A euro prepaid Visa with an IBAN, cheap to hold and awkward to rely on

Updated October 2026

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Available in US

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Bitsa is a prepaid Visa card that sits between a crypto wallet and an everyday payment method: you hold euros in a card balance, you spend that balance, and a European IBAN comes with it. On paper that is a genuinely useful shape for someone who wants a normal-looking card without a traditional bank account. In practice the card’s public pages are thin where it matters most — the country list is not stated, the issuing bank is not named on the pages I read, and the fee schedule depends on which plan you are on. I scored it 5.0 out of 10, and the reason is not that it is a bad product. It is that the things you would need to trust it with money are the things it publishes least clearly.

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

I am not telling you what to do with your money; I am telling you what I could and could not verify, and where the friction is.

The score, and who this card is actually for

Bitsa suits one person quite well: an EU resident who already holds crypto or stablecoins, wants a prepaid Visa with an IBAN to spend euros without opening a bank account, and can live with a euro balance rather than a dollar one. If that is you, the mechanics are simple and the plan ladder is genuinely cheap at the bottom.

It does not suit someone who needs a card in a country the card has not confirmed, who wants to hold dollars, or who needs support to answer within a day. It is also a poor fit for anyone whose main worry is control of their crypto: this is a custodial setup, and the card’s own programme structure means a third party sits between you and the funds.

That total is 5.0 out of 10. The pattern is worth reading twice: the card is excellent at the narrow job of being a spendable euro balance, and weakest at the things that determine whether you can trust it with a meaningful amount.

Will they give you the card?

Here is the honest answer: the card does not say. The public pages I read do not state which countries are eligible. Everything below comes from third-party reporting, so treat it as unofficial and unconfirmed by Bitsa.

Unofficial sources describe residents of 27 EEA countries as eligible: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. The same source lists Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Latvia, the United Kingdom and the United States as restricted or closed.

Two consequences follow, and both matter for you:

• Citizenship and residence are recorded separately in these programmes, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy often follow nationality and country of birth rather than just your address. If you hold a passport from a restricted country but live in an eligible one, the answer is not obvious from the pages I read.
• If your country is not on any list above, you should assume the answer is no until Bitsa tells you otherwise in writing. There is no list to check against, which is itself the problem.

On age: prepaid and debit cards in this category are generally for adults, and one third-party report describes Bitsa’s onboarding as starting at 18 with a separate “Bitsa Young” route for 16 and 17-year-olds requiring guardian authorisation in the app. The card’s own pages do not confirm the tiers.

How to get it

The card does not publish a step-by-step signup, and it does not state what identity checks it runs. What it does say is enough to describe the shape: it is a prepaid Visa crypto card, available as a physical card and as a virtual card, crypto is converted to euros, a European IBAN is issued, and everything is managed in an iOS and Android app.

Unofficial, and not confirmed by the card: you would supply proof of residence in an eligible country and complete identity verification, and the issuer may suspend an account where KYC fails, where fraud or anti-money-laundering risk is flagged, or where source-of-funds documents are missing. That last one deserves a pause. It means the right to your balance can depend on documents you did not think to keep, and the people complaining in public (below) describe exactly that pattern.

Delivery is not stated on the official pages I read, and the third-party material did not supply times either. Pricing is clear enough: the physical card is EUR 20 and an additional virtual card is EUR 2.50.

So the practical answer to “how do I get it” is: expect an app, expect a verification step you cannot skip, and do not treat the card as something you will have in your wallet the next morning.

What it really costs: Fees

This is where a prepaid card is either cheap or not cheap at all, and Bitsa’s numbers land somewhere in the middle depending on how you use it.

Two of those rows are the ones to hold onto. First, “Cashback up to 15%” is listed as a plan service, with the payout asset and the conditions not stated — so read it as marketing until you see what actually triggers it. Second, the plan fee buys you limits and features, not a cheaper card.

Now three ordinary payments, because percentages only mean something against a real amount.

