Pay card review: the programme is closed, so what now?

If you have been looking into Pay — sometimes called “Card Pay” — because you wanted a crypto-funded payment card, the short version is this: the programme has been closed to new sign-ups since late 2022, the last app update landed in February 2023, and the underlying card-purchase provider (Wyre) has since shut down. The app is still downloadable from the UK App Store as of the time of writing, but it does not issue new cards, and the listing itself says prepaid card purchases via Wyre are disabled “until further notice” — a notice that, more than three years later, has not arrived.

I went through the App Store listing, the developer’s stated privacy policy, and the public version-history notes for the app, and this is a review of what I actually found there. Where the official pages do not say something, I will say so plainly rather than fill the gap with speculation. If you are a holder of the old Card Pay wallet, I will walk you through what the public record does and does not tell us about your balance and your options. If you came here looking for a working Pay card to apply for today, the answer is straightforward: you cannot get one, but three alternatives further down this page are actively issuing cards and may suit you.

The conditions described here are current as of 21 October 2026.

Verdict

Pay scores 1.8 out of 10. That is the lowest band I give to a programme, and it reflects the fact that the product essentially no longer functions. New cards are not being issued, the only payment partner named in the version notes (Wyre) has wound down its retail business, and the developer’s own public materials stop short of stating whether the issuer behind the card, the country list, the fee schedule or the KYC requirements ever were. There is also no mention of a physical card delivery, of ATM access, of disputes, or of card-currency support. Read against an active competitor like MetaMask Card or KAST, where you can see the issuer, the supported regions and the fee table on the homepage, Pay is a shell.

Who it suits, then, is a very narrow group: existing holders of the old Card Pay wallet who want to know whether the app still holds a balance, whether the rewards they earned can still be claimed, and whether to keep the app installed or move their funds elsewhere. Everyone else — anyone who could have applied for a Pay card today — should look at the alternatives section instead.

The following table breaks down the score by criterion, based on the official public listing:

If you already hold a Card Pay wallet, that last column is the only one that really matters — and that is the audience I am writing the rest of this review for. Newcomers: skip ahead to “What to take instead.”

What happened to the Pay programme

The Pay card was pitched, on the App Store listing I read, as a way to “manage your prepaid cards” inside a DeFi payments wallet. The network the cards ran on, the issuer of the cards, and the supported currencies are not stated anywhere on the public listing — these are the kind of details a closed programme can leave unanswered for a long time, and Pay has. The listing describes the wallet itself: free to download, with biometric confirmation (Touch ID or Face ID) for every transaction, and a feature that lets a user “claim” rewards one at a time from version 1.1.13 onwards. Polygon support was removed in the same version.

The single most important date in the programme’s history is 2022-12-05. On that day the developers pushed version 1.1.12 of the app and, in the release notes, announced that “prepaid card purchases with Wyre are disabled until further notice.” This is the official admission that the card-buying flow had been switched off. Wyre was, at that point, the only payment partner named in the version history; without Wyre, the card-purchase step in the app would not complete.

The second important date is 2023-02-18, when the developers shipped version 1.2.0 of the app — the last version that has appeared on the UK App Store as of the time of writing. After that, the app was not updated again. I should add that the listing remained downloadable, so for a person who had the app installed in 2022 the icon never disappeared, but no new features, fixes or country-support updates were added after that February release. If you opened the app in late 2023, 2024, 2025 or 2026, you were seeing the same build your phone had on that date.

The third date worth knowing is the wider Wyre story, because it explains why the 2022-12-05 notice never turned into a “back to normal” announcement. Wyre was a US-based crypto payments firm that several wallet apps, including MetaMask’s, relied on as a payment infrastructure provider. In January 2023 MetaMask publicly ceased support for Wyre, citing reporting about Wyre’s financial state. In June 2023, The Block reported that Wyre had announced a wind-down of its operations, with the company set to shut down the following month. There is no public source that links Cardstack or the Pay programme directly to those announcements: the link I am describing is that Pay’s only payment partner, named in its own release notes, was the same company that other wallet apps were rapidly distancing themselves from during the same period.

Three versions cover most of what we know about the programme’s history:

• v1.1.12, 2022-12-05 — prepaid card purchases via Wyre disabled “until further notice.”
• v1.1.13 — Polygon support removed; rewards are now claimed individually by the user.
• v1.2.0, 2023-02-18 — the most recent release on the UK App Store.

Between those notes there is no announcement of a new issuer, a new payment partner, a card-network migration, or a list of supported countries. The product side of the wallet — the on-chain balance, the Gnosis Chain account purchase at GBP 0.99, the individual rewards — was kept alive in the app’s code, but the card side of it has not been operational.

