A prepaid Visa you fill from crypto, with a 1.99% deposit fee and a narrow country list

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Bitrefill’s card is not a bank account with a crypto link attached. It is a prepaid Visa — virtual and physical — that you load by converting crypto or by a SEPA bank transfer, and then spend like an ordinary card until the balance runs out. That single design choice explains most of what follows: why it is cheap to hold, why it costs something every time you fill it, why it is unavailable in most of the world, and why the interesting limits are tiered rather than generous.

I scored it 6.8 out of 10. It is a competent, boring piece of financial plumbing with one genuinely attractive feature — 2% cashback split across deposits and purchases, with no cap — sitting on top of a provider whose reputation problems come from its gift-card shop rather than from the card itself.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

Who this suits, and who it does not

It suits EU residents who already hold crypto — or Lightning — and spend in euros. If that describes you, the card does one thing well: it turns a crypto balance into a card that a coffee shop accepts, at a known cost. The cashback is real and uncapped, which almost nothing else in this category offers.

It does not suit anyone who wants to spend in the United States, in the UK, in Switzerland, in Canada or in Australia, because the card is not offered there at all. Nor does it suit a Russian or US citizen living in Paris or Berlin: citizenship, not residence, is the gate. And it does not suit someone who wants their crypto to stay in their own wallet, because the balance is custodial — a partner holds the funds, so you are trusting an Estonian issuer and a crypto infrastructure provider rather than holding your own keys.

One thing you should know before you get excited about the number: several of the details that decide whether this card is cheap for you — the conversion spread percentage, the exact limits, the ATM fee — are simply not stated on Bitrefill’s public pages. Where I have third-party figures I mark them as unofficial, and they are not confirmed by the card.

Will they give you the card?

Yes, if you live in the right country, are 18 or older, and pass identity verification — and no, if your citizenship is excluded no matter where you sleep.

The eligible resident countries are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. That is 29 countries in the EU plus Norway and Iceland. Identity verification is required.

Citizens of the United States and of Russia are excluded regardless of residence. There is a nuance worth knowing: a Russian citizen who also holds EU or EEA citizenship is eligible. So the gate is the citizenship on your document, and dual citizenship changes the answer. There is also no Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan mobile number accepted at signup, which catches people who are otherwise eligible but hold a phone number from those countries.

The help centre also runs a blocklist for verification and deposits that includes the US, Japan, Russia, Ukraine and the UAE. That list reads to me as truncated rather than exhaustive, so treat it as a sign of the direction of travel rather than the full rulebook.

Beyond the country list, the terms themselves are vague on purpose: access is “subject to eligibility criteria”, and “further eligibility requirements, established and verified by our partners, shall apply”. In plain terms, the card partner reserves the right to say no after checking you, and the card page does not publish what those criteria are. If your situation is unusual — a recent address change, a difficult document, a residence application in progress — expect friction, and expect the reasons to be given thinly.

How to get it

The route is short: verify your identity inside the Bitrefill app, then order the card. You get both forms — the card is sold as a “Virtual & Physical Visa Card”, so a virtual card you can add to a wallet immediately and a physical card in the post.

The order matters, because verification happens before the card exists, not after. The identity check is run by the card partner. At the Starter level that means a photo ID, a selfie liveness check and, in some cases, proof of address. If you are activating outside the EU, proof of address is required. Source-of-funds documentation is set by Lightspark, the crypto infrastructure partner — they decide what they want, and the card page does not publish a checklist.

You start on Starter by default. When you approach the Starter deposit ceiling, Bitrefill invites you to Plus, and you have 30 days to complete the upgrade — add proof of address and proof of source of funds. Miss the window and the card is suspended. That is the single sharpest procedural edge in the whole product: an inactivity in your inbox becomes a frozen card.

The physical card is delivered to the address you provide and ordering it is free. Delivery time is not stated, which is worth pressing support on if you are in a hurry. A second card can be requested from the Cards page, and when your card expires you order a new one rather than expecting a replacement in the post. What a replacement costs is not stated on the official pages; third-party reporting puts it at 10 EUR.

Documents and proof-of-address requirements are not stated on the card page itself — everything above comes from the terms and the verification flow.

Fees: what it really costs

Free to hold, 1.99% to fill, no foreign exchange fee, and a spread on conversion that the public pages never put a number on.

The card itself is free through the app. Issuance and monthly fee amounts are not stated officially; there is an inactivity fee that applies after 12 months without spending or cashing out, and the amount is not stated there either. Third-party reporting from August 2026 and a February 2026 review both put the inactivity fee at EUR 10 per month, and physical card delivery at EUR 0 where offered.

Three everyday payments, so the fees stop being abstract.

Coffee, 4 EUR. You paid nothing to get the card, you spent from a balance you already loaded, and there is no per-transaction fee listed. Cashback adds 1% back on purchases. The only cost you may have already paid is the 1.99% on the deposit that funded this balance.

