A card that no longer exists — and what to pick if you still need one

Updated October 2026

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If you are reading this in 2026 because someone told you to “get the BitPay card”, the short answer is that you cannot. The prepaid Mastercard programme ended on 15 June 2023, the day BitPay’s issuing bank stopped processing crypto card transactions, and loading had been switched off two weeks earlier on 1 June. BitPay’s website no longer shows a card product at all. This page walks through what happened, what a former cardholder should still do with any leftover balance, the risks that came with the programme’s collapse, and which cards you can actually apply for today if you need a crypto-to-fiat payment method.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict

I score the BitPay card 1.7 out of 10. A card you cannot get, top up or use is a card that does not score well on any of the things a payment card is meant to do. The only reason the number is not zero is that the historic fee structure, on the unofficial record, was at least modest compared to a few of the louder crypto cards on the market, and that the company behind it is a regulated virtual-currency business in the United States.

Who it suits, in the strict sense, is almost no one. The card is closed, so a new applicant cannot get one. The audience I would still write for is the former cardholder trying to track down a leftover balance, because the wind-down process itself — cheque by post, no clear claim window — is the part of this story that still matters to real people. Everyone else, looking for a working card in 2026, should read the alternatives section.

What happened to the programme

The card’s issuer was not BitPay itself. The BitPay-branded prepaid Mastercard sat on top of a banking partner, and that partner’s decision pulled the rug out from under the card in the first half of 2023. The card was not a sudden shutdown; the wind-down had several clear steps and a fixed end date.

In January 2023, Metropolitan Commercial Bank, the institution that had been issuing the card programme, announced that it was pulling out of crypto banking. On 17 May 2023, BitPay emailed existing cardholders to say the prepaid Mastercard programme was being wound down. From 1 June 2023, you could no longer load the card. On 15 June 2023, ATM access and card spending both stopped. Around 30 June 2023, the company said it would mail any remaining balance as a cheque to the address linked to the card.

That is the official timeline. There is no public statement of the exact closing balance for individual cardholders, and no record of a formal claims window or a deadline to cash those cheques.

After the wind-down, the company was reported to be working on a replacement card, but as of the most recent checking of sources one reviewer says the replacement never launched, while another site says new applications are paused and a waitlist is open (the waitlist page is undated, so the status is not confirmed). BitPay’s own site in 2026 shows no card product at all, only wallet download badges for the App Store, Google Play, Windows and Mac without ratings. The card’s virtual, physical, wallet and ATM conditions are not stated anywhere, because the product is gone.

I should also flag that this is not BitPay’s first card collapse. In 2018, the non-US prepaid Visa programme was shut down after Visa revoked the licence of Wave Crest, the issuer that supplied several crypto card brands at the time. So the 2023 closure was the second time a card product tied to BitPay’s name was wound down by an upstream partner, which is worth keeping in mind when you weigh anything the company says about a future “BitPay card”.

I could not find an official statement of the card’s issuing bank for 2026, only the historical Metropolitan Commercial Bank arrangement that ended in 2023. BitPay, the company, says it is “licensed to engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services” with NMLS ID#1496848, but that licence is a virtual-currency business licence for the wallet side, not a card-issuer licence.

If you already have the card

If you are one of the people who still has a BitPay card in a drawer, there is a small, finite set of things that are worth doing, and a much larger set of things that are not stated.

First, do not expect the card to do anything new. Loading ended 1 June 2023, ATM and spending ended 15 June 2023. The card is not a working payment method today. Any merchant that ran it in 2023 stopped getting authorisations from 15 June 2023, and most payment terminals will decline a card whose programme has been closed. If you still have a card with a leftover balance, the official route is the cheque: the company said it would mail the remaining balance to the address it had on file, around 30 June 2023. If you have not received a cheque, the address it would have gone to is the one BitPay had on file, and the only realistic next step is the BitPay support channel from inside the app. Because there is no official claims process, deadline or refund amount, anything beyond “check the post, then contact support” is guesswork.

