The Shakepay card pays you bitcoin back — but only if you already live in Canada

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Shakepay Card is a prepaid Visa that spends Canadian dollars from your Shakepay balance and pays part of every eligible purchase back to you in bitcoin. That sounds appealing in a single line. In practice, it is a fairly narrow product: it is only available inside Canada, its everyday value depends on which reward status you have reached, and the money on it is held by a company whose customer funds are not deposit-insured. I scored it 4.3 out of 10. That is not a verdict on the bitcoin cashback idea, which I like more than most — it is a verdict on how little this particular implementation gives you, and how much it assumes about you already.

The card suits one person almost perfectly: a Canadian resident who already uses Shakepay, transacts in bitcoin regularly, and wants part of their ordinary spending paid back in bitcoin while a status tier is quietly shrinking their foreign-exchange charge. If you are anywhere else on the planet, the answer is simply no, and no fee schedule will change that.

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

Will They Give You the Card?

Short answer: yes, if you are a Shakepay customer in Canada; no, if you are anywhere else. The card is available to all Shakepay customers in all 13 Canadian provinces and territories. That is the whole eligibility story, and it is a narrower one than most people assume when they read about crypto cards.

One detail is worth sitting with before you go looking: the cardholder agreement does not explicitly require Canadian residency. The pages I read do not set out a citizenship test or a residency test in plain words. That does not mean anyone abroad can apply. What it means is that the stated availability is tied to Canada, and some countries and merchants are restricted — the card’s own guidance is to email [email protected] and ask. If you are reading this from outside Canada, do not read the absence of a residency clause as an invitation; read it as a reason to ask first.

For Canadian readers, the practical conditions to check before you start are these:

• You must already be a Shakepay customer, and the account must be fully verified.
• You must be of the age of majority in your province or territory.
• One card per person.
• There is an eligibility questionnaire inside the app.
• There is no credit check.

The card being tied to an existing, fully verified account is the hinge here. It means the card is not an on-ramp for people without a Shakepay account — it is an add-on for people who already cleared the account-opening checks. For the reader who came here looking for a way to pay at a shop after struggling to open an ordinary bank card, that ordering matters: the account is the hard part, and the card is the easy follow-on.

How to Get It

There is no credit check, and setting the card up takes minutes. That is genuinely quick, and it is one of the things this card does better than the paperwork-heavy norm.

What you need in hand is less clear. The public pages do not say which documents are required, whether proof of address is needed, or what age evidence is used beyond the age-of-majority rule. The verification tiers, how long each takes, and the grounds on which an application is refused are also not stated in the pages I read. I would rather tell you that than invent a document list. If the exact document set decides whether you can do this today, ask [email protected] before you start, because I cannot tell you what will be asked for.

What is documented is the physical card itself and how it arrives:

• It is a physical Shakepay Visa Prepaid Card, drawing on your Canadian dollar balance.
• Whether there is a virtual or metal version is not stated.
• You order the physical card in the app, and you set your PIN during the ordering step.
• It arrives within 21 days by Canada Post regular mail, with no tracking. Regular mail with no tracking is a real thing to note: if it does not arrive, you have no scan to show anyone.
• Delivery happens “regardless of where you live in Canada”. Other countries are not listed.
• The card is free for fully verified accounts; the general issuance fee is not stated.
• To replace it, use “Replace card” in the app. A damaged card keeps its number, expiry and CVV; a lost or stolen card gets new details. The replacement fee is not stated. A reissued card arrives within 30 days after you report the loss.

That last cluster deserves attention because it is exactly where prepaid-card users get hurt. Two different failure modes, two different outcomes: damage keeps your card number alive, loss replaces it. And if you set a PIN badly on day one, you cannot change it — the route to a new PIN is to replace the card. Set it carefully.

Fees: What It Really Costs

Here is the honest version: this card has almost no disclosed fees attached to it, and what it does have is one significant, unavoidable one. The absence of a big fee list is not the same as being cheap to use — it depends entirely on how often you spend outside Canada.

