The programme stopped selling cards in 2022 and stopped updating in 2023

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

There is a version of this review that begins with the app, the card, the fees and the countries where you could sign up. That version cannot be written, because the Pay card programme does not issue cards any more. Card purchases through Wyre were disabled on 2022-12-05, the last version of the app is 1.2.0 from 2023-02-18, and the company behind the listing has moved on to other things. So what I have here is a review of a shut-down product, and the honest question is not “is this card any good” but “what happened to people who were already inside it”.

If you are searching for a crypto-linked payment card because a normal bank card is hard to get where you live, this page is still worth your time. The failure mode described below is not unusual, and knowing how one programme actually ends is the most useful thing I can offer you before you pick another one. My score for the card itself is 1.8 out of 10, and the reasons are almost entirely about a product that no longer exists rather than about a bad experience while it did.

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

Verdict: 1.8 out of 10, and the reason is not a defect

Let me give you the score first, because anyone landing on a review of a closed product is entitled to know where I stand before reading the details. The mark is 1.8 out of 10. Two of the six criteria score zero, and they are the two that matter most for whether a card is usable: who can get it, and whether it works day to day. The single most generous mark on the sheet, 5 out of 10, is for cost, and even that is not a compliment — it is an absence of information.

The whole picture collapses on one fact: prepaid card purchases with Wyre were disabled on 2022-12-05 “until further notice”. That notice never came. Wyre, the partner through which cards were bought, was reported to be ceasing support in January 2023 and announced its wind-down in June 2023. Two sources report those dates, and neither is a Cardstack page — the company never linked itself to the shutdown. Once the card purchase path is gone, everything that depended on it becomes hypothetical: top-ups, limits, withdrawals, disputes.

One more thing belongs in the verdict rather than buried: the App Store listing shows 5.0 out of 5, from 3 ratings. That is not a satisfaction signal. Three people rated an app that stopped selling its main product two years ago, and the score tells you nothing about anyone’s experience of spending money. If you see a perfect score on an abandoned product, it is usually silence, not happiness.

Who this suits: nobody, as a card. And that is a real answer, not a hedge. There is no country list, no eligibility rule, no fee schedule and no issuer named on the public pages — the card’s own pages simply do not say. You cannot check whether you qualify, because there is nothing to qualify for.

Who it does not suit: anyone reading this hoping to solve a real problem. If your reason for looking at a crypto card is that a regular bank card is difficult to obtain, that is exactly the situation where a silent, undocumented closure does the most damage. You will be relying on an unnamed issuer, an unnamed jurisdiction and an app that has not changed since February 2023.

One group I would single out: holders of the old Card Pay wallet. That is you, if you already downloaded this and loaded it years ago. There is still something to do about your balance, and I cover it below — but it is a claim on a wound-down programme, not a working card, and you should read that section before assuming your money is where you left it.

What happened to the programme

The timeline is short and the last three years are silent.

2022-12-05, version 1.1.12: prepaid card purchases through Wyre are disabled “until further notice”. This is the official app note, and it is the hinge of the whole story. Until that release, you could buy a prepaid card through Wyre inside the wallet. After it, you could not.

January 2023: MetaMask ceased Wyre support, per Benzinga, because Wyre was reportedly closing. This is a third-party report, not a Cardstack statement.

2023: Wyre announced its wind-down, per The Block — mid-2023, again a third-party report. Nothing on Cardstack’s own pages links itself to that shutdown.

2023-02-18, version 1.2.0: the most recent app version. After this date, no release notes. The Google Play situation is not stated.

Along the way, the app itself stopped changing shape. The listing describes a “Manage your prepaid cards” section inside what it calls a DeFi payments wallet, with no network and no currency named. In version 1.1.13, Polygon was removed; in the same version, claiming rewards became an individual action per reward. Earlier notes, in 1.0.11, mention “Reward withdrawal” bug fixes. What you cannot find anywhere on the public pages: who can get the card, what the KYC rules were, what the fees were, which wallets are supported, which currencies, whether there were tiers, whether physical cards were delivered, and what the verification steps were. It is not stated. Once, that is all I need to say about the gaps; from here on I will just point.

Two details in the listing are worth reading closely because they tell you what the product had become rather than what it was. The listing mentions claiming “rewards” individually as of 1.1.13, with no rate given. And the app description confirms transactions with Touch ID or Face ID. That is a genuine convenience feature and it is the only security-relevant thing the listing claims — self-custody is not stated either way.

The other thing to note is who was behind it. The developer named on the App Store is CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD., while the Cardstack homepage footer refers to the Cardstack Foundation. An earlier name in search results connects Cardstack to these Wyre events — but no source I found makes that link, so treat it as coincidence rather than evidence. The issuer is not stated, and that omission matters more than it looks: the issuer is the institution that actually holds your balance and stands behind disputes, and here you cannot find out who that is.