Second, do not throw the cheque away if one did arrive. A cheque from a US-based issuer does not last forever; in the US, a cheque is typically considered “stale-dated” (banks are not obliged to honour it) after six months, so if a 2023 cheque is still uncashed, the support channel is again the only way back. BitPay’s policy on re-issuing an expired cheque is not stated, so the practical advice is to treat the cheque as time-limited whether or not the bank tells you so.

Third, do not assume the cheque covered the full balance. Whether fees were deducted before the cheque was cut is not stated. Historically, the card charged a USD 5 per month dormancy fee after 90 days of inactivity, which is a fee structure that, on the unofficial record, would still have been live in the run-up to the closure. The longer a balance sat unused between the wind-down announcement and the cheque date, the more the dormancy fee would have eaten into it. Again, this is not stated officially.

Fourth, “what were the daily or monthly limits?” does not have a current answer, because the card is closed. Unofficial, historical limits were a USD 10,000 daily purchase cap and a USD 25,000 monthly ATM cap. They are not relevant in 2026, but they are worth knowing if you are reading a review from 2022 or earlier and trying to compare.

If you are trying to reach support, the BitPay app and the help library on the site are the stated channels. Support hours, the languages supported, or whether phone support ever existed are not stated. Reading the wider Trustpilot signal (which I cover in the next section), the consistent complaint is that support is bots-only with no phone line, so expect a written, asynchronous channel rather than a call.

There is no record of a formal dispute process for the closed card, and US debit card reversal rights (Regulation E) and credit card rights (Regulation Z) apply differently to prepaid cards, with prepaid coverage varying and not to be assumed. If you have a dispute tied to a transaction that ran before 15 June 2023, the right route is through the card network and your bank’s chargeback mechanism, not through BitPay.

What can go wrong

A few things to be specific about, because the closure of the BitPay card is the obvious risk, but it is not the only one. The wider BitPay picture has its own warning signs that any prospective user of BitPay’s other products should at least glance at.

The clearest risk is the structural one. The BitPay card was, in payment-network terms, a programme manager’s product sitting on a bank-issued card. The bank — not BitPay — held the issuing licence, the BIN (the first six or eight digits of the card number that identify the issuer) and the relationship with the card network. When the bank decided to leave crypto, BitPay had no card to issue, no matter what its own licence said. The general pattern here is well known: a 2018 shutdown of the non-US Visa programme followed the revocation of the issuer Wave Crest’s licence, and in November 2022 Visa said it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX”, with the FTX US debit card programme being wound down by its issuer. Programme closures typically give a notice period, then stop spending and loading, then ask users to withdraw balances, and the BitPay wind-down followed that pattern precisely. The lesson is that a crypto card with a single, named bank issuer is one bank decision away from ending, regardless of what the brand on the front says.

The second risk is the user-experience evidence. The Trustpilot page for BitPay (the company, not specifically the card) sits at 1.2 out of 5 from 299 reviews, with 89% of those reviews giving one star. The themes, drawn from recent reviews, are funds that cannot be withdrawn or sent, KYC that is either burdensome or declined (one October 2026 reviewer describes being asked for full KYC for a USD 15 payment), a support channel that is bots-only with no phone line, and account closure requests that the company refuses. BitPay does not reply to negative reviews on the platform, which is a soft signal that any support issue you raise privately is unlikely to be escalated. Some of the reviews also push “recovery services” for lost funds; treat those as unverified and ignore them. None of this is a finding about a specific BitPay cardholder’s balance, but it is the company-level risk picture captured online.

The third risk is the wind-down itself. Programme closures typically give a notice period, then stop spending and loading, then ask users to withdraw remaining balances. One 2026 closure reported by a secondary source, which is flagged as a single source, has new loads ending on 8 July 2026 and spending stopping on 8 August 2026. The point is general: a cheque by post is a slow and unreliable refund mechanism, and a USD-denominated cheque mailed to an overseas address is a particularly poor one. If you are still waiting on a 2023 BitPay cheque, that is a risk that has already crystallised.