The table needs one clarification, because it looks contradictory at a glance. Non-Canadian transactions are converted at the Visa rate, and that conversion includes a Foreign Exchange Charge which the cardholder agreement states as 3%. The help centre breaks that same charge down by status: 3% on Base, 1.5% on Bright, 0% on Blue. The agreement’s own fee table only carries the 3% figure. So the number you actually pay depends on which document you read and which status you have reached — the practical advice is to confirm your status in the app before a big trip rather than assume you are on the best rate.

Statuses are earned by calendar month, and that word matters. They are not permanent badges:

• Base (the default): 1% card cashback and a 3% foreign-exchange fee.
• Bright: reached by exchanging $100 or more, or receiving $200 or more in eligible direct deposits — 1% cashback and a 1.5% foreign-exchange fee.
• Blue: reached by exchanging $1,000 or more, or receiving $2,000 or more in direct deposits — 1.5% cashback, a 0% foreign-exchange fee, and priority support.
• Business: automatic.

No metal card is stated at any tier.

Now the everyday cases, because a fee list does not tell you what you will actually pay.

A coffee in a Toronto café, paid by tapping your phone. No conversion happens, because the transaction is in Canadian dollars on a Canadian dollar balance. The cashback of 1% (or 1.5% on Blue) goes to your bitcoin balance. This is the case the card is actually good at.

Dinner in Lisbon, paid by tapping your phone. The amount is converted at the Visa rate, and the Foreign Exchange Charge is added on top — 3% unless you are on Bright or Blue. Your bitcoin cashback is still credited if the merchant is eligible. On a $100 dinner, the difference between Base and Blue on the FX charge alone is $3; the difference between Base and Blue on cashback is $0.50. Anyone spending abroad regularly should read that ratio carefully, because the status that saves you on the foreign-exchange charge saves you far more than the one that pays you extra cashback.

Withdrawing Canadian dollars from a PLUS-logo ATM. $500 per transaction and $1,000 per day, with operator fees possibly applying on top. Note what is not there: no bitcoin rewards on ATM transactions. Cash is the one place the cashback promise does not reach.

Paying a bill online. Refunds from abroad are the quiet sting. A foreign refund is converted at the rate you paid to Visa minus the charge, so you generally get back less than you paid. Budget for that if you expect to return something.

The reward structure itself: up to 1.5% cashback in bitcoin on eligible purchases at eligible merchants worldwide, credited automatically to your BTC balance and withdrawable to a user wallet. Two words are doing real work in that sentence — “eligible” and “worldwide” — and the list of blocked categories is not stated.

How to Top Up the Card

The card does not have its own balance and its own top-up system. It spends the Canadian dollar balance in your Shakepay account. So “topping up the card” really means funding the account, and the routes are the account’s routes:

• Interac e-Transfer in: free, arrives in minutes, minimum $5, maximum $10,000.
• Wire in: free, takes 1–2 working days, minimum $10,000.
• There are no activation fees and no minimum balance.

Shakepay does not disclose how to load that account with crypto, including which coins or networks it supports. That is a gap for anyone whose income or savings are in bitcoin rather than in Canadian dollars. If your plan is to convert coins and spend the balance, confirm these details before you commit — the card is designed to spend a fiat balance, not to spend crypto directly.

Closing the card is not a trapdoor: your Shakepay Wallet balance stays accessible and your funds do not expire with the card. The fee for withdrawing funds from the wallet is not disclosed.

Paying With It Every Day

This is the strongest part of the card, and it is why the everyday-use mark is 7 out of 10 rather than something lower. The basics are all there:

• A physical Visa Prepaid card.
• Apple Pay and Google Pay supported “where available” — that phrase does a lot of work, and it means support depends on your country and on your device.
• No blocked categories are stated.
• No virtual card is disclosed.
• The mobile app handles disputes, card controls and support chat.

Spending through Apple Pay or Google Pay is subject to a $250 tap limit, which is the number most likely to surprise you in a restaurant or a shop checkout. The $5,000 transaction and daily caps and the $50,000 monthly cap are generous for normal life; the $250 tap ceiling is the one that actually binds in ordinary use.

The app also carries the tools you want in a crisis. You can lock or freeze the card instantly from the app, and two-factor authentication is supported. That combination — instant freeze plus app-based 2FA — is the baseline for a payment card that lives on your phone, and this one meets it.