Platform support, for what it is worth: iOS 13.0+, macOS 11.0+ on Apple M1 or later, visionOS 1.0+. That is the surface area left: an app built for Apple devices, last touched in February 2023.

If you already have the card or the wallet balance

This is the section I would prioritise if you are reading because you have money in the thing.

Start with the uncomfortable fact: the app says nothing about what happens to a card balance after the programme closes. Withdrawal terms are not stated. No information exists on the public pages about withdrawing a card balance, or about what your balance is now that nothing loads into it. The version notes that do exist are only about rewards — 1.0.11 fixing “Reward withdrawal” bugs, and 1.1.13 saying each reward is claimed individually. Those are not instructions for getting your money out.

So the only guidance I can give you is procedural. Before doing anything else, establish whether there is still a balance at all and whether the app still displays it. If the app still opens and shows a figure, that figure is your only record of a claim; screenshot it, and keep the screenshots. Then look for whether the developer has published any wind-down notice — the App Store listing links only to the developer site cardstack.com and a privacy policy, with no support page, so support is not something I can point you to. Next, check the app for any working support or refund route, and check the card network directly if a card number is still active, since the issuer is the party that can authorise a reversal and the issuer is not named anywhere in the public records. Finally, if the funds are genuinely stranded, that is a complaint for a regulator rather than a support ticket: under EU rules a firm that cannot complete due diligence must refrain from the transaction and, where necessary, end the relationship — but I am not giving you legal advice here, and how that applies to you depends on where you live and who holds the balance.

I want to be careful not to promise a route that does not exist, because that would be the worst outcome. What I can tell you plainly:

• Card spending stopped when Wyre card purchases were disabled on 2022-12-05, so treat any card in your wallet as dead for payments.
• Top-up methods are not stated, so do not assume you can still add funds, and do not try to.
• Limits, ATM access and funding routes are all not stated, which in a wound-down programme means you should assume the worst rather than look for a workaround.
• Disputes are not stated either, and with the issuer unnamed, that is the gap I would worry about most.

If you are in this position, your realistic goal is documentation and recovery of value, not restoring the service. And do that now rather than in a year’s time — the longer a closed programme sits, the harder every question gets.

What can go wrong

I want to separate two things here: what actually went wrong with this programme, and what a closed crypto card generally does to the people holding it.

On the record, one official incident exists and it is the shutdown itself: prepaid card purchases with Wyre disabled until further notice, on 2022-12-05. There is no long list of user complaints. In fact there are none at all — no Trustpilot page or Reddit threads for Card Pay were found, and searches on 2026-10-20 returned unrelated companies. That absence is worth explaining rather than celebrating. A product with no complaint pages usually has no users, or users who have already left, or complaints recorded somewhere I could not reach. It is not evidence of a clean record.

Then there are the structural risks that this case illustrates, and they are the ones that should shape your choice of a replacement.

The counterparty disappears. Wyre was the route to a card and it ceased support in January 2023, with a wind-down reported in mid-2023. When a card depends on a named partner to issue or fund it, that partner’s health is the card’s health. Nobody’s fault, no refund.

You are told nothing. The last version is 1.2.0 from 2023-02-18. There is no closure notice with a schedule, no deadline, no “withdraw by” date — the kind of thing the industry normally provides when a programme winds down. Compare that with the orderly shape a closure usually takes: a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. This programme skipped straight to silence.

Nobody will tell you who is responsible. The issuer is not stated. In this model a card payment involves several parties: the network (Visa or Mastercard) routes the messages and sets the rules, the issuer is the licensed bank or e-money institution that actually holds the programme, and the crypto brand is often just a front-end that markets the card. If the front end vanishes and you do not know the issuer, you have no one to ask.

Company records can diverge. Two names appear: CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD. on the App Store, the Cardstack Foundation in the homepage footer. Not alarming in itself, but when you are chasing a balance on a closed product, knowing exactly which legal entity holds customer funds is the first question, not the last.

Custody risk is real and it is not specific to this card. With a custodial wallet, the provider holds the credentials, so you must trust them completely; and a seed phrase — typically 12 to 24 words — is the private key in unencrypted form, so anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend the funds. Transfers are typically irreversible and a stolen private key has no recovery, because the network cannot freeze or return anything. The industry’s record is not encouraging: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011-2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022). Self-custody-linked cards flip the risk rather than removing it: funds stay in your own wallet until the moment of payment, but you bear sole responsibility for key loss, phishing, and clipboard-hijacking malware that swaps copied addresses.

