Pay is closed — here is what it means for anyone still holding it

Updated October 2026

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If you have been circling a crypto-linked payment card called Pay — the one that came out of Cardstack and was sold through the App Store as a DeFi payments wallet with prepaid cards inside it — this review is going to open with the hard part: there is nothing left to apply for. The programme that issued those cards was shut down. The last app version the developer shipped carries the date 18 February 2023, and the card-purchase route through Wyre was switched off on 5 December 2022. So if your question is “how do I get a Pay card,” the honest answer is that the door is closed.

What is left, though, is a genuinely useful thing to write about. If you already opened the app and loaded money into a Card Pay wallet, you are in a position that a lot of people quietly find themselves in when a crypto card programme dies: you hold a balance, the card that spent it no longer works, and nobody is clearly obliged to tell you what happens to the money. That is the situation this page walks through — what I checked, what I found, what is still unexplained, and which cards people in the same spot are looking at now.

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

Verdict: 1.8 out of 10, and the number is not subtle

The Pay card scores 1.8 out of 10 in my assessment. That is close to the floor, and it is worth saying why before the details: a card you cannot obtain any more is not really a card you are choosing between, so the low mark is less about quality and more about whether the product still exists in the form it was sold as.

Cost gets the highest of the sub-marks at 5 out of 10, and I want to be careful about how you read that. It is not a positive verdict. It means the information is simply absent: the app is free to download, and the only in-app purchase listed is “Account on Gnosis Chain” at GBP 0.99. No card fees are stated anywhere. An undisclosed fee schedule cannot earn you a card; it can only avoid losing points for something we cannot see.

Who this suits, honestly: almost nobody. The intended audience for the old Card Pay wallet is, of course, the people already inside it. That is exactly the group this review aims at — holders of the old Card Pay wallet who want to know what to do with a balance in a product that no longer issues cards.

Who it does not suit: anyone starting out. If you are looking for your first crypto-linked card, reading this page is a waste of a few minutes; the alternatives section is where your time is better spent. If you came here thinking you might apply, stop — there is nothing to apply to.

One more thing before we go further, because it colours every section that follows. Almost nothing about this programme’s structure is disclosed. The card’s network and currency are not stated. The issuer is not stated. Whether verification was required is not stated. Support arrangements are not stated — the App Store listing links no support page, only the developer site, Cardstack, and a privacy policy. When a service publishes so little, and then closes, you are left reconstructing it from third parties, which is a worse position than simply reading a fee schedule.

What happened to the programme

The timeline is short and it is the whole story.

On 5 December 2022, app version 1.1.12 disabled the purchase of prepaid cards with Wyre, “until further notice.” That was the moment the card stopped being obtainable in practice. The next and final app version, 1.2.0, is dated 18 February 2023. Nothing has been published since.

What brought it down was not Cardstack. It was the payment and custody partner. As unofficial reporting has it, MetaMask stopped supporting Wyre in January 2023 as Wyre was reportedly shutting down, and Wyre’s wind-down was announced in June 2023. Those two dates are third-party reporting, not something the card’s own pages confirm, and no source links Cardstack to Wyre’s shutdown — so treat the causal story as well-supported background rather than as the developer’s stated position.

The company’s structure, where it is publicly visible: the App Store developer is CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD., and the Cardstack homepage footer names the Cardstack Foundation. The issuer — the institution actually licensed to stand behind the card — is not stated, and that omission matters more than it sounds. In any card programme, the issuer is the party you deal with if money is disputed or frozen. Here you cannot name it.

The app’s technical shape is small but it is what remains. The listing describes iOS 13.0+, macOS 11.0+ on Apple M1 or later, and visionOS 1.0+, distributed through the App Store in the UK. Google Play support is not stated. The App Store rating read on 20 October 2026 was 5.0 out of 5 from three ratings — three ratings is not a sample, it is a coincidence, and I would not treat it as evidence of anything. Transactions are confirmed with Touch ID or Face ID. Whether the wallet is self-custodial is not stated. One thing the listing did mention, in version 1.1.13, was that you claim “rewards” individually — the rate is not stated, and with the programme closed, tiers and reward structures are not stated either.