A 100 EUR online subscription in dollars. No foreign exchange fee — the card terms are explicit about that — and the Visa exchange rate applies. So you eat the rate Visa quotes, not a markup from Bitrefill. If your cashback is paid in EUR, as the terms indicate, the 2% does not move with the dollar.

Withdrawing 200 EUR cash at an ATM. This is the one with a real number. The card page confirms cash withdrawals are possible “at ATMs that accept Visa” but states neither the fee nor any free allowance. Third-party figures put the card’s own ATM charge at 2.49% on both tiers, plus whatever the ATM operator adds, with limits of EUR 350 a day and EUR 3,000 a month. Those figures come from a source that says the pricing page itself rendered those cells incorrectly, and another third-party report says the ATM line was dropped from pricing in mid-2026. Treat 2.49% as a strong indication, not a promise, and check the pricing page in the app before you rely on it.

The pattern to hold on to: there is no fee for holding, no fee for foreign exchange, no fee stated per purchase — and a fee every single time money moves onto the card or off it at a cash machine.

Top up: how money gets onto the card

Nine or so ways in, one of which is gone, and a minimum deposit that catches small transfers.

The card page has a “Buy with” list naming Bitcoin, Lightning, Ethereum, USDC, USDT, Solana, Base, Polygon, Li.Finance, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa and Mastercard. Read that carefully rather than skimming it: USDT deposits on any network ended 17 March 2025, so the “Buy with” list is not a funding list. Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa and Mastercard appear there as ways to *buy* things in the Bitrefill store, not as ways to load the card. For actual funding, the terms also list SEPA transfer.

So the real options are Bitcoin, Lightning, Ethereum, USDC, Solana, Base, Polygon and SEPA. Lightning is the one that distinguishes this card from most of the field — paying from a Lightning wallet means no on-chain fee and near-instant settlement, which is a genuine advantage if you are already set up for it.

What it costs to top up: a fixed 1.99% Bitrefill fee plus a variable exchange cost at the card partner’s live rate. A SEPA pay-in is also 1.99%. The minimum deposit is currently EUR 15, and anything smaller is not added to the balance — it is not rounded up, it is simply not credited, so a small test transfer is a wasted transfer. Store credit cannot be moved onto the card.

Two things to check before you send anything. First, the network: a transfer sent on a chain the provider does not support can be lost, because blockchain transfers are irreversible. Second, the minimum — if you are testing, EUR 15 is your floor, not one euro.

Getting money back off is straightforward: withdraw to a bank account free, or take cash out at ATMs. The card page lists no withdrawal limits. Third-party reporting describes free SEPA cash-out within limits, not available to Swedish residents, or ATM withdrawal. The card is deactivated when inactivity fees eat the balance down to EUR 0 — which is the practical reason to spend or close rather than abandon.

Paying with it every day

It behaves like a normal prepaid Visa, with two gaps you will notice.

Wallets. Google Pay works. Apple Pay is “not supported yet” and “will be available soon” — so if you are an iPhone user planning to tap to pay, that gap is live today. Apple Pay and Google Pay appearing in the “Buy with” list has nothing to do with the card funding itself.

Rewards. 2% total cashback, described as having no cap: 1% on each crypto deposit and 1% on each purchase. The page does not state the payout currency; the terms say the rate is published on the website. The card currency is EUR, and cashback is paid in EUR. Uncapped cashback funded by deposits is unusual — most rivals have none at all — though note that paying it on deposits means part of the reward is a function of how much you move money, which is exactly what the 1.99% fee is charged on too.

The app. Available on the App Store and Google Play. Store ratings were not read from the stores themselves; third-party reporting from August 2026 gives 4.7/5.0 on the Apple App Store across 372 ratings and 4.5/5.0 on Google Play across 2,468 ratings.

When a payment goes wrong. The help centre’s own article on disputing a card payment tells you to contact the merchant first, because most refunds are handled that way. Two consequences worth reading twice: rewards may be debited if a transaction is refunded or charged back, and Bitrefill says it is not liable if a merchant refuses the card. Time frames for disputes are not stated.

Which merchants decline it is not stated, and that is worth understanding rather than worrying about. A prepaid card from an Estonian issuer looks, to a merchant’s systems, like a foreign prepaid card — the kind of signal that can trigger extra scrutiny or an outright decline at a shop abroad. It is not fraud protection working against you; it is ordinary card infrastructure being conservative.

What can go wrong

Nothing dramatic is documented, and that is genuinely the finding. But the structural risks are real, and they are worth naming.