It is worth saying what the listing does not mention, because the gaps are themselves part of the answer:

• Who the card issuer is — not stated.
• What the KYC requirements are — not stated.
• Whether the card was Visa, Mastercard or something else — not stated.
• What currencies the card balance held — not stated.
• Whether a physical card was ever delivered — not stated.
• Whether there are tiers (Standard, Premium, etc.) — not stated.
• Whether a Google Play (Android) build exists — not stated; the listing only describes iOS 13.0+, macOS 11.0+ on Apple M1 and later, and visionOS 1.0+.

That last point matters because the only public download path I could verify is Apple’s. If you found Pay on Google Play and downloaded it from there, the version-history I have described above is not the version-history you are reading about.

If you already have the Card Pay wallet

This is the part of the review I wrote for the smallest audience, but it is the audience that needs the most careful answer. Three concrete questions will probably be on your mind, and the public record answers each of them differently.

What can go wrong

Most of the risks on a closed programme are not the ones a fresh cardholder usually worries about — they are risks to whatever balance, identity or device access you still have with the product. I will go through them in the order they are likely to bite.

The balance you cannot move is the balance you could lose

The single biggest risk for a holder is that there is no published answer about whether card balances, rewards or pre-loaded funds remain recoverable. A closed card programme typically gives users a notice period, then stops new loads, then stops spending, then walks users through a withdrawal. Pay’s programme went through the first step (loads disabled 2022-12-05) without an obvious public second step. If you still have a stored balance in the wallet, treat it as a balance that you should plan to move to a place that has working customer support.

The silent issuer problem

The card issuer is not named in the public listing. That is unusual for a regulated payment card in any serious market — UK and EU issuers of prepaid cards are required, at minimum, to display their name on the card itself and to identify themselves in the cardholder agreement. Without an issuer name, you do not know which regulator to complain to if something goes wrong, which deposit-guarantee scheme (if any) covers your funds, or which law of which country governs your dispute. The Cardstack Foundation in the App Store credits and CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD. as the developer are not the same as a regulated card issuer.

Wyre’s collapse, and what it implies

Wyre’s shutdown is not directly tied to Cardstack by any public source I could find, but it is the proximate cause of Pay’s card flow stopping. Wyre was a major crypto-fiat payments partner, and its collapse illustrates two broader points that bear on Pay:

1. Crypto cards live and die with their payment partners. A prepaid card flow that depends on a single partner (Wyre in this case) goes dark the moment that partner has problems. This is the same category of risk that took down FTX’s Visa debit card programme in November 2022, and the same category of risk that closed WaveCrest’s European Visa programmes in 2018.
2. Closures are usually sudden and partial. Notice periods are short; balance-withdrawal windows are short; and customer support becomes hard to reach right when you need it. Pay has been in this state for more than three years as of writing, which is itself unusual.

No disputes, no chargebacks, no recourse

The listing does not describe a dispute or chargeback process for Pay holders. In active programmes, when a purchase goes wrong or a card is used fraudulently, the cardholder can ask the issuer to reverse the transaction under rules like the EU’s rules on digital payment services or US Regulation E/Z. With the Pay brand, none of that machinery is described in public. If a transaction goes wrong after you read this, the only practical option is to contact support through whatever channels still exist — and as I noted, those channels are not named in the listing.

Security: what is and is not stated

The App Store listing does say transactions are confirmed with Touch ID or Face ID, which is the wallet-side authentication, not the card-side authentication. Card security at the Visa or Mastercard level — chip, PIN, 3-D Secure for online payments, tokenisation for Apple Pay and Google Pay — is not stated in the listing. Self-custody of the underlying crypto is also not stated; because the wallet component is still usable, the question of who holds the keys is material, and the listing does not answer it.

For a reader who is Russian-speaking, these gaps compound. After Visa and Mastercard suspended their own operations in Russia in March 2022, cards issued by Russian banks stopped working abroad; this created a significant demand for foreign-issued alternatives. Pay’s apparent silence on country rules and citizenship rules — it does not state them at all — means a Russian citizen holding a Russian passport, or someone with Russian citizenship and a residence permit in another country, has no published way to know whether the product would or could have worked for them. The honest answer, given that the programme is closed, is that this question is moot. But if a similar product ever does reappear under the Pay brand, the citizenship-vs-residence distinction will be the first thing to check before signing up.

What user reports say (and do not say)

I checked Trustpilot and Reddit for a Card Pay or Pay-card user thread. None of the searches I ran turned up a Card Pay-specific page; they returned unrelated companies with similar names. That is itself a useful data point: this is a programme so small, or so dormant, that it has not generated a complaint trail. The only user-facing ratings in evidence are the three App Store ratings from the UK store, which give a 5.0 — but three ratings is not a sample size from which you can draw conclusions about reliability.