If you already have the card

This is the section that matters most, so I am going to be blunt about the information quality: almost everything I would want to tell you is not stated, and I am not going to fill the gaps with guesses.

What is not stated:

• Whether the balance can still be withdrawn, or what happens to it after closure. The version notes mention “Reward withdrawal” bug fixes in 1.0.11 and say each reward is claimed individually in 1.1.13, but there is nothing at all about getting money out of a card balance.
• ATM access, spending limits, and card-dispute handling.
• How to fund the wallet. The listing mentions crypto balances and notes that Polygon was removed in version 1.1.13, which tells you a network was dropped but nothing about the mechanics.
• Any top-up method. The only purchasable item listed is “Account on Gnosis Chain” at GBP 0.99.
• Support. No support page is linked from the App Store listing — only the developer site, Cardstack, and a privacy policy.

So what should you actually do? Not as advice, and not because I know the answers, but as a description of the order of operations that makes sense when information is this thin. First, try the app. If it still opens and shows you a balance, that tells you the wallet side is at least reachable, and it is the only live interface you have. Second, and this is the honest headline of this section: the money you see there should be treated as money that may be difficult to move. A closed programme’s balances are exactly the situation where nobody is advertising a withdrawal path, which is not proof that none exists, but it is very far from proof that one does.

One thing I can say clearly, because it is structural rather than speculative: this was a prepaid model, not a credit line. A prepaid card draws on a stored balance, while a standard debit card asks the bank to withdraw from a linked account at the moment of purchase. If your funds were loaded as a stored balance, then the value you have is a claim against a stored amount inside a wallet whose card programme no longer operates. That is a meaningfully different thing from a bank balance, and it is worth holding onto when you decide how urgently to act.

What can go wrong

Let me separate what happened to other people from what could plausibly happen to you, because the two are easy to blur and only one of them is evidence.

The documented incident on this card is the Wyre discontinuation of 5 December 2022. That is not a theory — it is in the app’s own version notes. Alongside it sits the wider pattern: Wyre announced its wind-down in mid-2023, and in November 2022 Visa said it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX” while the FTX US debit card programme was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. Cards die. The category’s track record says so plainly.

How a closure usually unfolds, in the order described in this industry: a notice period, then spending and loading stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. One 2026 closure reported by a secondary source had new loads end on 8 July 2026 and spending stop on 8 August 2026 — a single unconfirmed source, offered here as a shape of what to expect, not as a fact about Pay.

The risks specific to your position, in rough order of how much they should worry you:

• Being unable to move a balance out of a closed wallet. Nothing is promised about withdrawal, and the listed support routes are thin.
• Losing the ability to resolve a dispute. Chargeback is a refund ordered by the card issuer, and with no issuer named anywhere in the public material, you cannot tell who would even order one. 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.
• Depending on an unnamed issuer and an unnamed currency. You do not know which institution stands behind the card or which currency it spends in, and both matter when something goes wrong.
• Irreversibility on the crypto side. Blockchain transfers are typically irreversible; a deposit sent on an unsupported network or to an address of another network can be lost, or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. On-chain network fees for your deposit are charged by the blockchain, not the card provider.
• Stablecoin depeg risk if a balance is stablecoin-denominated. Stablecoins are not necessarily stable: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis.
• Merchant-side friction. A card number starts with an issuer identification number that merchants can look up, so they can see which institution and country issued it, and may apply extra scrutiny when that differs from your billing address. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards for this reason alone. A declined authorisation can also leave a hold on funds for several days, typically up to seven.
• No complaint record to lean on. I found no Trustpilot page or Reddit threads for Card Pay; searches on 20 October 2026 returned unrelated companies. That is not an accusation — it simply means there is no body of user reports that would tell you how the exit actually went.

What I could not find is itself worth listing: no support page, no issuer, no fee schedule, no dispute policy, no post-closure communication. For a review, that is the substance of the low score.

