A crypto card for West Africa that works — and tells you almost nothing about its fees

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Payrit is a crypto payment card built for a specific person: someone in Nigeria or one of its neighbours who holds naira and USDT or USDT and wants to spend both from a single piece of plastic, or from a single virtual card, without opening a traditional bank relationship first. On that narrow promise it does what it says. What it does not do is tell you much — not its monthly fee, not its conversion cost, not its limits, not its support hours, and not even who issues the card. I scored it 4.7 out of 10, and the number is less about the product being bad than about how much of the product is undocumented.

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

This review is written for you if the ordinary bank card is what has been hard — the application declined, the branch too far, the documentation you do not have. If that is your situation, Payrit is genuinely interesting and I want you to read to the end. If you simply want the cheapest reliable way to spend dollars online from anywhere in the world, this is the wrong card: it runs on Verve and Interswitch, not Visa or Mastercard, so most of the world’s online merchants have never heard of it.

Verdict: 4.7 out of 10

Here is the score, criterion by criterion, and then my honest reading of who this card is for.

The lowest mark on the card, 2 out of 10 for who can get it, is not a criticism of quality. It is a statement of geography. Seven West African countries are a small part of the world, and if you are not in one of them, the card does not apply to you at all. That drags the total down more than any feature does.

The cost mark of 6 is a guess dressed as a number, and I want to be honest about that. The one price I can confirm is ₦7,000 for the physical card. Everything else — what a monthly subscription might be, what a dollar purchase costs in conversion, what a foreign-currency purchase costs — is not stated anywhere on the card’s public pages. I cannot tell you a conversion percentage because the card does not publish one. Anyone quoting you one is guessing too.

The top-up mark of 5 sits in the middle for a good reason. The idea is sound and unusual: one card spends from a naira balance and a USDT or USDC balance without you having to move money between them first. But the card does not say which blockchain networks it accepts for those stablecoins, and it does not say what a top-up costs. For a deposit, network is not a detail — it is the difference between money arriving and money vanishing. See the top-up section for why that matters so much.

The reliability mark of 5 is the hardest to read, and deliberately so. Payrit is a product of Tree-House Nigeria LTD, which describes itself as “a financial technology company and is not a bank” and says it provides services “in partnership with licensed transmitters and banking partners”. That is a normal, legitimate structure. But the card never names the bank or institution that actually issues the card, and the app’s rating on the App Store is 4.33 from only three ratings — a number so thin it tells you almost nothing either way.

The everyday-use mark of 6 is the card’s real strength. A physical and a virtual card on the Verve and Interswitch networks, usable at point-of-sale terminals and ATMs across Africa, is exactly what a person without a mainstream bank card needs. Whether you can add it to Apple Pay or Google Pay is not stated, and given the networks involved, I would not assume you can.

So: who is this for? In short, West African users who want to spend naira and USDT from one card and who can tolerate a provider that publishes almost nothing about its costs. Who is it not for? Anyone outside the seven listed countries. Anyone who needs their card accepted on Visa or Mastercard rails in Europe, North America or Asia. Anyone who needs to know their exact conversion rate and fees before committing money — because Payrit will not tell you.

Will they give you the card?

Yes, if you are in one of seven countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal or Togo. That is the entire eligibility statement the card makes. There is no wider list, no regional carve-out, no “and elsewhere” — so if you are standing anywhere else, this is not your card.

Note carefully what the card does *not* say about who it will serve. It does not publish its identity-verification requirements. It does not say whether a passport, a national ID, a selfie, a proof of address, a bank statement or a utility bill is needed, or whether a minimum balance, a Nigerian BVN, a residency permit or a credit check is required. It does not even say whether verification tiers exist. None of that is on the public pages. That is not the same as “no KYC” — regulated partners almost always verify customers, and the card is explicit that it works through licensed transmitters and banking partners, which by law means some checking takes place. It simply does not tell you the shape of it.