The fourth risk is regulatory drift. MiCA, the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation, took legal effect in June 2023; its stablecoin rules applied from 30 June 2024 and the rest, including crypto-asset service provider rules, from 30 December 2024, with a transitional period that runs until 1 July 2026 or until a provider is authorised or refused. None of that is a problem specific to a closed US card, but it is the wider regulatory weather that any future BitPay card product would have to clear before re-launching.

The fifth risk is the assets, not the card. Card payments funded by crypto touch custody, KYC and stablecoins. With a custodial wallet the provider holds the credentials and the user has to trust the provider completely. Cryptocurrency transfers are typically irreversible and a stolen private key has no built-in recovery. Custodial platforms have failed before — Mt. Gox, Coincheck, Ronin Network — and holding funds with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk. A “stablecoin” aims to hold a stable value against a fiat currency, but that stability is a target, not a guarantee: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022 and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. None of this changes a closed card, but it is the territory a replacement card would sit in.

What to take instead

The BitPay card is closed, so the practical question is which of today’s cards replaces the use case it used to serve. I have picked three to compare, each from a different corner of the market. None of them are a like-for-like replacement — the BitPay card was a US-issued prepaid Mastercard, and the three below are quite different products — but they are the realistic options if you need a working card in 2026. I am not going to talk you through applying to any of them. The point is to give you a comparison so you can pick which one to read up on next.

A few things stand out across the three.

Young Card is the only one of the three with a published cashback structure, and the structure is unusual in that the cashback is paid in a token, the YNG token, rather than in fiat. The rate is tiered by Club level: Essential is 0.1%, Gold is 1.8%, Platinum is 3.6%, with Bronze and Silver not stated. If you are a heavy spender who is comfortable holding the YNG token, the top tiers are a meaningful return; if you would have to sell the YNG immediately to use it, the rate is a starting point for a calculation, not a guaranteed yield. The card’s country list, costs and funding rails are not stated officially, so you would need to confirm those on the issuer’s own pages before relying on any of it.

Cardex positions itself as a single card usable across 200+ countries, on four networks (VERVE, VISA, Mastercard and UnionPay), with both virtual and physical versions. The interesting part is the conversion model: the site says an “AI-Powered Conversion Rate” scans global exchange rates and picks the best one at the moment of payment, and crypto-to-fiat conversion happens in real time. That is a marketing claim rather than a number, and no fee percentage is stated. The card is denominated in Naira per the App Store listing, so the practical spend currency is Nigerian Naira even if the merchant is elsewhere; that is a meaningful constraint if you are not a Naira earner. The supported funding coins are USDT, USDC and BTC, with the specific networks not stated.

International Visa Card is the most clearly disclosed of the three. It is a US-issued Platinum Visa, virtual, paying in USD, with a physical card marked “coming soon”. The cost structure is explicit: USD 5 one-time to issue, no maintenance fee, three plan tiers (Classic free, Pro USD 9.00 a month, Max USD 19.00 a month), card use in USD free on all plans, foreign-currency transactions at the Visa exchange rate plus a 2% FX fee, and deposits of any kind free. You fund the card with USDC or USDT into a USD account, free at 1:1, and you can also deposit USD, EUR, SEPA, SWIFT and FedNow. The exclusions are the strictest of the three: the account or card is not available to residents or legal registrants of Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela or Vietnam, and FATF grey-list countries are reviewed case by case. Purchases are blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. The rule is by residence or registration, and citizenship is not mentioned.

A few general notes that are worth keeping in mind as you compare. On-chain network fees (gas, bandwidth) for your deposit are charged by the blockchain, not the card provider, so funding with USDT over a busy network will cost you ETH or TRX on top of the card’s own fees. Crypto transfers are typically irreversible, and a deposit sent on a network the card provider does not support, or to an address of another network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity, so stablecoins are not censorship-proof. The exchange side (buying, selling, custody) is a separate regulated activity from the card (a payment service), and the two licences do not always sit with the same provider, so a “licensed” claim on the wallet side does not automatically mean the card is licensed too.