What to take instead

If your underlying problem is the one Pay was aimed at — wanting a card linked to crypto when an ordinary bank card is awkward or unavailable — then the search is not over. Three live programmes in the same space score considerably higher, and it is worth comparing them on the axes that actually decide whether a card works for you.

MetaMask scores 7.1 out of 10 and is the strongest of the three on the evidence. It is a Mastercard, virtual first and instantly issued, with a Metal card pre-orderable in the app after Virtual approval and one card per user. The virtual card is free with no annual or maintenance fee; Metal is $199/year. Fees are described as a “minimal fee for each transaction” — the amount is not stated on the pages I read, and a fee table is linked — with no additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee. It spends directly from the connected wallet across Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, with mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT named. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories, with other regions on a waitlist; proof of residency is required; the citizenship rule is not stated; US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ. Note the phrase on the page itself: ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending.

KAST scores 6.1 out of 10 and is the most openly structured on fees. Membership runs 0 USD for Standard, $1,000/year for Premium and $10,000/year for Private, billed annually upfront with no monthly option. Cards range from Visa Platinum Standard to Visa Infinite metal and gold plated, up to ten per user, with other designs in Pengu, Solana and Bitcoin themes. Fees are unusually clear: 0% stablecoin top-up, 0% USD card spend, 0% transaction fee, 0% for Apple and Google Pay, and a non-USD FX fee of 0.5%–1.75% depending on your residence country, transaction country and card programme. There is also a $0.10 fee on non-USD transactions under $25 and $0.50 for a declined transaction with insufficient balance. The catch is eligibility: KAST shows a residence-based list at KYC, but the country list is not published, and holding only an ID from a restricted region can make you ineligible even if you live somewhere supported. A VPN does not bypass this. Rewards are cashback in USD by tier — 1.5% on the first $2,000/month at Standard, 2% on the first $10,000/month at Premium, 3% on the first $40,000/month at Private — plus KAST Points of +1% (Premium) or +2% (Private) of eligible spend.

Zeal scores 6.1 out of 10 and is the one to look at if your interest is a card tied to the Gnosis ecosystem. It is a Visa card, virtual for online use and addable to Apple Pay, with accounts in EUR, USD and GBP through Gnosis Pay. Zeal charges no additional FX fee and converts at the Visa wholesale rate, though Gnosis Pay fees such as ATM may still apply. Rewards are up to 4% cashback paid in GNO on Gnosis Chain, with GNO required to be held in the card Safe to qualify, and rates can change; the App Store also advertises up to 5% variable APY on EUR/USD balances. Spending reaches 150+ countries, and the card programme is live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand.

If you want the shortest possible version of the comparison: MetaMask if you want the strongest overall card and the clearest reward structure; KAST if published fees matter most to you and you clear its residency test; Zeal if you already live in the Gnosis ecosystem or want a card denominated in EUR, USD or GBP. All three are also cards where the issuer and eligibility rules are at least articulated, which is the thing Pay never managed.

Who I would recommend it to

Nobody, as a card to sign up for. There is no sign-up. That is the recommendation.

There is a second, smaller group I would point here: if you are holding a Card Pay balance and you have been quietly hoping not to look at it, this page is my argument for looking. The facts that push me toward that are not the 1.8 out of 10 and not the three App Store ratings. They are these: the card-purchase route has been off since December 2022, the last app build is from February 2023, no issuer is named, no support page is linked, nothing is said about withdrawing a balance after closure, and the wallet’s own network support changed under it when Polygon was removed in version 1.1.13. Each of those alone is manageable. Together they are the profile of a product that is no longer being maintained, which means the person or system you would need in order to get your money back is not clearly a going concern.

And a third group, for balance: if you read this and thought “at least it was cheap,” note that the cost mark is 5 out of 10 only because nothing is disclosed. An absent fee schedule is not a bargain. If a card does not tell you what it charges, it is not cheaper — it is just unknown, and unknown is a worse thing to hold money in than expensive.