What to take instead

I do not usually reach for “alternatives” on a closed programme, but because the question readers most often ask after a closure is “okay, what now,” I will spend a little time on the three active programmes I have on file. I compared them on the same dimensions the verdict above uses: who can apply, what the card costs, what it costs to spend, how you fund it, and what you get back. None of these are perfect substitutes for Pay — none of them are Pay, and Pay being the thing you originally wanted is the one thing no alternative can fix — but they are programmes that are taking new applications and have published answers to the questions the Pay listing leaves blank.

MetaMask Card

MetaMask Card is the highest-scoring of the three and the one most directly comparable to what Pay was trying to be: a non-custodial-flavored crypto card, where the underlying funds sit in a wallet the user controls. The catch is the geography: sign-up is open in 45 listed countries (Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain and Uruguay are examples from the public pages), with proof of residency required, and other regions join a waitlist. Eligibility rules on citizenship are not stated on the public pages; US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ. Russia / Belarus are not explicitly named in the pages I read, but neither is the full country list.

The cost side is one of the cleaner ones: the Virtual card is free, with no annual or maintenance fee, and the Metal tier is $199/year. There is “a minimal fee for each transaction,” which the fee table on the website spells out in more detail than I have here; there is no MetaMask-side foreign transaction fee; conversions use the Mastercard rate. The card itself is a Mastercard, issued by Monovate, with Crypto Life as the card provider.

Funding is the part to read carefully: spends come straight from the connected wallet, and MetaMask Card supports networks Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, with nine tokens named including mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT. Rewards are paid in mUSD into the Money Account at 1% on Virtual and 3% on Metal — but the Metal footnote limits the 3% rate to the first $10,000 of spend, after which it drops to 1%. The Blackbird-dining-app $FLY multiplier sits on top.

For a Russian-speaking reader who is choosing where to put a residual balance from Card Pay, the things to weigh are (a) whether your residency is on the published list and (b) whether your citizenship is screened separately by the issuer’s risk team. The FAQ explicitly says “ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending,” so being turned away at sign-up does not mean you would have been turned away from spending — but for a fresh application it is the sign-up screen that matters.

KAST

KAST is the most explicit of the three on fees, and the most candid about country restrictions. KYC uses a residence-based country list that is only shown to you inside the app — there is no public list — and KAST is unusual in spelling out, in its help centre, that “if your country isn’t listed, it means KAST is not available there.” It also explicitly differentiates residence from ID: someone living in a supported country but holding an ID from a restricted region can still fail KYC; dual citizens with an ID from a supported country can pass; only the account holder’s own ID is accepted; and a VPN does not bypass.

The card line-up is the broadest of the three: up to 10 cards per user, with Visa Platinum (Standard), Visa Infinite metal (Premium), and Visa Infinite gold-plated (Private) as the headline tiers, plus themed designs (Pengu, Solana, Bitcoin). The membership structure is layered — Standard $0/year, Premium $1,000/year, Private $10,000/year, billed annually upfront, no monthly option — and the spend economics depend heavily on which tier you pick.

Funding is stablecoin-led: USDT, USDC, PYUSD and RLUSD are accepted, with USDT and USDC supported on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Arbitrum and TRON according to the KAST help centre. There is no bank account needed for top-up, and spending is from the user’s own balance, deducted straight away (so it is debit-style, not credit). The help centre page lists four supported stablecoins, while the Terms state acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”; I have noted this inconsistency as it appears in the official documentation.

The reward table is the other place to read carefully: Standard gets 1.5% cashback in USD on the first $2,000 a month, Premium gets 2% on the first $10,000, Private gets 3% on the first $40,000. Premium and Private tiers also earn KAST Points on top (+1% / +2% of eligible spend). For someone whose reason for using a card was the cashback, KAST is the one whose math you can run out loud. The non-USD FX fee is the variable cost: 0.5%–1.75%, depending on residence country, transaction country and card programme.

Zeal

Zeal is the smallest of the three by profile, the only one whose fee schedule is not published. The card itself is a Visa, virtual for online use, addable to Apple Pay, with card-account balances in EUR, USD or GBP per the Gnosis Pay documentation; physical-card availability is not stated. Spend reach is the largest of the three at “150+ countries,” although actual issuance depends on eligibility and regional availability, and the live card programme covers the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand per the Gnosis Pay docs — with Zeal’s own update notes calling out Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia at various points.