What this means for you in practice: expect to hand over documents at some point, and do not read the absence of published KYC rules as permission to skip it. Across the industry, KYC rules require regulated businesses to verify customers as part of anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing law, and in the EU customer due diligence typically covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, and a politically-exposed-person check. In the US the customer identification programme requires name, date of birth, address and an identification number. Nationality, by the way, is recorded and screened separately from residence, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy are usually applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as address. Prepaid and debit cards are generally available to adults aged 18 and up.

So the honest answer to “will they give me the card” is: probably yes if you are in one of those seven countries and over 18, but you will not find the conditions published, and you should go in expecting to prove who you are.

How to get it

You order the card in the app, and you have to supply three things at the ordering stage: the card name, a delivery address, and your choice of primary balance. The card is produced immediately and shipped. The quoted delivery window is “5–14 working days within Lagos and most states in Nigeria”, so if you are in Cote d’Ivoire or Senegal, the timeline you have is an extrapolation, not a promise. The cost of delivery is not stated.

Activation is straightforward: once the card arrives you activate it using its first six and last four digits together with setting a new PIN. That is the whole process — no branch visit, no courier waiting with paperwork.

Two details worth pausing on before you tap through. First, when you choose a “primary balance”, you are choosing which of your naira or USDC or USDT funds the card draws from first. The card says you can spend right away without prefunding, so this is not a deposit step, it is a default-source setting. Second, the card comes in both physical and virtual form on the Verve and Interswitch networks — not Visa, not Mastercard. Both are worth having: the virtual card is instant and good for online subscriptions, the physical one is what gets you into shops and ATMs. Order the virtual one first if the app allows, because you do not have to wait five to fourteen working days to start spending.

Fees: what it really costs

This is the section where I have the least to give you, and I would rather say so than dress up the silence. The costs table below is honest about its gaps.

The currency question sits underneath all of these. The card spends naira and USDC or USDT from a single card, which is its main design idea — but when you spend a USDC balance in a shop that charges naira, someone is converting, and that “someone” is the card, and the card does not publish the rate or the margin.

Two or three everyday payments, and what I can tell you about them:

• Buying something in naira from a USDC balance. This is the conversion case. The card converts your stablecoin into naira to pay the merchant. What rate you get, and what fee is added on top, is not stated. This is the payment where the unknown cost is largest.
• Paying a naira bill from a naira balance. This is the clean case. Same currency in, same currency out, so no conversion happens and the only possible charges are ones the card has not published — an ATM fee, if you withdraw cash, or a merchant surcharge.
• Withdrawing at an ATM in Africa. The card confirms ATM access exists. Whether the ATM operator charges you, whether Payrit charges you, and how many free withdrawals you get per month are all not stated. Treat cash as the use case with the most unknown cost.

I am not going to guess at percentages, because a wrong number here costs you real money. What I can tell you is how to protect yourself: keep small amounts on the card, make one test purchase early and compare it against what the item actually cost you, and if a fee surprises you, that surprise is itself the fee schedule, because there is no published one. Also remember that on-chain network fees — the gas or bandwidth for a deposit — are charged by the blockchain, not by Payrit, so they are a separate line from anything on this table.

How to Top up the Payrit card

The short version: you fund the account with any supported currency — USDC, USDT or naira — and spend right away. The card’s own line is worth quoting because it is unusual: “Your card works without needing to be prefunded.” It draws on your connected primary balance, whether that is NGN or USDC or USDT. Naira and USDC/USDT wallets spend from one card, so you are not shuttling funds between accounts before each purchase; the card uses what is there.

What is not stated is the part that matters most for a crypto deposit: which networks are supported. The card names the coins — USDC, USDT, naira — but not the chains they should arrive on. This is not a nitpick. Blockchain transfers are typically irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. There is no chargeback for a misdirected blockchain transfer.

