare honestly. All three scores are mine, on the same scale.

RedotPay — 6.9 out of 10. A step up on cost and on clarity. Two official lists word the eligibility rule differently, which is worth knowing about: the KYC list says citizens of the listed countries cannot complete verification, while the card-issuance list, dated 28 August 2026, says residents of 47 places are ineligible for both virtual and physical cards and cannot use those places as a billing address. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Serbia are on both lists. Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan and the UAE are on neither — which is precisely the region I was asked about above, and the reason SharPay’s silence on country numbers hurts.

A few practical notes. Some merchants carry a 1.5% fee with a 0.50 USD minimum — Gulf Health Counsel, Free Fire, PUBG Mobile, Brawl Stars, eFootball, Facebook Ads and Discord — with the first three per month waived. The 5 USD welcome reward is spend-only, valid 30 days, and cannot be used toward the issuance fee. On-chain deposits are free to the card balance; the USDT-TRC20 minimum is 1 USDT after network fees, and each asset is accepted only on the networks shown on the deposit page, which the provider may change.

Wirex — 6.7 out of 10. The one with a reward scheme, and the one whose eligibility information I could least verify. Card availability “depends on your region”, and the official supported-countries article returned a page-not-found when I went to it, so there is no country list I can read. The homepage claims a service area of worldwide, 130-plus countries. Fees are published by region — UK, EEA, APAC, Singapore, Australia and “other” — and card issuance is free in all of them. The metal Visa Signature card carries a 45 GBP order fee on the UK page with free DHL Express, and a 45 EUR delivery fee elsewhere. The card page advertises no annual or foreign exchange fees, though the fee page declines to give a number for the exchange rate, saying only that rates vary and are shown in the app.

The reward is the interesting part: cryptoback in WXT at 0.5% Standard, 3% Premium and up to 8% Elite, with up to 8% on the metal card. ATM withdrawals, cash advances, crypto purchases, gambling and refunds are excluded, and a long list of merchant categories is excluded. Spending can draw on cash, stablecoins and cryptocurrencies, and fiat deposits by SEPA, Faster Payments, ACH and PIX are free.

Bitpanda — 6.5 out of 10. The regulated European option, and the narrowest. A verified account plus residence in a euro-area country is required, and users verified through Bankident cannot order a card. It is a physical Visa debit in euro only, one active card at a time. Account opening and monthly cost are free and the first shipment is free; reissue is 5.90 EUR (the FAQ says 9.90 EUR for lost or stolen) and each additional physical card is 10 EUR. The non-euro foreign exchange fee is 0 EUR, though Visa mark-up fees apply, and the crypto conversion fee is not stated — assets are auto-converted to euro at the point of sale. Spending draws from a chosen main asset and optional fallback, minimum payment 1 EUR. On rewards the page contradicts itself: the body says 1% cashback on crypto spending, the summary says up to 2%; fiat, stocks, metals and stablecoins are excluded, and the payout currency is not stated.

Take the comparison the useful way. If you are in the euro area and want the most conventional regulated setup, Bitpanda is the boring answer. If you want a reward on spend and can live with region-dependent availability, Wirex pays you back. If you want the cheapest open and the widest stated currency choice, RedotPay charges a hundred dollars for the plastic and nothing for the virtual.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend SharPay to a non-EU resident, living in a country that is neither the EU nor on the prohibition list, who wants a Mastercard with Apple Pay on it, who mainly spends in euro or in one other currency they can live with, and who is comfortable with a custodial balance and with reading the app carefully before they send a transfer.

I would not recommend it to a resident of the EU, to a resident of a prohibited country, to anyone whose income arrives in many currencies across many countries, or to anyone planning to rely on ATM withdrawals until they have a written answer on the fee. Nor would I recommend it to someone who needs a long public record of customer experience, because there isn’t one.

If I were doing this myself, the order of operations would be: ask support three questions in writing and keep the replies — what network to use for the asset I hold, what the ATM withdrawal fee and allowance are, and what happens to my balance if I close the account. Read the answers into your decision as seriously as the fee table. Then open the payment account, load the minimum, and only then decide whether the monthly three euros earns its place.