Your money is held by someone else. This is custodial. The card is issued by Wallester AS (Estonia, licensed by Finantsinspektsioon) and operated by Airfill Prepaid AB (559001-6035), Stockholm, Sweden, with crypto and virtual IBAN services from Lightspark Payments Europe AS (Estonia, licensed by the Estonian financial intelligence unit). Your balance sits with those partners. Safeguarding and insurance are not stated. In the EU, e-money funds must be safeguarded — segregated or insured — but that is not the same as a bank deposit and may not sit under a deposit guarantee scheme.

Regulatory tightening is already visible. From July 2026 the EU Transfer of Funds Regulation applies: deposits from non-own or non-EU-licensed VASP wallets above EUR 1,000 are declined, and SCA rules changed deposits too. USDT deposits ended 17 March 2025. The help centre also mentions a temporary suspension of applications from Hungarian residents. The direction is one-way — fewer routes in, more checks — and that is a risk to your own flexibility if you fund from a third-party wallet.

The 30-day upgrade clock. Miss the Plus invitation window and the card is suspended. It is a procedural risk, not a technical one, but procedural risks are the ones that actually bite.

Crypto-network mistakes. Deposits to the wrong network or the wrong token are a recurring complaint theme, and the underlying reason is structural: blockchain transfers are irreversible. A support conversation may recover the funds; there is no guarantee.

The reviews are not about the card. Trustpilot reads 4.5/5 across 2,943 reviews as of 20 October 2026 — 89% five-star, 5% one-star. The negative themes are overwhelmingly gift-card related: markup and fees on gift cards (October 2026), non-working Apple codes with accounts blocked (September–October 2026), refunds paused (September 2026), a pending deposit of more than 20 days with support called worthless (September 2026), and a lookalike fake site (October 2026). One three-star review says the Visa card is sometimes declined at checkout. Bitrefill says it replies to all one-to-three-star reviews. No official incidents found, and no Reddit threads found. Read that list carefully: if your main worry is whether the card issuer works, the evidence is reassuring; if your main worry is the whole company, the noise is about gift cards.

It could be wound down. Cards in this category do not last forever — Visa terminated its agreements with FTX in November 2022, and WaveCrest’s European programmes closed in 2018. Closures follow a pattern: a notice period, spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw your balance. That is why I would not park a large balance on this card.

Operational details worth asking about. Freeze the card and hide the balance in one tap; 3-D Secure is applied to online payments; report lost, stolen or unauthorised transactions to [email protected]; help centre at help.bitrefill.com plus a Contact Us form. Whether you can delete your account, and what happens to a balance on voluntary closure, is not stated.

What to take instead

I scored the alternatives below on the same basis. None of them beats Bitrefill; they trade different things away.

UPay is the one to consider if you are outside Europe but in a covered country. It claims support in 180+ countries, offers virtual and physical personal and business cards, and converts payments to USD, EUR, AED and others. What it lacks on the card page is cashback. There is also a constraint that catches people out: the KYC partner accepts only identity documents issued by the same country as the user’s.

Kemy is the one to look at if you want the physical card to be the point. It offers unlimited virtual cards and one physical Mastercard with contactless, and says Visa and Mastercard are accepted globally. The pricing is where it stops me: virtual is $15 issuance valid three years plus $2 a month, with a $1.50 top-up fee under $100 or 1.25% from $100 and a 3.5% + $1 transaction fee; physical is $250 issuance with DHL Express included plus $10 a month. Failed transactions cost $0.80. A deposit fee is shown as 8% in one place and 5% in another on the same pricing material — an internal conflict you should not have to resolve for someone. Funding is USDT and USDC on the main networks plus BTC, ETH and SOL, and fiat through mobile money and virtual bank accounts.

Tevau I would treat with caution, and the reason is that everything I know about it comes from a single independent information site that states it is not Tevau itself. On that basis: Visa, available across 200+ countries with regional variation, funding by USDT with the app showing you which network to use and wrong-network funds not recoverable, a 1% fee for moving deposited USDT onto the card balance, wallet deposits described as free, an unquantified FX rate spread on overseas spending, and unofficial card prices of Virtual 20 USD, Plastic 100 USD, Metal 199 USD and 24K Gold 499 USD (not confirmed by Tevau), with fees varying by card type, campaign and region. No cashback mentioned. That last item is why a card built for spending a crypto balance in euros is hard to recommend over one that gives 2% back.

Two structural differences matter more than any of these numbers. Bitrefill and Tevau fund from crypto you already hold; Kemy is heavy enough that you might as well hold euros. And Bitrefill is custodial with a named licensed issuer in the EU, while the others’ regulatory detail is thinner on the page. If you are in the EU with euros to spend and crypto to spend them from, Bitrefill is the least bad of the four on the evidence available.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Bitrefill card to a resident of the EU, Norway or Iceland who spends in euros, holds Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana or USDC, wants to convert without leaving the app, and values an uncapped 2% back more than they mind the 1.99% on each deposit. If your income is in crypto, the arithmetic is straightforward: the 1% deposit cashback partly offsets the 1.99% fixed fee, and the 1% purchase cashback is genuine money for spending you were going to do anyway. Lightning users get a materially better experience than on-chain depositors.

