A prepaid card that spends crypto, priced at 1% a purchase

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The CoinJar card is a prepaid Mastercard that draws on your crypto balance and converts it to Australian dollars at the moment you pay. The card itself is free, the physical card is free, and there is no monthly fee listed on the card page. What you pay for is the use: 1% on purchases, “2.99%+” on foreign transactions, and 1% on ATM withdrawals. If that sounds tolerable to you, the card is competently built. If you are outside Australia, it is not available to you at all — the card page names no countries, and the underlying Australian terms say it is for Australian residents.

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

I scored it 5.5 out of 10. That is not a verdict on whether the card works. It works. It is a verdict on how narrow it is and how much it costs when used as a general payment card.

Let me show you the breakdown, because the single number hides more than it explains.

The shape of that table tells you most of what you need. The two highest marks — everyday use at 9, reliability at 7 — are about the card as an object, and it is a good one. The two lowest — eligibility at 3, top-up options at 5 — are about the wrapper around it, and the wrapper is limited by design: Australia only, one prepaid card, one currency, no tier structure, no list of which coins work.

Who this suits. You live in Australia, you already hold and use crypto on CoinJar, you want to spend it in shops without selling it manually every time, and you do not mind paying 1% for that convenience. You mostly spend in Australia, so the foreign transaction line never bites. You use Apple Pay or Google Pay daily. Under those conditions this is a good card and I would not look further.

Who this does not suit. You live anywhere but Australia. You want to be paid into it, or use it as your only bank card. You need a wide choice of coins or networks to draw from. You travel often and would rather not pay a foreign transaction fee. Or you are simply looking for the cheapest way to move value — at 1% per purchase plus a separate trading fee when CoinJar sells your crypto, this is not that.

Who they will give you the card to

Short answer: adults who live in Australia and already have a verified CoinJar account. Everything else on the card page is silent.

That silence is worth taking seriously rather than reading as permission. The CoinJar card page does not state eligibility rules or list any countries. The Australian Product Disclosure Statement does, and it says the eligible person is 18 or older, a resident of Australia, with a verified CoinJar account. That is the rule set that governs this card as far as the published documents go, and it points to a single country.

There is no news here beyond the Australian terms, and the card’s own pages do not advertise a wider footprint. If you are outside Australia, the practical answer to “is this card available in my country” is no on the evidence I could find, and the honest thing to tell you is that I could not find anything saying otherwise either. CoinJar is an Australian exchange, and the card is issued by an Australian company, so the surrounding infrastructure is Australian.

Two things about eligibility that the documents leave open, and which you should not assume away:

• Verification levels and timing. The requirement is a verified CoinJar account. The card documents do not say which tier of verification is needed, how long approval takes, or why an application might be refused. If you are in a hurry — a trip, a deposit, a subscription starting next week — that is a real unknown, and it is on you to ask CoinJar before you rely on the card.
• Rejection reasons. Also not stated. In practice, identity re-checks happen on crypto platforms as a matter of anti-money-laundering routine, and a failed check stalls everything downstream. Do not book anything that depends on the card working before it physically arrives.

One structural point that matters more than it first appears. On KYC generally: rules require regulated businesses to verify customers and assess risk as part of anti-money-laundering law, including ongoing monitoring and reporting of suspicious activity. In the EU, due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether you are a politically exposed person. In the US, the customer identification programme requires name, date of birth, address and an identification number. And nationality is recorded and screened separately from residence, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy often follow citizenship and country of birth, not just where you live. That is the general shape of the rules every provider operates under — I am describing the category, not telling you how to get around any of it. There is no version of this where skipping verification is legitimate.

How to get it

Short answer: you ask CoinJar for the card from inside an account you already hold and have verified. There is a free digital card and a free physical one, and both are prepaid Mastercards.

The route is not complicated. You need a verified CoinJar account first, because that verification is the eligibility condition. Once you have one, the card is added from the CoinJar app, where you also manage it afterwards — freezing it, changing the PIN, reading your transaction history. The card page does not describe the application steps, so I am not going to invent a walkthrough of screens; what I can tell you is that the flow lives in the app and the precondition is verification.

The card itself: free physical card plus a digital card, prepaid Mastercard. The currency is AUD — every fee in the PDS fee table is quoted in Australian dollars, GST inclusive. The card page implies Australian dollars throughout rather than stating the currency in so many words.