Who I would recommend it to

In good conscience, I cannot recommend the BitPay card to anyone in 2026, because there is no product to recommend. The honest answer for a reader asking “should I get the BitPay card?” is that the question is no longer live, and the right next step is one of two things.

If you had a card before June 2023 and never received a cheque for the remaining balance, the only path is through the BitPay support channel from inside the app. Keep the card number, the last balance you remember and the address BitPay had on file, because that is what support will ask for. If the support channel is not responsive, the practical escalation routes are a written complaint to the New York State Department of Financial Services (BitPay is licensed there as a virtual-currency business, although not as a card issuer) and a chargeback through your own bank for any transaction that did go through before 15 June 2023.

If you are a new applicant looking for a working crypto card, the question is really “which of today’s cards is closest to what the BitPay card used to be?” and the honest answer is none of them, because the BitPay card’s value was in being a US-issued, prepaid, Mastercard-branded product that turned a stored crypto balance into spending power, and the live market has shifted towards stablecoin-funded debit cards, token-reward programmes and multi-network products. International Visa Card is the most explicit on cost and is the closest to a “load USDC, spend USD” workflow, with the obvious caveat that its country list is narrow. Cardex is the broadest on country coverage but vaguer on fees. Young Card is the most generous on cashback if you are willing to hold the YNG token and accept the unspecified cost and funding structure.

The wider lesson, looking at the BitPay story, is the structural one: a crypto card that is one bank-issuer decision away from ending is a real risk, and the wind-down process — cheque by post, no public claim window — is the part you only feel when it is too late to do anything else. Hold your own keys, fund a card with stablecoins you actually control, and check the issuing bank, not just the brand, before you sign up.

Frequently asked questions

What is the BitPay card?

The BitPay card was a prepaid Mastercard that let you load a fiat balance from a BitPay wallet and spend it like a normal bank card. The programme was wound down in 2023 and is no longer issued, and the BitPay site in 2026 shows no card product.

How does the BitPay card work?

It worked as a prepaid card: you would top up the card with a converted balance, and the card would draw on that stored balance at the point of sale. Loading ended on 1 June 2023 and spending ended on 15 June 2023, so the card is no longer operational.

Is BitPay a bank?

No. BitPay is licensed to engage in virtual-currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services, but that is a virtual-currency licence, not a banking or card-issuing licence. The historic card’s issuer was Metropolitan Commercial Bank, not BitPay itself.

Who owns BitPay?

The ownership of BitPay is not stated. The company is identified on its own site as a virtual-currency business licensed in New York, with NMLS ID#1496848, and the wallet provider is named as BitPay Software, LLC.

Is the BitPay card available in my country?

The card is not available in any country, because the programme was closed in June 2023 and is no longer being issued. Country-specific availability from before the closure is not stated.

How do I get a BitPay card?

You cannot get one. The programme was wound down, no replacement has been confirmed as launched, and the company’s site does not list a card. Any third-party site offering a “BitPay card” should be treated with caution.

Does the BitPay card require KYC?

KYC requirements for the closed card are not stated, because the card is no longer issued. BitPay’s wider wallet KYC, based on user reports, can be burdensome and is sometimes declined.

How do I add the BitPay card to Apple Wallet?

You cannot, because the card is closed. Tokenised wallets (Apple Pay and Google Pay) replace the card number with a device-specific number, and the card issuer can restrict a tokenised number once the underlying programme is shut down.

Is the BitPay card safe?

The card is closed, so the question does not really apply. The wider company has a poor Trustpilot score (1.2/5 from 299 reviews) and the 2023 wind-down was the second time a BitPay-branded card programme ended because of an upstream bank or network decision.

How do I withdraw money from BitPay?

If you mean from the closed card, the company said it would mail any remaining balance as a cheque around 30 June 2023. If no cheque arrived, the only route is the BitPay support channel from inside the app. If you mean from the wider BitPay wallet, the current withdrawal process or fees are not stated.

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