A Card That No Longer Exists

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

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18+ Only

If you arrived here looking for the BitPay card to spend from your cryptocurrency, I have to open with the least pleasant sentence in this review: there is nothing left to apply for. The BitPay card programme wound down, loading stopped on 1 June 2023, spending and ATM access ended on 15 June 2023, and what remained on balances was posted out by cheque in the weeks that followed. This is not a judgement about whether BitPay was a good card in its day. It is a notice about what is on offer today, which is nothing.

The conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

That said, a closed programme is still worth writing about carefully, for two reasons. First, there may be money of yours still sitting somewhere in the former BitPay card system, and people chase those balances for years. Second, the way this programme died is instructive for anyone choosing a crypto card today, because it happened in a very specific pattern that has repeated across the category. Understanding the pattern is more useful to you than any pricing table would have been.

If you are here with a leftover balance rather than a shopping question, skip to the section on what to do if you already have the card. If you are comparing cards, read the whole thing but read the alternatives section first.

Verdict: 1.7 out of 10

A score of 1.7 is not really a verdict on a product so much as a statement that the product is not present. Every criterion above is low for the same underlying reason: there is no card to buy. I want to be careful here, because a low score on a closed card can mislead you into thinking the card performed badly while it was running. Some of that criticism is deserved, and some of it is the ordinary friction of a product being switched off. Reading the two apart is most of the work of this review.

Who does this score suit? Almost nobody, in the sense of “apply for this.” Who is it actually for? Former cardholders tracking down leftover balances, and anyone who has been shown a BitPay card by someone else and wants to know whether the offer still exists. That second group is not hypothetical. In-store signage and old blog posts outlive programmes by years, and I have seen this pattern before: a card that no longer issues still has a presence in the wild through screenshots and reprints.

Who it does not suit is anyone planning where to hold and spend crypto in 2026, because the honest answer is that the card is not a candidate. What replaces it is the subject of the alternatives section, and I want to flag one thing before we get there. The three cards I compare below are live products with their own open questions, not like-for-like replacements. I have given each of them their own score alongside mine, and those scores range from 5.2 to 6.4. None of them is at 9. That is the honest baseline for this category as I find it, and you should read the difference between 1.7 and 6.4 as “closed” versus “operating, with gaps in the published detail.”

One more framing point before the details. The BitPay situation is not an exotic failure. It is the standard ending. A crypto card is a joint arrangement between at least three parties, and any one of them can end it. In November 2022 Visa said it had terminated its global agreements with FTX, and the FTX US debit card programme was wound down by its issuer. In 2018 WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes, which is what killed the earlier non-US prepaid Visa product that BitPay had run before. When you read a crypto card’s terms, the durability of the programme is worth as much attention as the fees.

What Happened to the Programme

The BitPay card stopped, in stages, in mid-2023, and the sequence matters because it tells you what state your money could have been left in.

The chain begins before BitPay’s own decision. In January 2023, Metropolitan Commercial Bank announced its exit from crypto banking. BitPay’s card ran on that relationship, so when the bank left, the card had no foundation underneath it. On 17 May 2023 cardholders received an email saying the prepaid Mastercard programme was winding down. Loading stopped on 1 June 2023, ATM access and spending ended on 15 June 2023, and remaining balances were mailed out as cheques around 30 June 2023 to the address linked to the card.

Read that sequence as a countdown rather than a single event:

• 1 June 2023 — last day to load funds
• 15 June 2023 — spending and ATM access end
• around 30 June 2023 — residual balances dispatched as cheques

If you held the card at that time, the practical effect was that you had a two-week window to spend or withdraw what you had, and the cheque was the mechanism for anything left. Whether a cheque ever reached you, and how long it took, is not something the public pages explain.