Delivery: the physical card is free, and so is a replacement card. The PDS fee table shows “Card Issue Fee Free” and “Replacement Card Fee Free”. Where the card is delivered to, and how long it takes, is not stated. That matters for planning, and I would rather flag the gap than dress it up.

Verification requirements beyond the general account verification — which documents, which checks — are also not stated. What is clear is that a verified CoinJar account is required, and that levels, processing time and rejection reasons are all left open.

Fees: what it really costs

Short answer: the card is free to hold and free to replace. Every payment you make is not free. One percent on purchases, “2.99%+” abroad, 1% at the ATM, and $27.50 to lose a dispute.

A few of those lines deserve unpacking because they are the ones that decide whether this card is cheap or expensive for you.

The 1% on purchases comes back as points, but points are not cash. One CoinJar Rewards point per $1 spent, and points offset future trades or are redeemed in the Rewards Store. That is a genuine rebate against the fee — you are paying roughly nothing extra if you use the points on trading fees, which is the sensible thing to do. It is not money in your bank account, and I would not book it as income.

The foreign transaction fee is worse than a flat 2.99%. The card page says “2.99%+”, and the PDS is clearer: the foreign transaction cost is the Mastercard rate plus a 2.99% foreign exchange fee. So you are paying the network’s spread and then 2.99% on top. This is the number that makes the card a bad traveller.

The dispute fee is the one people get caught by. $27.50 per transaction, and it is charged on an unsuccessful dispute. You are betting $27.50 that a chargeback will go your way.

The free allowance on ATM withdrawals is not stated. There is a 1% fee and the ATM operator charges their own; whether some number of withdrawals per month is free is simply not on the page.

Limits are card-level and modest. $5,000 maximum per point-of-sale transaction, $5,000 daily across point-of-sale and ATM combined, and $1,000 a day at the ATM with a $20 minimum. These are prepaid-card numbers, not credit-card numbers. If you are trying to buy a car or pay a large invoice, this card is not built for it.

Now, three everyday payments, and which fees actually apply. This is the part that turns the table into a monthly figure in your head.

*A coffee, $6, in a Sydney café, paid by tapping the physical card.* One percent, so 6 cents, and you get 6 Rewards points back. No ATM fee, no FX fee, no dispute exposure. This is the card at its best and it is genuinely pleasant.

*The same coffee bought online from a merchant that charges in US dollars.* Now you pay the Mastercard conversion rate plus 2.99%. If the merchant’s own pricing adds a margin, that is on top. The 1% purchase fee also applies, so a cross-border online purchase is the most expensive way to use this card, and it is not close.

*Withdrawing $200 from an ATM in Melbourne.* 1% of $200, so $2, plus whatever the ATM operator charges on top, and it eats into your $1,000 daily ATM allowance. The free allowance, if one exists, is not published.

The pattern is clear: this card is cheap for domestic contactless spending and expensive for everything else. If most of your money moves in Australian dollars around Australia, the fees are tolerable. If your life involves travel or foreign subscriptions, the 2.99%+ line will cost you more than it saves.

One structural fact behind all of it, worth understanding once so the fees stop feeling arbitrary. A prepaid card draws on a stored balance, while a standard debit card asks your bank to withdraw from a linked account at the moment of purchase. Many crypto cards behave like prepaid cards: crypto is converted and loaded as fiat balance. That is why there is no overdraft here, and why there is a stored-balance mindset in the limits. It is also why the 1% exists at all — the card has to convert your crypto somewhere, and that conversion is the product.

Top up: how the card gets money

Short answer: it does not really top up. It spends the “Spendable Balance” of your CoinJar Everyday Account, and you nominate one crypto as your “Spend” account, which CoinJar auto-converts at its own rates when you pay.

This is the single most important thing to understand about the card, and it is where people get confused. There is no separate card balance you fill up like a gift card. The card draws on your Everyday Account. You choose a crypto to act as the Spend account, and when you make a payment, CoinJar sells enough of that crypto to cover it, converts to Australian dollars, and the card spends from the account.