• A EUR 40 grocery shop in Spain. Inside the euro zone, so no currency fee. Nothing in the card’s published schedule bites at the shop level. This is the card’s best case and it is a genuinely good one.
• A EUR 40 subscription paid from a card top-up. The card charges 1.5% to load from an external card above the free allowance, which is EUR 0.60 on a EUR 40 top-up needed for a EUR 40 purchase — and that is before anything else. If you top up in larger lumps the rate bites harder relative to the purchase, and if the subscription auto-debits, you are re-loading on a schedule rather than on demand.
• A EUR 60 meal in Tokyo. The card states 1.75% outside the euro zone, so EUR 1.05 on the meal, plus whatever your own bank’s conversion of the top-up cost you on the way in. Foreign purchases are where the fee structure shows its shape: it is not one fee, it is a fee on the load and a fee on the spend.

The cost the card does not publish is the one that could matter most to you if you hold crypto: the crypto conversion spread is not stated. You can be told the card charges 1.5% here and 2% there and still be exposed to the gap between the price you got and the price the card gives you. If crypto is your reason for being here, that spread is a number you should try to find out before you load anything large.

There is also a live conflict in the ATM terms: one source of issuer terms puts the fee in Spain at EUR 2.50, while a newer guide describes the operator fee alone. That is exactly the kind of discrepancy that makes “read the terms” frustrating rather than reassuring.

How to Top up the card

The card names its rails: Bitcoin, Ethereum and USD Coin, plus top-up by card, SEPA transfer, wallet and voucher. It does not name the networks. That is not a small omission — sending on the wrong chain is the single most expensive mistake people make with this kind of card, and blockchain transfers do not reverse. If you are sending Ethereum, for instance, the standard token on Ethereum requires ETH in the wallet to pay gas, so a wallet holding a token but no ETH cannot send.

Unofficial detail worth having: external-wallet top-ups explicitly list BTC, ETH and USDC, and the app generates a new address each time. Voucher reloads are described as costing between 0% and 6%, crypto buy is described as 0% on all plans, and crypto top-ups are capped at up to EUR 20,000 a day.

There is one piece of unofficial information here that changes how you think about the whole product, so I want to be precise about it: reported current material describes the in-app crypto feature as buy and sell only, with holdings that cannot be sent to or received from external wallets. If that holds, Bitsa is not a wallet with a card attached — it is a place to convert and spend, and your coins stay where they are until you sell them into the balance. That is a different product from the one many people picture, and it means the card cannot be used to move value to a new exchange or to a friend.

Paying with it every day

This is the strongest part of the card, and it is worth being blunt about why.

It is a Visa, physical and virtual, with a European IBAN. Visa is accepted in shops and online almost everywhere, and an IBAN means you can receive and send euros through the banking system rather than only through crypto rails. Apple Pay and Google Pay are confirmed in current help material; Samsung Pay was announced earlier but there is no current setup guide, so I would not plan around it.

On mobile, the mechanics are the standard ones. Apple Pay replaces the card number with a device-specific number held in the Secure Element, and each payment carries a one-time code. The issuer can restrict the tokenised number — for example block it for online use — so if a phone-based payment fails while the physical card works, that restriction is the first thing to check.

Three everyday realities to plan around:

• Declines are not always about you. Address verification compares the numeric parts of the billing address you type with issuer records, and it is mostly a US, Canadian and UK system that is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards. Some merchants also decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards because the card’s identifying number reveals the type and issuing country. Both produce a decline with nothing wrong on your end.
• Merchant categories can be blocked. Gambling has its own merchant category code, and issuers block it on specific cards by policy rather than by law, with the blocked list differing per issuer. The card’s own page does not publish a blocked-category list, so this is another thing to discover by failing.
• Holds linger. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to seven. With a prepaid balance that is money you cannot spend meanwhile.

Online payments are protected by 3-D Secure, Visa’s version of it, where the issuer either approves silently or challenges you with a code or a biometric step. That helps against card-not-present fraud; it is not protection against the account being frozen for compliance reasons, which is a different failure entirely.

What can go wrong

This is the section I would read twice if I were you.

The card’s own pages report no incidents. What I found instead is user reporting, gathered from a secondary aggregator and unverified, and from Trustpilot at 1.3 out of 5 across 363 reviews with 68% one-star. I found no Bitsa Trustpilot page or Reddit threads of my own to cross-check, so treat the picture as one-sided and incomplete.