Stuck payments can cost you twice. A declined authorisation may leave a hold on funds that can stay for several days, typically up to 7. And refunds are not automatic: a chargeback is a refund ordered by the issuer, with reason codes such as fraud, duplicate billing or goods not received; US debit card reversal rights come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z, while prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed.

One safety point on the card side, since it recurs in this category: Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer, and WaveCrest — the Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands — was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. A card brand is not the same thing as an issuer’s licence to keep operating, and the licence can go.

What to take instead

Three live alternatives came out of the same research, and I want to walk through them the way you would weigh them: what it costs, what it asks of you before you start, and where the sharp edges are.

MetaMask — score 7.1 / 10. The most established of the three, and the one with the most named detail. It issues a Mastercard: a virtual card instantly on approval, and a metal card you can pre-order in the app once the virtual one is approved. One card per user. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay are among them — while other regions sit on a waitlist; US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ. Proof of residence is required, and the page is careful in a way I respect: “Ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending”. The citizenship rule is not stated.

That cashback footnote is the kind of thing I check twice. “Up to 3%” and “3% on the first $10,000, then 1%” are very different products, and only one of them appears in the small print.

KAST — score 6.1 / 10. The most complicated eligibility rule of the three, and the one where reading carefully saves you time. Residence is checked at KYC: “If your country isn’t listed, it means KAST is not available there.” The country list is not published, a Restricted Locations list is referenced with no countries named, and identity document nationality matters separately — “If you currently live in a supported country but only hold an ID from a restricted region, you may still be ineligible to pass KYC”. Dual citizens with an ID from a supported country may pass, only the account holder’s own ID is accepted, and a VPN does not bypass any of it. You can create an account in an unsupported country, but KYC stays locked.

Two things I would flag. The tiers are priced for people with volume, not for someone quietly replacing a bank card in a town of 20,000 people — Premium at 1,000 USD/year and Private at 10,000 USD/year. And KAST’s own Terms say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”, which conflicts with the app listing PYUSD and RLUSD as well. A contradiction like that in the token list is worth asking about before you fund anything.

Zeal — score 6.1 / 10. The one I would describe as least disclosed and least expensive on paper. Spend in 150+ countries; issuance “depends on eligibility and regional availability”. Gnosis Pay docs list the card programme as live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, and Zeal update notes mention Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia. The card is a Visa, virtual for online use and addable to Apple Pay, with accounts in EUR, USD and GBP on Gnosis Chain and Celo per the docs; physical is not stated, and exact coins for Zeal are not stated. Costs are not stated — no fee schedule is published on zeal.app or the App Store. What is stated: no additional FX fee from Zeal, conversion 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, and GNO must be held in the card Safe to qualify; rates can change. The app also advertises up to 5% variable APY on EUR/USD balances — an investment advertisement, not a card benefit, and worth reading with the caution that deserves.

A comparison at a glance, if you want the three side by side:

Whichever you look at, the same background applies to all three, and it is worth knowing before you choose. Stablecoins are not necessarily stable: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022 and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis, despite the name. USDC is the one with the clearer disclosure — Circle says it is redeemable 1:1 for USD and 100% backed by cash and cash equivalents, mostly in an SEC-registered government money market fund, with monthly reserve attestations by a Big Four firm, and it lists USDC as natively supported on 38 networks as of 16 September 2026. USDT is issued on more chains including Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon and Avalanche, with reserves intended to back it 1-to-1, and Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list, so stablecoins are not censorship-proof either.

Watch the network, too. Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option. If you hold USDT but no ETH, you cannot send it on Ethereum: gas is paid only in ETH. Tron prices fees through bandwidth and energy rather than the native asset in the usual way. And blockchain transfers are irreversible, so a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee. On-chain network fees for your deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by the card company.

On the regulatory side, if you are in Europe: MiCA is Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, and ESMA says it took legal effect in June 2023, with the rules on asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens applying from 30 June 2024 and the remaining provisions, including crypto-asset service provider rules, from 30 December 2024. Under Article 48, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution. The transitional period lets providers already operating under national law continue only until 1 July 2026 or until they receive or are refused a MiCA authorisation, whichever comes first. ESMA keeps an interim register of authorised providers that you can check before you sign up, and one authorisation can serve the whole EU — Coinbase’s Luxembourg licence replaced its national licences with a single EU-wide authorisation. A card, meanwhile, is a payment service regulated separately, so a crypto card often rests on two licences at once. Electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds by segregating them or insuring them, and such funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not sit under a deposit guarantee scheme. In the US, FinCEN guidance (FIN-2013-G001) treats administrators and exchangers of convertible virtual currency as money transmitters, while ordinary users buying goods or services are not.