That is a slightly unsatisfying conclusion for a review, and it is the honest one. SharPay is a real operation with real licences doing a real job, and on the days it works it works well. But the company has not yet done the basic courtesy of telling us very much, and a card you spend money through deserves better than that. Judge it on the answers they give you, not on the ones I could not find.

Frequently asked questions

What is SharPay card?

SharPay is a crypto wallet with a Mastercard debit card attached to it. You load the balance with euros or with crypto such as USDT, USDC, BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC and BCH, and spend from it at ordinary shops, online, or in a mobile wallet. The card is issued by UAB Walletto in Lithuania, and the wallet app itself is run by GTM Exchange Ltd in Cyprus. It is not a bank account and it is not a credit card.

Is SharPay a bank?

No. SharPay is a crypto company front end sitting on top of licensed payment infrastructure. The card comes from UAB Walletto, which holds Bank of Lithuania e-money licence no. 33, and the payment services are provided by SPEKA Payments Corp in Canada, registered with FINTRAC as MSB M22046940. So the money sits in a payment or e-money account at a licensed institution rather than in a bank deposit, which also means deposit guarantee schemes should not be assumed.

Who can get a SharPay card?

Eligibility runs on where you live, not what you hold. You must not be a resident of a restricted or prohibited country; that list includes Russia, Belarus, Crimea, DNR, LNR, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, along with Iran, Cuba and Syria among others. The crypto services are described as not being for residents of the EU. Non-EU citizens verify with a foreign passport, EU citizens with a passport or ID. How many countries are covered is not disclosed.

How do I get a SharPay card?

Register with your phone, email and password, then pass identity verification, then order the card in the app. You need a passport (the full page, uncropped, good quality), bank statements in English, a questionnaire on turnover, source of funds and any PEP or US-person links, and a video selfie in decent light without a hat, glasses or filters. Level 2, the extra check for fiat accounts and cards, can add up to five days.

Does SharPay require KYC?

Yes, and it is thorough. Identity verification is not optional: passport, bank statements in English, a source-of-funds questionnaire and a video selfie all feed it. Documents are reviewed in 1 to 72 hours, the Level 2 check runs up to 5 days, and the provider may request proof of funds. Where due diligence cannot be completed, the normal outcome is that the transaction or the relationship is declined.

How much does a SharPay card cost?

Opening a payment account costs 10 EUR, issuing a card 1 EUR, and servicing it 3 EUR per card per month. There is one tier and no free plan. Loading the card card-to-card costs 2.00 EUR plus 1.99%. The foreign-exchange mark-up is stated as 2.99% on a personal card and 1.00% on payments, and buying USDC with a Mastercard or Visa costs 4% to deposit and 3% to withdraw.

How do I top up the SharPay card?

You can add EUR, USDT, USDC, BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC and BCH, with DAI and TUSD also named on the price page. The app asks you to select the currency and the network — and the FAQ does not name the networks, so check the list in the app immediately before sending. XRP and Stellar transfers need a memo or tag. Send a small test amount first, and remember ERC-20 tokens need a little ETH for the network fee.

Can I add the SharPay card to Apple Pay?

Yes, and this is one of the card’s strongest points. Apple Pay and Google Pay are both supported, as is contactless payment. When you add the card, the number is replaced by a device-specific one held in the phone’s secure hardware, and each payment uses a one-time dynamic code. The issuer can restrict that tokenised number, so the phone copy can be limited separately from the plastic one.

Is SharPay card safe?

The paperwork is sound: a licensed Lithuanian e-money issuer for the card, a FINTRAC-registered Canadian company for payments, one-time codes at login, 3-D Secure 2.0 online, and instant card freeze in the app. But the balance is custodial, held at the provider, and whether funds are safeguarded or insured is not stated. That is the question to ask before loading anything substantial.

Is SharPay card worth it?

Worth it if you are a non-EU resident who wants a Mastercard with Apple Pay, can load in euros or a crypto you already hold, and mostly spends in one or two currencies. Not worth it if you are in the EU, live in a prohibited country, need many currencies, or plan to rely on cash machines until someone tells you what the ATM fee is. The fee schedule is fair rather than generous, and the disclosure is thinner than I would like.

Prepared by the Crypto Card Rating editorial staff.