On the question of whether the card is coming back, the sources I found disagree, and I would rather show you the disagreement than smooth it over. One review reports that the replacement card never launched. CryptoCardHub, an unofficial third-party site, says new applications are paused and a waitlist is open, with no date attached to that claim. Against both of those, the plain fact is what I can observe directly: BitPay’s site in 2026 shows no card at all. There is no card page, no application button, no terms. Whatever the status of a waitlist somewhere, there is nothing on the company’s own site to apply to.

That leads to the question you would sensibly ask next, which is what BitPay itself is. BitPay’s site states that it is licensed to engage in Virtual Currency Business Activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services, with NMLS ID#1496848. Two things to separate there. That licence is company-wide and concerns its virtual currency business, not the card. And BitPay was never the bank behind the card. The card issuer is not stated officially on the company’s own pages.

This is a common misunderstanding worth naming plainly, because searchers ask it directly: BitPay is not a bank. BitPay is a crypto wallet and payments company that ran a card programme on top of someone else’s banking and card infrastructure. When the banking layer left, the product went with it. That structure is the single most important thing to understand about the card’s closure, and I return to it in the risks section.

What BitPay still offers is the company around it: a wallet, a payments business, apps for iOS, Android, Windows and Mac. The site shows download badges for those platforms with no ratings visible next to them, and I did not read the store ratings.

On the product specifications, I have to be straightforward: the card’s public pages do not state who was eligible, what the KYC or identity requirements were, what the card itself looked like, what it cost, what fees applied, which wallets or currencies it supported, how it was delivered, what the app did, or what verification looked like. Those pages are gone. I have found no reliable record of the eligibility rules, so I cannot tell you who could once have qualified, and I am not going to invent a country list from memory and present it as fact.

The pricing figures that circulate for the old card are unofficial. From third-party reviews rather than from BitPay, the historic figures were 2.50 USD per domestic ATM withdrawal, 5 USD a month dormancy fee after 90 days of inactivity, and 10 USD for a standard card replacement. Also unofficial, a 3% foreign transaction fee. I have reproduced these because they come up constantly when people search this card, and I have marked them as unofficial throughout. Treat them as a picture of a historical product, not as terms you can rely on for anything.

If You Already Have the Card

If you are reading this section, your situation is different from everyone else’s on this page. You are not choosing a card. You have a card that stopped working and possibly money that went nowhere obvious. Here is what the record actually says, and where it stops.

The programme’s own closing mechanics were: the last day to load was 1 June 2023, and remaining balances were to be issued as a cheque to the address linked to the card, within roughly 30 days after the 15 June 2023 cut-off. That is the last official statement about your money. No refund amount was specified, and no claims process is described in official documentation.

That leaves you with three possibilities, and it is worth being honest about each:

• You already received the cheque. If it arrived and you cashed or deposited it, there is nothing outstanding on your side.
• The cheque was issued and is sitting somewhere, or was returned. A cheque sent to an old address is a common failure point.
• The balance was never remitted, or you are unsure which of the above applies.

For the third case, and for the second, the only route I can point you to is BitPay’s support. The site has a help library and support is reachable from the app. Card support itself has ceased, which I want to be careful about: it means the card-specific desk is gone, not that the company has no contact route at all. I found no published support hours and no list of languages.

I should be direct about what I cannot offer you. I am not going to give you a template for writing to them, a trick for getting a faster answer, or a way to reach the cheque department that bypasses their process. None of that is my place, and you must use the contact routes that BitPay provides for account holders. What I can do is tell you what the situation is so that you know what to ask for, which is a cheque, or confirmation of what happened to the cheque if one was issued to you.

On the product terms you would want as a holder, the record is empty. Daily purchase caps, monthly ATM caps, ATM locations, funding routes and top-up methods are not stated by the official sources, because the programme is closed and the pages are gone. Two unofficial historical limits are worth mentioning only so you recognise them if you encounter them in old writing: a 10,000 USD daily purchase cap and a 25,000 USD monthly ATM cap, both from a third-party review, both about a product that no longer exists.

If you are wondering whether you can still top up, spend, or withdraw, the answer is no. The last day to load was 1 June 2023. That is not a policy that might be revisited; it is a date that passed.