The costs follow from that design in a way that is easy to miss at first. CoinJar charges its normal trading fee when it sells your crypto for the purchase, on top of the 1% purchase fee. So a $100 shop purchase costs you the 1% card fee plus whatever CoinJar’s trading fee is on the conversion. If you have ever assumed “1% and nothing else”, you have been underestimating. CoinJar charges its own trading fee separately on the conversion; the specific percentage for this fee is not disclosed.

What is not disclosed: which coins and networks work. The card page does not list them. A 2021 launch press release mentioned 30 digital currencies and a flat 1% conversion, but that is a launch-time press release, not current product documentation, and I would not treat it as the definitive list. Check with CoinJar before you assume the coin you hold is the one the card will sell.

Card top-up fee, minimum top-up and network fees are not stated.

Getting your money back out. If you cancel the card or it is revoked, the remaining value on the card is paid to CoinJar, which pays it into your CoinJar Everyday Account in Australian dollars once no pending authorisations remain and you instruct them to. You can cancel the card yourself at any time. The issuer can cancel it with 14 days’ notice, or immediately if it suspects misuse or false information.

Two general points that explain most of the friction people hit with transfers on any platform. First, network fees are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider, so a deposit can cost a small amount of the coin you send. Second, blockchain transfers are irreversible: 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. That is not CoinJar-specific caution; it is the nature of moving funds on a public chain.

Paying with it every day

Short answer: very comfortably. Apple Pay and Google Pay work, the physical and digital cards are both free, and the app is where you control everything.

Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported, and the card is tokenised into them — the card number is replaced by a device-specific account number stored in the phone’s Secure Element, never on the server, and each payment uses a one-time code. The issuer can restrict the tokenised number, for example blocking it on online or contactless-only use. In the app you can hold and unblock the card, change the PIN, and review your history.

In-store controls are reasonably complete. Contactless has a limit under $100 mentioned, which is the kind of small friction you notice once and then stop noticing. Rewards accrue at one point per dollar and go to your CoinJar account.

The app: iOS and Android, with the cards managed inside the CoinJar app. The official listing’s store ratings were not readable, so unofficial third-party figures give you an idea rather than a verdict — App Store 4.1/5 from 123 reviews according to App Pricing Lab (listing updated 7 March 2026; Marlvel gives 128 ratings), and Google Play 3.91 from roughly 2.6 thousand ratings according to AppBrain, searched 20 October 2026. Treat both as unofficial and not confirmed by the card itself, and treat the scale difference — a hundred-odd iOS reviews against thousands on Play — as information about which platform has more users, not about which app is better.

Disputes and chargebacks, because this is where prepaid-card users get the worst surprises. Chargebacks follow the Mastercard scheme rules. You should notify EML as soon as possible; the time limit is generally 90 days from the transaction. You must supply extra information within 10 days or the chargeback may be lost or reversed. And remember the $27.50 fee per unsuccessful dispute. If a merchant refunds you, it goes back into the Everyday Account in Australian dollars.

Complaints. CoinJar attempts resolution within 5 days, otherwise within 30 days, after which the matter escalates to AFCA, the Australian Financial Complaints Authority. Official complaints route: [email protected].

One structural limit nobody advertises: which merchants work. A card number begins with a 6- or 8-digit issuer identification number that merchants can look up to see which institution and country issued it, and some apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from the billing address. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards precisely because that lookup reveals the type and country. A merchant category code — the four-digit classification of a business, assigned when it starts accepting cards — can also be blocked by policy rather than by law, with the blocked list varying by issuer; gambling, for example, is commonly blocked. The card does not publish its blocked categories, so I cannot tell you what is on the list.

What can go wrong

Short answer: not fraud so much as friction — frozen accounts, held transfers, a slow exchange around the card, and fees you did not budget for.

Let me separate what is official from what is not, because the distinction matters for how much weight you give it.

Official, and reassuring. I found no official complaints about the card itself. No Reddit or Trustpilot complaints specific to the card turned up either. One third-party news-level review named the 1% purchase fee as the main drawback, which is exactly the critique I have been making throughout. The issuer is EML Payment Solutions Limited, AFSL 404131, with CoinJar Australia Pty Ltd as authorised representative. The regulatory structure is sound and named. And a third-party news item reported no 2026 programme change, with CoinJar’s own blog in February 2026 still describing the card — a live product, not a wind-down.