Funding is from a card Safe holding EUR / USD / GBP stablecoin accounts on Gnosis Chain and Celo; the exact accepted coins are not stated in the Zeal materials. Zeal does not charge an additional FX fee; conversion is done at the Visa wholesale rate, although underlying Gnosis Pay fees (for example, ATM withdrawals, where applicable) still apply.

The reward story is the one that distinguishes Zeal: up to 4% cashback, paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain, with the constraint that GNO must be held in the card Safe to qualify. Rates can change. The App Store listing additionally advertises up to 5% variable APY on EUR/USD balances, which is a balance-yield feature, not a transaction-rewards feature — important not to confuse them.

For a Russian-speaking reader who has migrated to Latin America or South-East Asia and wants a card that works in those regions, Zeal’s published footprint overlaps with those geographies. For someone still resident in Russia or Belarus, none of the three alternatives explicitly publishes support — and that silence has to be read as “do not assume.”

Who I would recommend Pay to

I am going to be unusually direct about this: I would recommend Pay to nobody who is choosing a card today. The programme is closed, the partner that ran the card flow has shut down, and the app has not been updated in over three years at the time of writing. Anyone who reads this and is looking to get a card should not be looking at Pay; they should be looking at MetaMask Card, KAST or Zeal from the section above, and the right one depends on where you live, which currencies you hold, and whether you are willing to pay an annual fee.

The only people I would still point to this review are existing holders of the old Card Pay wallet, and for them the recommendation has three parts:

1. Move the balance. Treat whatever sits inside the Card Pay wallet as funds you should plan to relocate. The on-chain wallet still works in the public record, so an outgoing transfer to your own self-custody address should still be possible — but the card part of the product is gone, and the longer you leave balances anywhere with no published customer-support channel, the more exposed you are to whatever happens to that wallet next.
2. Claim rewards one at a time. From version 1.1.13, individual rewards have to be claimed individually; do not assume unclaimed balances will still be there a year from now.
3. Keep the evidence. Take screenshots of balances, transactions, the app version and the developer credits. If you ever need to make a complaint, those will be useful, and the underlying details — who the issuer was, which regulator has jurisdiction, what fee schedule applied — are not on the public listing.

I am not going to soften the score for the audience. Pay at 1.8 / 10 reflects what the product is: a closed programme with no published replacement, no named issuer and no working card flow. Holding the app does not change that. The people who should stay alert are the holders; the people who should move on are everyone else.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Pay card?

The Pay card — also called Card Pay in some listings — was a prepaid card managed inside a DeFi payments wallet app, developed by CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD. with the Cardstack Foundation credited on the developer’s website. The card was described as a way to manage prepaid cards inside the wallet, but the card network, the issuing bank, the supported currencies and the country list were never published on the App Store listing. The programme stopped issuing new cards in late 2022.

How does the Pay card work?

The way the wallet was designed, you would hold a crypto balance in the app, and buy a prepaid card through a payments partner (Wyre) that the version notes name; the card would draw on a stored balance. That card-purchase flow has been disabled “until further notice” since version 1.1.12 on 2022-12-05, and Wyre has since shut down. The on-chain wallet component still works, but the bridge from balance to card has been removed.

Is Pay a bank?

No. Pay does not describe itself as a bank, and the App Store listing does not name a card-issuing bank or e-money institution. Cardstack Services Pte. Ltd. (the developer) is a Singapore-registered entity, and the Cardstack Foundation is named on the developer site; neither is identified as the issuer of the cards. Without a named issuer, there is no deposit guarantee scheme, no banking regulator and no recourse to a banking ombudsman behind it.

Who owns Pay?

The App Store credits the developer as CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD., and the Cardstack website footer names the Cardstack Foundation. Beyond that, ownership is not described in the listing. The card issuer behind the card programme is not named anywhere on the public materials.

Is Pay card available in my country, and can I use it there?

No. Pay is not available to anyone as a new sign-up: the programme is closed, the card flow is disabled, and the app has not been updated since 2023-02-18. The App Store listing also does not name a country list, a citizenship rule, or a sanctions policy, so we cannot say which territories the card would have served in 2022 or could serve now. The honest answer is that availability today is zero.

How do I get a Pay card?

You cannot, as of writing. The card-purchase flow through Wyre has been disabled since 2022-12-05, the app has not been updated since 2023-02-18, and the developer has not announced a new card programme or a new partner. If you want a working card today, the alternatives section above lists three programmes that are actively issuing.

Does the Pay card require KYC?