There is a reason not to be complacent, though, and it is about money rather than software. This is a custodial arrangement: Shakepay holds the balance. Nobody can move your funds without the private key, and nobody can help you if you lose it. The reward, the balance and the card all sit on one company’s balance sheet.

What Can Go Wrong

Three distinct risks, and they are worth separating because they are not the same size.

The first is that the money is not bank-insured. Shakepay is registered with FINTRAC (#M17065696), is a CIRO member, and is an Investment Dealer registered with the AMF and provincial regulators. The card itself is issued by Peoples Trust Company under licence from Visa International. The funds are not CDIC-insured. That is the single most important line in this review: your balance is not a bank deposit, so no deposit guarantee scheme stands behind it.

The second is complaints, and they are specific. On Trustpilot the score was 2.3 out of 5, from 22 reviews, one of them in the last 12 months, as read on 20 October 2026 — and only one of those 22 reviews even mentions the card, from December 2021, and it is positive. So treat the score as a measure of the platform rather than the plastic. The reported themes are: accounts frozen or closed without a stated reason (2021 through February 2022, and July 2025); support going unresponsive for days (2021, December 2023, July 2025); delayed or blocked withdrawals and wires (2022–2023); funds not returned, including a $250 bill payment not received (September 2026); and questions about source of funds (November 2022). Note that an unofficial source, CryptoCardHub on 11 August 2026, cites Trustpilot at about 1.5 out of 5, which disagrees with what I read directly — treat that figure as unconfirmed.

Read that list again and notice the shape of it: freezes, blocked withdrawals, unanswered support. Those are the experiences of people trying to get their own money out, not of people being defrauded. If Shakepay decides your account needs a source-of-funds review, the pattern of experience suggests it may be slow.

The third is the category risk, which belongs to everyone and is not Shakepay-specific. Card programmes close. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer; WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme. Closures tend to follow a pattern: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw what is left. And the crypto side has its own history of loss — custodial platforms include Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018) and Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022).

A few smaller traps are worth knowing before they happen. A declined authorisation can leave a hold on your funds for up to seven days. Some merchants refuse prepaid or foreign-issued cards because the issuer-identification number at the front of the card number reveals the card type and country, which is also why a Canadian card can look foreign in another shop. Address verification, which compares the numeric parts of a billing address, is offered mainly in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards — another source of unexpected declines.

Disputes have hard clocks. Notify Shakepay in writing within 60 days of the transaction through the dispute section of the app. The agreement also says the dispute must be received within 90 days or the transaction is deemed accepted — read the shorter of the two as the one that governs you. Visa Zero Liability claims about unauthorised use can take up to 120 days after the paperwork is complete and may require a police report. Transactions before you reported a loss may be treated as yours. If a complaint goes unresolved, the routes named are the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments on 1-888-451-4519 and FCAC on 1-866-461-3222.

And one category fact that catches people out with stablecoins. 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 recovery with no guarantee. Support contacts, for what they are worth: [email protected], in-app support chat under Settings > Help > Support Chat, phone +1(438) 802-1221, and 1-855-574-2539 for lost or stolen, 24/7. Blue and Business get priority live chat on weekdays 8am–10pm EST and weekends 9am–5pm EST.

What to Take Instead

If Shakepay does not fit you, the reason matters, because the alternatives fail in different directions.

Three patterns stand out. Gemini is a different instrument entirely: a credit card, not a prepaid one, so it involves a credit line and a bill rather than a stored balance, and its rewards are paid instantly in bitcoin or 50+ other cryptos on Gemini, changeable at any time. It also carries referral terms — $50 crypto each, $250 per five referrals, up to 50 a year — which I would treat as a marketing number rather than a return.

Lava is the one that scores highest here, at 7.1, largely because it removes the fee that this card’s whole design turns on: no FX fees and no FX spread. It accepts local currency or stablecoin deposits. Its “up to 5% back in bitcoin” comes with conditions that are not stated, which is the sentence to interrogate before you believe it.

Trastra shares the Shakepay flaw — how to fund it with crypto is not spelled out — and adds a euro-centre-of-gravity. Its country list is more generous than Shakepay’s single country, and its eligibility rule appears residence-based. Its page carries no rewards at all.