Unofficial, and worth weighing carefully. Trustpilot’s score for CoinJar — the exchange, not the card — is 3.3 from 2,549 reviews with 17% one-star, read 20 October 2026. CoinJar replies to 100% of negative reviews, which is more than most. The complaint themes are about the exchange rather than the card: transfers and withdrawals held “under review” or under Travel Rule holds from June to October 2026, including a Bitcoin transfer paused for more than four days in August 2026; identity re-checks and account freezes from May to September 2026; and slow support through the same period. Only one review in that set concerns the card itself, a virtual Mastercard “constantly having technical issues” dated 18 October 2026.

Read that carefully, because the pattern is the point. The card is a thin layer on top of an exchange. When the exchange freezes an account or holds a transfer, the card stops working too, and the card’s own terms do not promise otherwise.

The structural risks you cannot fix by choosing carefully. The card is custodial: your funds sit in your CoinJar account and EML issues the card against them. That is worth understanding precisely. 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. A seed phrase — typically 12 to 24 words — is an unencrypted form of the private key, and anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds. Transfers are typically irreversible and a stolen key has no built-in recovery, because the network cannot freeze or return the funds.

Custodial platforms have a real record: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022). That history is why the assets held behind a custodial card are a counterparty risk, not just a technical one.

Programme risk. Card programmes do close. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves; they license issuers and can suspend a programme. Visa said in November 2022 that it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX”, and the FTX US debit card programme was wound down. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Closures typically follow a pattern: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. One 2026 closure reported by a secondary source ended new loads on 8 July 2026 and spending on 8 August 2026 — a single unconfirmed source, so I mention it only as a shape of risk, not a prediction for this card. CoinJar’s cancellation terms (value paid back to your Everyday Account in AUD after pending authorisations clear) are the same courtesy extended in those cases.

Safeguarding: not stated. The card documents do not say whether funds are segregated or insured. That is a genuine gap, and it is the gap you would ask about in a serious conversation with the company. More generally, electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds by segregating them in dedicated accounts or insuring them, but such funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by deposit guarantee schemes. Assume no deposit guarantee.

Declines and holds. A declined authorisation may leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to seven. Address verification, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address you type with issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines.

Support. [email protected], the issuer at [email protected], and a help centre at support.coinjar.com.

One thing this card is not: a way to move value cheaply. Every purchase costs 1%, every conversion inside that costs a separate trading fee, and every cross-border payment costs the network rate plus 2.99%.

What to take instead

If you are in Australia and happy with crypto spending, there is no strong reason to leave. If you are anywhere else, or you want cheaper payments, or you want a card backed by something other than a crypto exchange balance, here is what the comparison looks like — with the caveat that most of these figures come from published pages I could read, and gaps are marked as gaps rather than filled in.

Bybit Card is the broadest of the three and the obvious comparison for anyone outside Australia. Its card works across a long list of regions, with different networks and currencies per region — Mastercard in Australia, Visa in Brazil and Peru, Visa credit in Asia Pacific — and card currency set by the country of your identity verification. The catch is that the economics vary wildly by region: 0.9% conversion in the Australia and Asia Pacific group against 7% FX in Argentina, plus Argentine taxes of 21% VAT on foreign digital services and 30% on foreign transactions with provincial gross-income tax of 1% to 13.2%. Its rewards structure is more elaborate than anything here, tiered from Base at 2% to Infinite at 10% with monthly caps, but from 5 October 2026 only crypto-funded transactions earn, and fiat-funded spending does not. On availability it wins; on predictability for an Australian user it does not obviously beat a free card with a 1% fee.

MEXC is virtual-only, physical cards not yet available, with a $20 issuance fee and cashback by tier from 4% to 10%. Its card page does not state conversion or FX fees, and I would want to see those before drawing any conclusion.

MSX scored highest of the three in this comparison, but almost everything I could verify about it was missing from official pages — eligibility, card type, cost, fees, funding and rewards are all not stated. A high score against thin evidence is not a recommendation; it is a question I could not answer.