It also matters because the popular coins live on very different networks. USDC is natively supported on 38 networks, as Circle listed as of 16 September 2026, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon PoS, Avalanche, Arbitrum and Stellar — and Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option. USDT has been issued on networks including Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon and Avalanche. Fees differ by network too: on Ethereum, gas is paid only in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT but no ETH cannot send at all; on Tron, fees are paid through bandwidth and energy resources, often by burning TRX.

So the practical rule for topping up is: ask Payrit, in writing, which network to send on for your specific coin, and keep a record of the answer. Do not guess. Get it wrong and there is no customer-service remedy that can reverse a blockchain transaction.

One more thing the card does not address: withdrawing. Whether you can move money back off the card to a bank account, to a wallet, or anywhere else, and what that costs, is not stated. For a card you mostly spend, that may not matter. For anyone treating it as a bridge between currencies, it is the question you should ask before you commit.

Paying with it every day

The daily picture is the strongest part of this card. You get a physical and a virtual card on Verve and Interswitch, accepted at point-of-sale terminals and at ATMs across Africa. For a person in Lagos or Abuja who could not open an ordinary bank card, that is a real, working answer.

The app is the hub: the iOS app “Payrit” by TREE-HOUSE NIGERIA LIMITED, version dated 2026-09-18 as I read it. It is where you order, freeze and unfreeze the card, set your primary balance and manage spending. From there, your main daily controls are sound — you can freeze and unfreeze the card instantly in the app, which is the single most useful safety feature a card like this has.

What the card does not offer, or does not disclose, in daily use:

• Apple Pay and Google Pay are not disclosed. The card does not say whether either wallet is supported, and given the Verve and Interswitch networks, assume nothing. If phone payments are essential to you, ask first.
• Rewards. No cashback or rewards are stated. There is nothing to offset the ₦7,000 or any conversion cost.
• Wallets. Whether Payrit offers its own custodial wallet, or connects to an external one, is not stated.
• Disputes and chargebacks. The process for disputing a transaction is not stated. A chargeback is a refund ordered by the card issuer, with reason codes such as fraud, duplicate billing or goods not received — but if the issuer is unnamed, so is the process.

Two industry details that will shape your daily experience more than the app features. First, some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs, because a BIN lookup reveals the card type and the issuer’s country and the merchant can apply extra scrutiny when it does not match your billing address. Verve and Interswitch are large in West Africa and small everywhere else, so expect smooth acceptance at home and friction abroad. Second, a declined payment can still leave a hold on your funds for several days, sometimes up to seven — so a retry at a shop is not always harmless.

What can go wrong

I looked for incidents and found none, and I want to be precise about what that means. I found no official incidents and no user reports, and there is no Trustpilot page. That is genuinely reassuring, and it is also thin evidence: a young product with three App Store ratings has not had many chances to generate a complaint history either way. Absence of complaints is not the same as a good track record.

The real risks are structural. Let me lay them out plainly:

• You do not know who issues the card. Payrit is a product of Tree-House Nigeria LTD, a fintech that “is not a bank”, working “in partnership with licensed transmitters and banking partners” — but the issuing institution is not named. When something goes wrong, knowing who your issuer is, and under which regulator’s rules you are protected, is the first thing you will want.
• Custody risk. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key or seed phrase; with a custodial wallet the provider holds the credentials, so you must trust the provider completely. The industry has a record here: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), and Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022). Holding funds with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk, and a seed phrase — typically 12 to 24 words — is an unencrypted key that anyone who obtains it can use to spend your funds, with no built-in recovery.
• Programme shutdown. Card programmes can be closed by a network or a partner. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX in November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down; WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018. Closures typically give notice, then stop spending and loading, then ask you to withdraw remaining balances. This is why a stablecoin balance sitting on a card for months is a decision, not a default.
• Getting the network wrong on a deposit. Covered above, and it is the one mistake that is genuinely unrecoverable.
• Stablecoin risk. Stablecoins aim to hold a stable value, but “despite the name, stablecoins are not necessarily stable” — TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. Tether also 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.