I would steer away from it if you are a US or Russian citizen wherever you live, if you need a card in the UK, Switzerland, Canada or Australia, if you want to hold more than EUR 15,000 in crypto on the card without upgrading tiers, if you need Apple Pay today, or if you take cash out regularly enough that the ATM fee matters — in which case move money out by SEPA, which is free.

And if you are someone who has never been declined by a bank and holds euros in an ordinary account, this card solves a problem you do not have, while adding a custodial counterparty, a conversion spread nobody publishes, and a ruleset that has visibly tightened twice in the last eighteen months. It is a good tool for a specific situation, not a replacement for a bank account.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Bitrefill card?

It is a prepaid Visa card — virtual and physical — that you load with crypto or a SEPA bank transfer and then spend like any other card until the balance runs out. It is not a bank account and not a credit card; there is no overdraft, and the card simply stops when the money stops. The card currency is EUR, crypto deposits are converted to euros, and cashback is paid in euros. It is issued by Wallester AS in Estonia and operated by Airfill Prepaid AB in Sweden.

How does the Bitrefill card work?

You convert crypto to euros or send a SEPA transfer, the balance sits on the card, and each purchase draws it down. Google Pay works today; Apple Pay is described as coming soon. Card payments run through Visa’s network, so wherever a normal Visa is accepted this should work, though prepaid cards from foreign issuers can be declined at some merchants. Disputes go to the merchant first, per the help centre’s own guidance.

Is Bitrefill a bank?

No. Bitrefill is a company, and the site is owned and operated by Airfill Prepaid AB (559001-6035), based in Stockholm, Sweden. The card itself is issued by Wallester AS, licensed in Estonia by Finantsinspektsioon, and the crypto and virtual IBAN services come from Lightspark Payments Europe AS. So your balance is held by licensed partners rather than by a bank, which means deposit guarantee schemes should not be assumed.

Who can get the Bitrefill card?

Residents of 29 EU countries plus Norway and Iceland, aged 18 or over, who pass identity verification. US and Russian citizens are excluded regardless of residence, though a Russian citizen who also holds EU or EEA citizenship qualifies. No Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan mobile number is accepted at signup. The card page does not publish a full country list beyond this, and the terms reserve further eligibility checks to the partners.

Does the Bitrefill card require KYC?

Yes, before you can order it. The identity check is run by the card partner: at Starter level a photo ID and a selfie liveness check, with proof of address in some cases and required if you activate outside the EU. Upgrading to Plus adds proof of address and proof of source of funds, with the source-of-funds documents set by Lightspark. You have 30 days to complete an upgrade invitation or the card is suspended.

What does the Bitrefill card cost?

The card is free through the app. Each deposit costs a fixed 1.99% plus a variable exchange cost at the partner’s live rate, and SEPA pay-in is 1.99% too. There is no foreign exchange fee, so the Visa rate applies on foreign-currency payments. A conversion spread is applied but its percentage is not stated publicly. An inactivity fee applies after 12 months without spending or cashing out.

How do I top up the Bitrefill card?

With Bitcoin, Lightning, Ethereum, USDC on a supported network, Solana, Base or Polygon, or by SEPA transfer. The minimum deposit is currently EUR 15 and anything smaller is not added to the balance. USDT deposits on any network ended 17 March 2025, despite still appearing on the card page’s “Buy with” list. Check the network before sending, because blockchain transfers are irreversible.

Can I use the Bitrefill card in the United States or the UK?

You can hold the card while resident in an eligible European country, but you cannot open it from the United States — US citizens are excluded outright — and the card is not offered in the UK, Switzerland, Canada or Australia. Spending abroad works through Visa, using the Visa exchange rate with no Bitrefill markup. Spending in a country where the card was never issued is where declines are most likely.

Is the Bitrefill card safe?

The usual safeguards are there: freeze the card and hide the balance in one tap, 3-D Secure on online payments, two-step verification in the app, and [email protected] for lost, stolen or unauthorised transactions. But the balance is custodial, so funds sit with partner institutions and safeguarding or insurance arrangements are not stated. Trustpilot reads 4.5/5 from 2,943 reviews, with complaints concentrated in the gift-card shop rather than the card.

Is the Bitrefill card worth it?

For an EU resident spending euros from a crypto balance, yes — the card is free, there is no FX fee, and 2% cashback with no cap is better than anything UPay, Kemy or Tevau offers. Weigh it against a 1.99% fixed fee on every deposit, a conversion spread nobody publishes, and ATM charges reported unofficially at 2.49% plus the operator’s. If you already have a normal bank card, this solves a problem you do not have.

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