The broader lesson is worth stating once, because it applies well beyond this card. A crypto card is a payment instrument sitting on top of someone else’s licence, and the party you actually depend on is usually the one named least. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key; with a custodial wallet the provider holds the credentials, so you must trust them completely. A seed phrase, typically 12 to 24 words, is an unencrypted form of the private key — anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds — and blockchain transfers have no built-in recovery. Custodial platforms have a real record of failure: Mt. Gox at about US$350 million reported stolen between 2011 and 2014, Coincheck at about US$400 million in 2018, and Ronin Network at US$625 million in 2022. In the EU, electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds in dedicated accounts or by insuring them, but such funds are not bank deposits and may not be covered by deposit guarantee schemes. That is the reason to want a named issuer, a support route, and published fees before you load money — all three of which Pay lacks.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Pay card, and what was it made of?

Pay was the Cardstack wallet sold through the App Store as a DeFi payments wallet, described in the listing as letting you “Manage your prepaid cards.” It sat in the Cardstack app for iOS and Apple platforms, with transactions confirmed by Touch ID or Face ID. Crucially, its network, currency and issuer are all not stated — so even the basic composition of the product is not something its public pages tell you.

Does Pay card require KYC, and who can actually get one?

Neither question has a public answer, because there is nothing to get. Whether the programme required identity verification is not stated, and no eligibility rules are published. Card purchases through Wyre were disabled on 5 December 2022 and the last app version is 1.2.0 from 18 February 2023, so the practical answer is that no new cards are being issued to anyone.

How do I withdraw my money from a closed Pay card?

Nobody’s public pages say, and I want to be honest rather than helpful-sounding here. There is no information on withdrawing a card balance or on what happens to it after closure. The only support routes linked from the App Store listing are the developer site, Cardstack, and a privacy policy. Open the app and see what it shows, but treat the balance as money that may be hard to move.

Can I still use the card in shops, or top it up?

There is no published answer either way. Top-up methods are not stated, spending on existing cards is not stated, and the one network detail on record is that Polygon was removed in version 1.1.13. The listing describes prepaid cards inside the wallet and never mentions physical delivery. With the programme closed, assume nothing works and verify what you can.

Is Pay a bank, and who owns it?

No — it is not a bank, and the ownership picture is partial. The App Store developer is CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD. and the Cardstack homepage footer names the Cardstack Foundation. The issuer, meaning the licensed institution actually behind the card, is not stated. What brought the programme down was the partner: Wyre, whose wind-down was announced in mid-2023.

Is Pay card safe, and are there complaints about it?

I found no complaints — but that is not reassurance, it is absence of information. There is no Trustpilot page or Reddit thread for Card Pay; searches on 20 October 2026 returned unrelated companies. What is documented is the 5 December 2022 disabling of prepaid card purchases with Wyre. Whether the wallet is self-custodial is not stated, only that transactions are confirmed with Touch ID or Face ID.

Is Pay card free, and what are the fees?

The app is free to download, and the only in-app purchase listed is “Account on Gnosis Chain” at GBP 0.99. Card fees are not stated anywhere, which is why the cost criterion scored 5 out of 10 — a middle mark meaning unknown, not cheap. If you are comparing cards on price, an unpublished fee schedule gives you nothing to compare.

Is Pay card available in my country?

This is no longer a meaningful question, since no cards are issued in any country. For context on what replaced options do publish: MetaMask is open in 45 listed countries and territories with proof of residency and a waitlist elsewhere; KAST shows a residence-based list at KYC but does not publish the country list; Zeal is live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand.

What are the best alternatives to the Pay card?

On my scoring, MetaMask leads at 7.1 out of 10 — a free virtual Mastercard spending from your connected wallet, with Metal at $199/year. KAST and Zeal both score 6.1: KAST publishes the clearest fee schedule in the category, and Zeal offers a Visa card in EUR, USD or GBP with no additional FX fee and up to 4% cashback in GNO.

Is Pay card worth it, and can I delete my account?

Worth it is easy to answer: there is nothing to obtain, so the question is moot for anyone starting now. Deleting the account is a different matter — nothing is stated about account deletion or what happens to a remaining balance in the process, and the app itself is your only visible interface. Deleting something is irreversible; look before you remove anything.

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