Two more practical points. Protection from fraud is thinner than on a mainstream card: US debit card reversal rights come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z, but prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed. And the tax treatment deserves a note, not advice — the IRS treats digital assets as property, so spending crypto generally produces a taxable gain or loss, measured in local currency at the value on the date of the transaction, meaning each card payment funded from crypto can be a separate disposal. That is a conversation with a tax professional in your country, not with me.

There is one more thing that I like. Support is not just an email queue: the card invites you to “speak with the founders directly” and links a community. For a small fintech, that direct line is worth a lot. But the help centre is marked “Under construction,” and support hours and languages are not stated.

What to take instead

If Payrit is not right for you, it may be because of where you are or because of what you need. Here are the three alternatives I compared against, with their own scores.

Let me take you through what that table actually means for a decision.

Stella is the strongest of the three on score, 6.5 out of 10, and it is the only one that runs on Visa, which means it is accepted almost everywhere a card is accepted. Its crypto model is the cleanest of the three: you deposit crypto into the account and it automatically tops up the card, with an in-app custodial wallet. The catch is eligibility — the official site does not state which countries it serves, it excludes anyone under economic sanctions programmes, and it routes US and European users through affiliates, which means your contract may be with a different legal entity than the one you downloaded. No cashback is stated on the card page; its Earn product is a separate yield feature.

Whop Cards is built for a different job. It is Visa, it is aimed at sellers and creators with a Whop balance rather than at crypto holders, and the balance is backed by stablecoin collateral from a linked wallet — coins and networks not stated. Its most attractive feature is honest: 5% cashback at select merchants, currently Uber, with more planned. Payout currency and conditions are not stated. Its country list is the longest and most specific of the three, and note that it excludes a long list of countries including Russia, Belarus, China (Mainland), India, Israel, Turkey and Ukraine for consumers.

UniFi Card matches Payrit’s 4.7 score but solves a different problem: receiving money, not holding crypto. It is a prepaid Visa debit card issued by Lead Bank, funded via ACH, wire, SEI (IBAN) or SPEI (CLABE), and it can pay you out to a USDC wallet. The listing claims “3% rewards on balances”, though card cashback specifically is not stated, and it says “Fees may apply” without saying what. Apple Pay is supported, which Payrit does not claim. Its country reach is not confirmed from official pages.

My honest comparison: if your problem is “I have no ordinary card and I am in Nigeria,” Payrit is genuinely the only one of these four built for that, and none of the three alternatives solves it. If your problem is “I want a Visa that works online worldwide,” Payrit is the wrong instrument and Stella or Whop is closer. If your problem is “I receive income and want it in a wallet,” look at UniFi.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend Payrit to a specific person, and I want to be concrete rather than generous. If you live in Nigeria or one of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Senegal or Togo; you hold some naira and some USDT or USDT; you have struggled to get an ordinary bank card; and you are comfortable adopting a young fintech’s terms without being able to read the fee schedule in advance — then yes, order it. The physical card costs ₦7,000, activation takes a minute, the virtual card is instant, and spending from both balances without moving money first is a genuinely useful design that most bigger cards do not offer in that form.

I would not recommend it to you if any of these are true:

• You are outside those seven countries. Not a fit, full stop.
• You need Visa or Mastercard acceptance. Verve and Interswitch is a regional network; it will not get you through most of the world’s online checkout pages.
• You need to know your fees before you commit. You cannot know them. The card does not publish them.
• You plan to hold a large balance on the card for a long time. Custody risk, programme-shutdown risk, and stablecoin risk all scale with the balance.
• You need 24/7 support with stated hours. The help centre is under construction.
• You are risk-averse about blockchain deposits. Send to the wrong network and there is no remedy.