The honest summary: Lava is the closest thing here to a card built for spending abroad, Gemini is the one built on a different model entirely, and Shakepay’s own niche — a prepaid Visa paying bitcoin cashback inside one country — is not something the other three cleanly duplicate.

Who I Would Recommend It To

I would recommend the Shakepay card to a Canadian resident who already keeps a Shakepay account, already buys bitcoin regularly, and spends most of their money inside Canada. For that person the maths is straightforward: no annual fee, up to 1.5% back in bitcoin on ordinary purchases, a physical card that arrives in three weeks, phone wallets for everyday use, and 3-D Secure alongside instant freeze if something goes wrong.

I would tell everyone else to look elsewhere, and I would say it plainly per group. If you live outside Canada, this card does not exist for you, and the foreign-exchange charge is irrelevant anyway. If you spend abroad, the 3% Base charge is a tax on ordinary life and you should be reaching for something with no FX fee before you assume this works. If you are trying to solve a problem with getting a bank account, the card is downstream of the account, and it is not the part that is hard. And if you are holding a meaningful balance, read the CDIC line once more — the money is not a bank deposit, and the complaint pattern around frozen accounts and slow withdrawals is the thing to plan around.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Shakepay card?

It is a prepaid Visa card that spends Canadian dollars from your Shakepay account balance, with part of eligible purchases paid back to you in bitcoin. You need a fully verified Shakepay account first, and the card is available to all Shakepay customers across Canada’s 13 provinces and territories. It is issued by Peoples Trust Company under Visa’s licence.

Who can get the Shakepay card?

All Shakepay customers in all 13 Canadian provinces and territories — Canada only. You must have a fully verified account, be of the age of majority in your province or territory, and there is one card per person. An eligibility questionnaire runs in the app and there is no credit check.

Is Shakepay a bank?

Not in the sense you would want to rely on. Shakepay is FINTRAC-registered (#M17065696), a CIRO member and an Investment Dealer registered with the AMF and provincial regulators. The card is issued by Peoples Trust Company. Crucially, the funds are not CDIC-insured, so they are not a bank deposit.

How do I get and activate the card?

Order it in the app and set your PIN during the ordering step. There is no credit check and setup takes minutes. It arrives within 21 days by Canada Post regular mail, with no tracking, and delivery is “regardless of where you live in Canada”. The card is free for fully verified accounts.

What does the Shakepay card cost?

There is no annual fee, and the issuance fee is not stated; the card is free once your account is fully verified. The real cost is the foreign-exchange charge on spending outside Canada: 3% on Base, 1.5% on Bright and 0% on Blue. ATM operator fees may also apply on PLUS-logo withdrawals.

How do I top up the Shakepay card?

The card spends your Shakepay Canadian dollar balance, so you fund the account rather than the card. Interac e-Transfer in is free, arrives in minutes, and runs from a $5 minimum to a $10,000 maximum. A wire in is also free, takes 1–2 working days, and has a $10,000 minimum.

Can I use it in Apple Pay and Google Pay?

Yes, both are supported “where available”, which means support depends on your country and device. Note the $250 tap limit for Apple Pay and Google Pay, well below the card’s $5,000 per-transaction cap. Spending limits also include $5,000 per day and $50,000 per month, and they cannot be increased.

How much bitcoin do I earn back?

Up to 1.5% cashback in bitcoin on eligible purchases at eligible merchants worldwide, credited automatically to your bitcoin balance and withdrawable to a user wallet. The 1.5% applies on the Blue status; Base and Bright pay 1%. No bitcoin rewards are paid on ATM withdrawals.

What are the limits and can they be raised?

At PLUS-logo ATMs the limits are $500 per transaction and $1,000 per day. Card purchases run to CAD $5,000 per transaction, CAD $5,000 per day and CAD $50,000 per month. These cannot be increased. Note that another help article and the cardholder agreement were reported with different figures, one of them $3,000 per transaction and per day.

Is the Shakepay card safe, and what should I watch out for?

The practical safeguards are solid: instant lock and freeze in the app, two-factor authentication, 3-D Secure and tokenised phone wallets. What to watch is that the balance is custodial and not CDIC-insured, that Trustpilot stood at 2.3 out of 5 with complaints about account freezes, closed accounts and delayed withdrawals, and that a PIN cannot be changed once set.

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