The themes in those reviews are consistent and specific:

• Accounts frozen or blocked with funds withheld. Reviews date from September 2020 to September 2026, with several in May, July and September 2026.
• Support unresponsive for weeks or months, including a July 2026 report.
• Repeated document and KYC demands, in 2025.
• Crypto top-ups partly or not credited, in May and November 2025.
• Login and app failures, September 2026.
• Unexplained account closure, January 2025.

Two reviewers claim regulator warnings, which I could not verify. The company has not replied to negative reviews.

Two structural facts sit behind all of this and are more useful than the reviews themselves. First, the entity is described officially as a simplified joint stock company registered in the Nice Trade and Companies Register, and the card’s footer links to issuer conditions and a payment service provider that I did not read — so the bank behind the card is not named on the pages I reviewed. Unofficial sources name Pecunia Cards EDE as issuer under the PecunPay programme, with a Banco de Espana register number, and Bitsa as the programme operator. Second, unofficial current material describes the balance as custodial after funding and held inside that programme, with an SMS code plus a personal secret for online purchases, and the ability to block the card in the app.

If you hold money here, you are holding it with a programme operator and an issuer rather than at a deposit-taking bank, and e-money balances are not bank deposits. That is the risk that the complaints are all versions of, whatever the individual grievance was.

One more thing worth knowing: this is a category with a history. Visa ended its agreements with FTX in November 2022 and the card programme was wound down; WaveCrest, a supplier to several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018 and all its Visa programmes closed. Programme closures typically mean a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw. A card programme ending is not an exotic event in this industry.

What to take instead

If the crypto-to-Visa shape is what you need, there are three comparable cards, and each fails in a different place.

Where the alternatives beat it:

• Stella scores highest here and is simpler in the way Bitsa is not, with both card types and no cashback promise to decode. Its catch is the same catch: availability is not stated, and its terms bar users under economic sanctions programmes while routing US and European users through affiliates.
• Whop Cards are built for a US footprint, 31 states for consumers, and are useful if your money is US-side. They are not an EEA answer.
• UniFi Card is a dollar card with US rails — ACH, wire, SEPA, SPEI — issued by Lead Bank, which makes it a different proposition for someone paid in US dollars rather than euros.

Where Bitsa still wins: a euro balance with a European IBAN, at EUR 0 on the Free plan, with crypto top-ups described as 0% to buy. Nothing else in this group combines euros, an IBAN and a free tier. Unofficial sources, such as CryptoCardHub, describe these as not officially stated by Bitsa.

If none of these fit — because you are outside the EEA, or you need dollars, or you want to keep your own keys — the honest answer is that crypto cards are not the tool. A self-custody-linked card keeps funds in your own wallet until the moment of payment, and you carry the sole responsibility for key loss, phishing and malware that swaps copied addresses. Custodial platforms have their own record: Mt. Gox, Coincheck, Ronin. Both sides of that trade have failed people.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Bitsa to an EU resident whose spending money already sits in crypto, who wants a euro Visa with an IBAN for ordinary shopping, and who treats the balance as spending money rather than savings. Load what you need, spend it, and do not let it accumulate — the Free plan’s EUR 2,500 balance ceiling is a sensible ceiling for that use, and staying under it means a freeze is an inconvenience rather than a crisis.

I would not recommend it to someone who needs the card to be the reliable part of their finances. The complaint pattern is too consistent, the issuer is not named on the pages I could read, and support is described by reviewers as absent for weeks. If your income lands on this card, you are exposed to something a normal bank account does not expose you to.

Before you commit, four checks, in this order:

• Which network do I have to send on? Not stated by the card. Ask before your first crypto transfer, because a wrong network can mean losing the money with no reversal.
• What is the crypto conversion spread? Not stated. This is the number that decides whether crypto top-ups are cheap or not.
• Which country am I judged by, residence or citizenship? The eligibility list is not published officially, so you are relying on unofficial reporting.
• What happens if the card is frozen mid-month? Read the issuer conditions in the footer and find out who you would be dealing with, and under whose rules.