The card’s own momentum is encouraging in a small way. Its update history shows physical cards arriving in February, followed by the addition of virtual dollar and crypto card options. The product is being actively built. That is a reason for cautious optimism, and it is not a substitute for published terms.

If you are in the target market, my advice is to start small. Load a modest amount, make one everyday purchase, compare the amount debited against what the item cost, and only then decide whether the card earns a permanent place in your wallet.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Payrit card?

Payrit is a crypto payment card product of Tree-House Nigeria LTD, a financial technology company that states it is “not a bank” and works with licensed transmitters and banking partners. It gives you a physical and a virtual card on the Verve and Interswitch networks, and the same card spends both naira and USDC or USDT without you moving funds between accounts first. It is aimed at West African users, primarily those who find ordinary bank cards hard to obtain.

Is Payrit a bank?

No. Payrit describes itself as “a financial technology company and is not a bank.” It provides services “in partnership with licensed transmitters and banking partners”, which is a normal structure — the fintech is the interface, a licensed institution does the regulated work. One thing to note: the card’s public pages do not actually name the institution that issues the card, which is something you may want to ask about directly.

Where can I use the Payrit card?

The card states it works in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo, at point-of-sale terminals and at ATMs across Africa. It runs on Verve and Interswitch rather than Visa or Mastercard, so acceptance is strongest in West Africa and limited elsewhere. Merchant acceptance of prepaid and foreign-issued cards can also vary, since a BIN lookup reveals the card type and issuer country.

How do I get the Payrit card?

You order it in the app, supplying a card name, a delivery address and your choice of primary balance. The card is produced immediately and shipped, with a quoted delivery of “5–14 working days within Lagos and most states in Nigeria”. Activation uses the card’s first six and last four digits plus setting a new PIN. The physical card costs ₦7,000; the cost of delivery is not stated. Whether the virtual card can be obtained without waiting for the physical one is something to check in the app.

Does the Payrit card require KYC?

The card’s public pages do not say. They do not state what identity documents are required, whether verification tiers exist, or at what point checks happen. Because the card works through licensed transmitters and banking partners, some verification is almost certainly required in practice — regulated firms must verify customers under anti-money-laundering law. Expect to prove your identity at some point, and do not treat the missing rules as an exemption.

How do I top up the Payrit card?

You fund the account with any supported currency — USDC, USDT or naira — and can spend right away; the card says it works “without needing to be prefunded”, drawing on your connected primary balance. The important gap is networks: the card names the coins but not the chains they should arrive on. Blockchain transfers are irreversible, so always confirm the correct network with support before sending, or the deposit can be lost.

What does it cost to use the Payrit card?

The physical card costs ₦7,000. That is the only figure the card publishes. The monthly fee, conversion fee, foreign-exchange fee, ATM fees and allowances, and daily and monthly spending limits are all not stated. When you spend a stablecoin balance in naira, someone converts it, and the rate and margin are not disclosed — so keep amounts small and check the first debit against the real cost of what you bought.

Is the Payrit card safe?

There is no promise of safety, and you should treat it as a young product. I found no official incidents and no user reports, and there is no Trustpilot page — reassuring, but thin evidence from a company with only three App Store ratings. The card offers sensible controls: instant freeze and unfreeze in the app, card termination with a replacement if lost, and a PIN set at activation. Custody risk and programme-shutdown risk are real and outside your control.

Is the Payrit card free?

No. The physical card costs ₦7,000, and a virtual card may differ, though the page does not separate the two. Beyond that nothing is disclosed: there is no monthly fee published and no commission schedule, so you cannot tell from the card whether holding it long-term is free. The one reward on offer is none — no cashback is stated.

How do I withdraw money from Payrit?

The card’s public pages do not say whether withdrawal is possible at all, to a bank account, to a wallet or anywhere else, or what it would cost. If you are considering Payrit as a way to move between currencies rather than simply to spend, this is the question to settle with support first. If your plan is mainly spending from the balance, the absence matters less — but it is still worth asking.

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