Who I would recommend it to

I would not recommend the Pay card to anyone, for use. That is not a hedge and it is not a “with caveats” — the card issuance path was switched off on 2022-12-05 and the partner behind it wound down in 2023. If you want the wallet, you can still install it; you just cannot get a card out of it, and the app has not been updated since 2023-02-18.

So let me be specific about who should do what.

If you want a crypto card to spend from: look at MetaMask, which has the most detail published and the broadest listed availability, and read the metal card’s cashback footnote before you assume 3%. Check your own country against its list first — 45 listed countries is not everywhere, and US and UK sign-ups are temporarily closed. If you trade several stablecoins and want a lot of card choices, KAST is the one, provided you can pass its residence and document-nationality checks and can afford the tier that fits you. If you are in one of its listed regions and want no FX fee with a Visa, Zeal works, but you are accepting that its fees are unpublished.

If you already hold the Card Pay wallet: treat it as a claim, not a card. Screenshot whatever the app still shows you, find out which legal entity is on the other side — CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD. is the developer name, the Cardstack Foundation appears in the site footer — and take it to a regulator if the funds cannot be recovered. Do not add money to it in the hope of reviving the product.

If your actual problem is that you cannot get an ordinary bank card: that is worth saying out loud, because it is the situation most of these searches come from, and it deserves a different answer. Cards are one route, not the only one, and I am not going to design that route for you here — country rules and identity rules apply to you personally and I do not know yours. What I will say is the principle: pick a provider that names its issuer, publishes its fees, and answers support messages, and check whether it is on the ESMA interim register if you are in Europe. The Pay card failed on all three counts, and none of that is about crypto being a bad idea.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Pay card?

It was a prepaid card offered inside a DeFi payments wallet, listed on the App Store under the description “Manage your prepaid cards”, developed by CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD. The listing named neither a network nor a currency. Prepaid card purchases through Wyre were disabled on 2022-12-05, and the last app version is 1.2.0 from 2023-02-18.

How did the Pay card work, and does it still?

It used to work by buying a prepaid card through Wyre inside the app and then loading it. That route was switched off on 2022-12-05 “until further notice” and never restored, so no new cards have been issued since. Spending on any card you still hold should be treated as finished. The app itself still exists, but it has not changed since February 2023.

Who owns Pay, and who issued the card?

The developer named on the App Store is CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD., while the Cardstack homepage footer refers to the Cardstack Foundation. The issuer is not stated anywhere on the public pages. That is the detail I would most want answered as a holder, because the issuer is the institution that holds the balance and authorises reversals.

Can I still get a Pay card in my country?

No. Card purchases through Wyre have been disabled since 2022-12-05, so eligibility is moot — the card’s public pages also do not state which countries were supported, what the KYC rules were, or what verification involved. Nothing there to check against, because there is nothing to qualify for.

What happened to my Card Pay balance?

The app says nothing about it. Withdrawal terms are not stated, and there is no information on the public pages about withdrawing a card balance or about what your balance is after the closure. The version notes only cover rewards — 1.0.11 fixed “Reward withdrawal” bugs, 1.1.13 made each reward claimed individually. Screenshot whatever the app still displays before anything changes.

Is the Pay card free?

Partly, and that is how I would describe the disclosure rather than the cost. 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. So there is no fee schedule to judge, and no way to work out what holding the card would have cost.

Was the Pay card safe to use?

Safety is not the question I would ask; liveness is. The card does not issue. Transactions were confirmed with Touch ID or Face ID according to the listing, and that is a real safeguard, but self-custody is not stated either way, and with the programme closed the practical risk is stranded funds rather than fraud. Trusting a closed provider is the part I would avoid.

Why was Polygon support removed from the app?

The listing’s version notes record Polygon being removed in version 1.1.13, the same release in which claiming rewards became individual per reward. No reason is given in the notes. If you were holding a token on Polygon through this wallet, that removal matters, and the app does not explain where value went.

Is Pay card worth it — is the app still any good?

At 1.8 out of 10, no. The two heaviest criteria, who can get it and everyday use, both score zero because no cards are issued. The App Store shows 5.0 out of 5 from 3 ratings, which I would read as an artefact of almost nobody reviewing an abandoned app rather than as satisfaction.

What should I use instead?

MetaMask, KAST and Zeal are the live options I looked at. MetaMask scores highest at 7.1 out of 10 with a free Mastercard virtual card and 45 listed countries, though its metal cashback headline of 3% drops to 1% after $10,000 spent. KAST and Zeal each score 6.1 out of 10, with KAST offering the widest card and token range at a tiered price and Zeal publishing the least about its fees.

Content created by the «cryptocardchooser.com» team