And one thing to keep in view if you use this at scale: in most places digital assets are treated as property for tax purposes, so each payment funded from crypto can be a separate disposal measured at the value on the day. I am not telling you what your obligations are — that is between you and a professional — but the frequency of small payments is exactly the pattern that generates paperwork.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Bitsa card?

Bitsa is a prepaid Visa card that holds euros rather than crypto. You load the balance by converting crypto or by topping up through other rails, then spend the euros in shops or online wherever Visa is accepted. The card is offered physically and virtually, comes with a European IBAN, and is managed through an iOS and Android app. The crypto is converted to euros before you spend it, not held and paid directly.

Is Bitsa a bank?

No. It describes itself as a simplified joint stock company registered in the Nice Trade and Companies Register, and it operates a card programme rather than taking deposits. The issuing institution is not named on the pages I reviewed; unofficial sources name Pecunia Cards EDE under the PecunPay programme. The practical consequence is that your balance is an e-money balance held in a programme, not a bank deposit, so deposit guarantee schemes should not be assumed.

Does Bitsa require KYC?

The card’s public pages do not state what checks it runs. Unofficial sources describe proof of residence in an eligible country and identity verification, with ages 16 to 17 handled through a “Bitsa Young” route requiring guardian authorisation in the app. The same source says the issuer may suspend accounts where verification fails, fraud or anti-money-laundering risk is flagged, or source-of-funds documents are missing — which is the part worth understanding before you start.

How much does the Bitsa card cost?

The physical card is EUR 20 and a virtual card is EUR 2.50. Plans are Free at EUR 0, Move at EUR 0.99 a month or EUR 8.99 a year, and Pro at EUR 9.99 a month or EUR 69.99 a year. On top of that, an external-card reload is 1.5% after the free allowance, payments cost 1.75% outside the euro zone and 2% elsewhere, and a transfer commission of EUR 1 applies on Free and Move.

Is the Bitsa card free?

The Free plan costs nothing per month, so yes in that narrow sense. The card itself is not free: the physical card is EUR 20 and the virtual card EUR 2.50. Fees then attach to how you load and spend — 1.5% on an external-card reload beyond the allowance, 1.75% or 2% on payments outside the euro zone, and EUR 0.55 plus 1% at an ATM abroad.

Can I use the Bitsa card in my country?

Possibly, and I cannot tell you from the card’s own pages, which do not state the list. Unofficial reporting describes residents of 27 EEA countries as eligible and names Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Latvia, the United Kingdom and the United States as restricted. Because citizenship is often screened separately from residence, the safest approach is to ask Bitsa directly and get the answer in writing before you fund anything.

How do I top up the Bitsa card?

The card lists Bitcoin, Ethereum and USD Coin, and also supports top-ups by card, SEPA transfer, wallet and voucher. What it does not name is the blockchain network, which is the detail that matters most — sending on the wrong network can mean losing the transfer, since blockchain payments do not reverse. A useful unofficial detail is that the app generates a new address for each deposit, and reported crypto reload limits run up to EUR 20,000 a day.

Is the Bitsa card safe?

It has the ordinary safeguards for this category: app-based two-factor authentication, the ability to freeze the card in the app, spending limits, and 3-D Secure confirmation online. But safety here has two halves, and the second one is the risk. The balance is custodial after funding and held inside the card programme, so it depends on the operator and issuer staying solvent and compliant. User reports describe frozen accounts with funds withheld, and Trustpilot shows 1.3 out of 5 across 363 reviews.

Can I withdraw money from the Bitsa card?

Withdrawals are what the card’s ATM terms cover: EUR 0.55 plus 1% abroad, with a minimum of EUR 0.75, and a maximum of EUR 450 a day outside Spain. The in-app crypto feature is described in unofficial material as buy and sell only, with holdings that cannot be sent to or received from external wallets — so your crypto cannot be moved out through the app, only sold into the balance and then spent or withdrawn as euros.

Is the Bitsa card worth it?

Worth it if you are an EU resident with crypto you want to spend in euros, need an IBAN, and will treat the balance as spending money. Not worth it if you need dollars, live outside the area the unofficial list covers, or want support you can rely on. It also falls short if you need to move crypto itself. My own read is that the card is well built for a narrow job and poorly documented for the trust decisions that come with holding money on it.

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