The alternative I would not skip: for ordinary spending, a regular bank debit card costs you nothing per transaction and is not tied to a crypto balance at all. If your goal is spending crypto, this card does a specific job. If your goal is spending money, a crypto card is adding a fee to a problem you may not have.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend this card to a specific person: an Australian resident, over 18, with a verified CoinJar account, who already holds crypto they want to spend, spends mostly in Australian dollars, mostly in Australia, mostly by tapping a phone. That person gets a free Mastercard, free Apple Pay and Google Pay, a 1% fee that comes back as offsetting points, and the convenience of not selling manually before every purchase. For them, 5.5 out of 10 is arguably too low, because the card is doing exactly what it was built to do.

I would not recommend it to anyone hoping to use it as a primary bank card, to anyone outside Australia, to anyone who travels enough for the 2.99% foreign exchange fee to matter, or to anyone who wants to hold several coins and choose between networks at the point of sale.

And the check I would make first, before anything else on this page: confirm with CoinJar that the specific crypto you hold can be set as your Spend account, and confirm what the trading fee on the conversion adds to that 1%. Those two facts decide whether this card is cheap or expensive for you, and neither is published.

Frequently asked questions

What is the CoinJar card?

The CoinJar card is a prepaid Mastercard issued by EML Payment Solutions Limited that spends the Australian-dollar value of your CoinJar Everyday Account. You nominate a crypto as your Spend account and CoinJar converts it at its own rates each time you pay. There is a free digital version and a free physical card, and refunds come back to the Everyday Account in Australian dollars rather than in the original crypto.

Is CoinJar a bank?

No, CoinJar is an Australian crypto exchange, not a bank. The card is issued by EML Payment Solutions Limited, an Australian payments institution with AFSL 404131, with CoinJar Australia Pty Ltd as authorised representative. Your balance is a prepaid card balance, so it should not be treated as a bank deposit and I would not assume any deposit guarantee applies.

Who can get the CoinJar card?

The Australian terms say you must be 18 or older, a resident of Australia, and hold a verified CoinJar account. The card page itself does not state eligibility or list any countries, so if you are outside Australia the evidence points one way only: no. Verification levels, processing time and rejection reasons are not stated in the card documents.

Does the CoinJar card require KYC?

Yes, in effect: a verified CoinJar account is the stated eligibility requirement. Beyond that, the card documents do not specify which documents or checks apply. In general, regulated businesses must verify customers under anti-money-laundering law, and where due diligence cannot be completed the institution must hold back the transaction or relationship.

How much does the CoinJar card cost?

The card itself is free, and a replacement card is free too, with no account keeping fee in the fee table. Spending is what costs: 1% on in-store and online purchases, returned as one Rewards point per dollar, and foreign transactions at the Mastercard rate plus a 2.99% foreign exchange fee. Withdrawals cost 1% plus the ATM operator’s fee.

Can I use the CoinJar card overseas?

You can, but expensively. Foreign transactions cost the Mastercard rate plus a 2.99% foreign exchange fee, quoted on the card page as “2.99%+”, on top of the usual 1% purchase fee. There is also a chance of a decline: merchants can see the issuing country and card type from the card number, and address verification is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards.

Is the CoinJar card free?

Free to issue, free to replace, and no monthly fee line appears in the fee table. Not free to use: purchases cost 1%, ATM withdrawals 1% plus the operator’s fee, and an unsuccessful dispute costs $27.50 per transaction. There is also a separate CoinJar trading fee charged when it sells your crypto to fund a purchase.

How do I add the CoinJar card to Apple Wallet?

Open the CoinJar app, where your cards are managed, and add the card to Apple Pay; Google Pay works the same way. The card is tokenised, meaning the number is replaced by a device-specific account number held on the device and each payment uses a one-time code. You can also hold and unblock the card, change the PIN and view your history from the same app.

Is the CoinJar card safe?

There are no fraud protections to overstate here. The card is custodial: your crypto sits in a CoinJar account and EML issues the card against it, so you are trusting the exchange. Exchange-level Trustpilot figures are 3.3 out of 5 from 2,549 reviews for CoinJar, with complaint themes around held transfers, identity rechecks and slow support — unofficial figures about the exchange, not the card.

What happens if I cancel the CoinJar card?

You can cancel it yourself at any time. The remaining value on the card is paid to CoinJar, which pays it into your CoinJar Everyday Account in Australian dollars once no pending authorisations remain and you instruct them to. The issuer can cancel with 14 days’ notice, or immediately if it suspects misuse or false information.

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