The App Store listing does not describe a KYC or identity-verification step. Cardholders in the past would presumably have gone through the Wyre flow, which had its own KYC requirements, but those are not reproduced in the listing. Today, with the card flow disabled, the question is moot; for any new programme you consider, KYC is something to verify directly with the issuer.

How do I top up the Pay card?

Public materials do not describe a top-up method. The version notes mention that Polygon support was removed in v1.1.13, which implies crypto balances were once funded over Polygon, but no current list of supported networks or top-up options is given. Card top-ups would have flowed through Wyre during the active period of the programme, and that flow is now disabled.

Is the Pay card safe?

The wallet side uses Touch ID or Face ID for transaction confirmation, which is a familiar Apple-platform safeguard. Card-side security (chip, PIN, 3-D Secure, tokenisation) is not described in the public listing, and the card issuer is not named, which makes it hard to assess the safety of the card itself. Where balances cannot be moved and the issuer is unnamed, treat any remaining balance as funds at risk by design.

Is the Pay card worth it?

No, for the simple reason that it is not currently a product. If you already hold a wallet, the relevant question is whether to keep your balance there or move it elsewhere; if you do not, then a closed programme is, by definition, not worth it. For a working alternative, the comparison table earlier in this review covers three programmes that are taking new applications.

Can I still see my balance?

The wallet component of the app — the part that holds crypto balances, lets you buy the Gnosis Chain account for GBP 0.99, and lets you claim individual rewards — has not been turned off in the version notes. The app still installs and still shows those screens. So your on-chain balance, if you had one inside Card Pay, is still visible in the wallet. What has changed is the bridge between that balance and a payment card: that bridge is gone, and you cannot move funds from the Card Pay wallet onto a card to spend.

Can I still spend or withdraw using the card?

The honest answer, from what the App Store listing and the version notes say, is that we do not know. The listing does not state:

• ATM access, daily or monthly limits, or top-up methods (none stated).
• Whether balances or cards can be withdrawn to a bank account after the programme closed.
• Whether pending transactions from before closure were honoured, and for how long.
• Whether disputes or chargebacks are still being processed.

Version note 1.0.11 mentions “Reward withdrawal” bug fixes, and note 1.1.13 says each reward is claimed individually — but “reward withdrawal” here refers to moving a reward out of the wallet’s pending state, not withdrawing a fiat balance from a card. There is no public statement on how to withdraw a pre-loaded card balance, on what happens to that balance once Wyre is no longer routing payments, or on whether there is a sunset period during which holders can still move money off the card. If you have a remaining card balance and have not been told otherwise by Cardstack, that silence is part of the problem: the listing does not promise anyone will.

What I would do, in your shoes:

1. Open the app, do not update past 1.2.0 unless you have a reason. The newer builds are not necessarily going to be available to you, but if the app prompts you to update, be aware that no version since 2023-02-18 has been published.
2. Move any spendable balance onto a different wallet or exchange as soon as you can. The on-chain wallet side of the app still functions as of the public record, so a normal crypto withdrawal from the Card Pay wallet to another self-custody address should still be possible — but the card side (spending with that balance at a shop) is the side that is gone.
3. Claim any pending rewards individually. From version 1.1.13 onwards, rewards are claimed one by one; if you have unclaimed balances in that flow, claim them now rather than assuming they will sit there indefinitely.
4. Save everything. Take screenshots of your balance, your rewards, your transaction history and the app’s “About” screen, in case you need them later.

Where do I get help?

The App Store listing does not link to a support page. The two URLs that do appear are the developer’s site (cardstack.com) and a privacy policy. Cardstack’s own homepage footer names the “Cardstack Foundation” as the entity behind the site, while the App Store credits the developer as “CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD.” — a Singapore-registered entity. Neither is named as the card issuer. There is no separate help desk, no community forum for Card Pay specifically, and no published support email that I could find in the listing or on the developer site. Russian-language support is not stated; neither is any other non-English support.

That last detail matters because if you are a Russian speaker using the wallet, this is one more reason not to rely on the wallet as your primary self-custody solution. A closed card programme with no published customer-support channel is exactly the situation in which you do not want to discover, two months from now, that no one is picking up the phone about your remaining balance.

Is there anything I can do to keep using Pay?

Practically, no. The card-purchase flow is disabled at the source, and the partner that handled it has shut down. The remaining live features (on-chain balance, individual reward claims, the GBP 0.99 Gnosis Chain account purchase) are useful only as long as you stay inside the Card Pay ecosystem, and that ecosystem has shown no public sign of adding a new card partner. Think of the wallet, today, as a self-custody app that cannot fund a card. If your use case was spending crypto at a shop, on a subscription, or online, the wallet alone will not do that for you any more.

Written by the editors at Crypto Card Rating.