One point on disputes, because people ask: chargeback and dispute rights under the old prepaid card are not stated in any source I could read, and prepaid card coverage varies by jurisdiction. I would not assume any particular protection applied in 2023, and I certainly cannot tell you what applies now. For anything where money is genuinely outstanding, that is a question for a qualified adviser in your own country rather than for me.

What Can Go Wrong

This is the section I would ask you to read twice if you are considering any crypto card, because the BitPay case is a clean demonstration of a risk that does not feel like a risk while you are signing up.

The programme can end while you still hold money. This is the defining risk, and it is structural rather than a quirk of BitPay’s management. A crypto card is not one thing. It is a payment card number that runs on a card network, held by an issuer bank or licensed e-money institution, marketed by a crypto brand that is often only a programme manager or front end. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves; they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. So the card depends on a network’s willingness, a regulator’s permission, a bank’s balance sheet, and a crypto company’s execution, all at once. BitPay lost one of those and the product ended inside six weeks.

The pattern of how closures run is worth knowing because it is fairly consistent. Typically there is a notice period, then loading stops, then spending stops, then users are asked to withdraw what remains. In BitPay’s case the notice came by email on 17 May 2023, loading stopped on 1 June, spending stopped 15 June, and cheques went out around 30 June. If you see the first signal, treat it as the last signal.

Your money may sit with a custodian the whole time. Many crypto cards behave like prepaid cards: your crypto is converted and loaded as a stored fiat balance. In that model, control of the funds belongs to whoever holds the credentials, and you must trust the provider completely. The failure history of custodial platforms is not theoretical: Mt. Gox with about US$350 million reported stolen between 2011 and 2014, Coincheck at about US$400 million in 2018, and Ronin Network at US$625 million in 2022. Holding funds with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk, and that risk exists independently of whether the card programme survives.

The alternative, a card linked to your own wallet, keeps the funds yours until the moment of payment, but moves responsibility to you entirely: losing your seed phrase, falling for a phishing page, or having clipboard malware swap an address you copied are all ways to lose funds with no built-in recovery. Cryptocurrency transfers are typically irreversible, and the network cannot freeze or return them. There is no version of this that is risk-free; the question is only whose risk you are carrying.

Identity checks fail, and there is no fallback. KYC is not paperwork for its own sake. It is how regulated businesses meet anti-money-laundering and counter-counter-terrorism-financing obligations, and it includes ongoing monitoring, not just a one-time upload. In the EU, customer due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether you are politically exposed. If due diligence cannot be completed, the institution is required to refrain from the transaction or relationship and, where necessary, end the existing relationship. That is the rule, and it is why accounts close or freeze pending documents.

A card can look foreign at the till. A card number starts with a 6 or 8 digit issuer identification number that tells a merchant which institution and which country issued it. Merchants look that up, and they may apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from your billing address. This is a category-wide reason a crypto card gets declined for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

Some merchants simply refuse the card type. Merchant category code 7995 covers gambling, and many issuers block it by policy rather than by law, with the blocked list varying by issuer. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards because the BIN lookup reveals the type. And address verification, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address the buyer typed against issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which causes declines.

A declined payment can still hold your money. A declined authorisation may leave a hold that persists for several days, typically up to seven.

Card charges in crypto are taxable events. The IRS treats digital assets as property, so exchanging them for goods, services, dollars or other digital assets generally produces a taxable gain or loss, measured in local fiat currency at fair market value on the date of the transaction. Each card payment funded from crypto may therefore be a separate disposal. For personal holdings the result is a capital gain or loss, short-term if held a year or less. I am not giving you tax advice and I cannot tell you what applies where you live, but you should not be surprised by it.

On BitPay specifically, the reputational picture is worth separating from the card’s. BitPay’s Trustpilot rating as a company is 1.2 out of 5 from 299 reviews, read on 20 October 2026, with 89% of those reviews one-star. That is the company, not the card. The themes people raise include funds that cannot be withdrawn or sent, KYC that is burdensome or gets declined, support that is bots-only with no phone option, and refused account closure. Some reviews are scam-loss claims promoting recovery services; those are unverified and I would disregard them entirely. The company does not reply to negative reviews.

Those complaint themes line up with the structural risks in a way that makes the rating more informative than its raw number. KYC failing and funds not moving are precisely what happens when a custodial platform is under pressure. But I want to be fair in the other direction too: none of this is the card’s own doing, and a low rating on a company that shut down a card cleanly and paid out balances is not the same as a low rating on a company that stole funds.

What to Take Instead

None of the three cards below is a replacement for the BitPay card in the strict sense. There is no successor product, and I would be misleading you if I framed any of these as one. They are live options in the same category, with different structures and different gaps, and I include their scores so you can weigh them against mine rather than against a marketing page.

Cardex describes itself as one crypto card for 200+ countries, with no country list and no stated exclusions, so I cannot tell you whether your country is covered. Its App Store listing is Naira-focused, paying in Naira, which is a strong hint about where its centre of gravity is. The card is a debit card running on VERVE, VISA, Mastercard and UnionPay, available as virtual and physical. On fees, it converts crypto to fiat at the moment of payment and claims an “AI-Powered Conversion Rate” that scans global exchange rates and picks the best one, but states no fee percentage at all. That absence matters: a claim of a good rate is not the same as a disclosed all-in cost, and you should ask for the number before you rely on it. Funding is from USDT, USDC and BTC wallets, with networks not stated, and networks are where transfers go wrong. No rewards are stated.

MSX scores highest of the three at 6.4, and I want to be candid that this is largely a score about the absence of bad findings rather than about verified strengths. I could not read an official page covering who can get it, what the card is, what it costs, what fees apply, what funds it, or what rewards it offers. That absence of red flags is worth something, but it is not the same as a verified feature set. If MSX interests you, the first thing you need is a page that states the card’s terms.

Whop Cards is the most specified of the three, and the most geographically limited. For consumers it covers 31 US states: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. For businesses, 41 states. Consumer countries listed as unsupported are Belarus, China (Mainland), Cuba, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam; unsupported corporate countries include Russia and Belarus. Whether eligibility runs on citizenship or residence is not stated, which is exactly the detail that bites people.

Its card is a Visa that works anywhere Visa is accepted, online and in stores, and can also be issued to team members; the virtual or physical type and the card currency are not stated. The page says no extra fees, without listing issuance or monthly amounts, and states no conversion or FX fee. Spending draws on a Whop balance, where pending balance is usable as soon as a payment arrives while standard withdrawals use settled funds, backed by stablecoin collateral from a linked wallet, with coins and networks not stated. Rewards are 5% cashback at select merchants, currently Uber, with more planned, and the payout currency and conditions not stated.

Two things about Whop are worth drawing out for the wider category. Its balance model is a genuinely different structure from the usual crypto card: money arrives and is held in a merchant balance, and pending funds are usable immediately. That solves one problem, the wait, and creates another, the question of what backs the balance while it sits there. Second, its reward structure depends on where you spend rather than on how much, which makes it useful for a narrow set of habits and worth nothing outside them.

Before you pick any of these, check four things against your own situation. Whether your country and your citizenship are both accepted, since those are different tests and providers often only answer one. Whether the card is Visa or Mastercard, because acceptance, 3-D Secure and tokenised wallet support all follow the network. What the all-in cost is in percentage terms, including any foreign exchange fee, not just the advertised rate. And which wallet the card draws from, since funding from a network the provider does not support can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee.

Who I Would Recommend It To

To no one, as a card to apply for. The programme closed. If you have read this far and still hold a BitPay card, the useful next step is not shopping, it is confirming what happened to your balance.

To former cardholders, I would say this: the record shows a defined process with a defined endpoint, cheques to the address on the card around 30 June 2023, and a company that still has a support channel through its app and help library. Whether that process worked for you is something only you know. I cannot tell you whether your cheque was issued, and I will not pretend otherwise.

To people choosing a card now, I would suggest you read BitPay’s failure as a template rather than a competitor. The question that should decide your choice is not “what are the fees” but “what happens to my money if one of the three parties behind this card decides to leave.” Find out who the licensed issuer is, not just which crypto brand is in front. Find out whether your funds sit with a custodian or in your own wallet. Find out what the issuer is regulated by in your own country. And notice the shape of the announcement when it comes, because the BitPay sequence, email on 17 May, loading stopped 1 June, spending stopped 15 June, is the shape every one of these closures takes.

There is a version of this card that was fine for its time, and the honest part of this review is that a card can be well-built and still stop existing, because the card was never the load-bearing part. If your requirement is being able to spend crypto in places your bank will not open an account, the category is thinner than the number of options suggests, and every option you consider carries the same structural exposure. Whop Cards is the most clearly documented of the three alternatives, and it is US-state limited. Cardex covers the most countries on paper and discloses the least about its costs. MSX tells me the least of all. Take the one whose issuer and costs you can actually verify in writing.

Frequently asked questions

What was the BitPay card?

It was a prepaid Mastercard that let you load crypto and spend the converted value in shops and at ATMs. It ran on banking and issuing infrastructure provided by a partner bank, with BitPay as the crypto brand in front. It wound down in 2023, so it no longer exists as a product you can obtain.

How does BitPay card work?

It worked like most prepaid crypto cards: you converted crypto into a fiat balance and loaded that balance to the card, then the card spent only that stored balance. Loading stopped on 1 June 2023 and spending and ATM access ended on 15 June 2023, so the mechanism no longer functions.

Is BitPay a bank?

No. BitPay is a crypto wallet and payments company whose site states it is licensed for Virtual Currency Business Activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services, NMLS ID#1496848. That licence is company-wide and concerns its virtual currency business, not the card.

Why did the BitPay card close?

Because the issuing bank left. In January 2023 Metropolitan Commercial Bank announced its exit from crypto banking, and the card rested on that relationship. Cardholders were emailed on 17 May 2023 that the prepaid Mastercard programme was winding down, and the rest followed over six weeks.

Is the BitPay card coming back?

The sources disagree and I would not promise it. One review says the replacement card never launched, an unofficial site says applications are paused with a waitlist, and BitPay’s own site in 2026 shows no card at all. Treat it as closed unless you see something on BitPay’s own site.

What happened to money left on the BitPay card?

Remaining balances were to be issued as a cheque to the address linked to the card, within roughly 30 days after the 15 June 2023 cut-off, with dispatch around 30 June 2023. No refund amount and no claims process are stated in any source I read, so if nothing arrived you need BitPay’s support.

Can I still top up or use the BitPay card?

No. The last day to load was 1 June 2023 and spending ended on 15 June 2023. There is nothing to top up, and the card has not worked since mid-2023. Any page suggesting otherwise is describing a product that no longer exists.

What did the BitPay card cost?

The only figures available are unofficial, from third-party reviews: 3% foreign transaction fee, 2.50 USD per domestic ATM withdrawal, 5 USD a month dormancy fee after 90 days of inactivity, and 10 USD for a standard replacement. None of these were confirmed by BitPay’s own pages, which no longer exist.

Did the BitPay card require KYC?

The official pages no longer state this, so I cannot tell you what was required. In general, crypto card providers must verify identity under anti-money-laundering rules, and where checks cannot be completed the institution is expected to decline or end the relationship rather than proceed.

What can I use instead of the BitPay card?

Live options I looked at are MSX at 6.4 out of 10, Cardex at 5.6, and Whop Cards at 5.2. Whop is the clearest on eligibility but limited to 31 US states for consumers; Cardex claims 200+ countries but states no fees; MSX publishes very little detail. None is a direct successor to BitPay.

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