A card that spends the crypto you already hold, with German-bank backing and a rewards rate people argue about

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Trade Republic is one of the few crypto platforms where the card is not a separate product bolted onto the side. It is the same account you already keep your coins in, with a payment card attached, issued by Trade Republic Bank GmbH in Berlin. If you spend from the crypto balance, the payment is treated as a sale of the coin — which is the single most important thing to understand before you start, and the thing most people only learn when they see a tax line later. The card is genuinely convenient, the rewards are real, and the platform’s reputation for reliability is strong. But this is a Europe-facing, German-bank product with a published fee schedule that is thinner than the marketing suggests, and the official pages leave several of the details I would want — eligibility, limits, coin list — unstated. I score it 7.2 out of 10.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

What I found, and who this card suits

Trade Republic scores 7.2 out of 10 overall. That is a good score, not a great one, and the shape of it matters more than the number: this card is excellent at the narrow job it was built for, and mediocre-to-unknown at everything around that job. Who it suits is someone who lives in the European Union, already holds crypto at Trade Republic, and wants to spend it without a separate exchange bridging into a bank account. Who it does not suit is anyone outside that circle, anyone who wants an ordinary bank card with a wide ATM network, and anyone who treats rewards as the main reason to switch — the reward rates on this card have moved more than once.

The detail that should decide it for most people: card spending counts as a sale of your crypto. That is a taxable disposal every time you buy a coffee, in most jurisdictions that tax digital assets. Read the rest of this page knowing that.

Two of the five criteria — eligibility and top-up options — score 5 out of 10, and both for the same reason: the official pages simply do not say. That is not a defect I can prove; it is a transparency gap you will feel when you are trying to answer “will this work for me” before you open an account.

Will they give you the card?

Short answer: the official pages in readable form do not tell you. There is no country list I can point you to, and I am not going to guess at one.

What is established is the shape of the operation. The product is Germany/EU based — the site carries en-de and en-nl versions — and the card is issued by Trade Republic Bank, Berlin. Whether a particular nationality, a particular residence, or a particular residence-plus-nationality combination is accepted is not stated in the readable official pages. That is the honest answer, and it is the answer you have to work with.

If you are outside the EU, do not assume openness on the basis of the brand being known worldwide. If you are inside it, the realistic obstacle is not citizenship but the ordinary onboarding checks described in the next section. And if your address is in a place you suspect is restricted, the only reliable source is the app’s own onboarding flow, which will tell you at the point of application rather than a marketing page.

How to get it

The card is called “The Trade Republic Card” and it is issued by Trade Republic Bank, Berlin. The network and whether you get a virtual card, a physical card, or both is not stated in readable official text — though third-party German reviews, which I treat as unofficial throughout, describe three versions: a virtual card, a Classic card and a Mirror metal card. The Mirror differs only by its casing, with the same fees and limits. None of that is confirmed by the card’s own pages.

On identity verification, the readable pages do not set out the requirements. In practice, any regulated EU firm will run standard customer due diligence before opening an account: name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, and a determination of whether you are a politically exposed person. For EU customers this is a legal obligation, not a platform preference. You should also expect that if the checks cannot be completed, the institution will not proceed and may end the relationship — that is what the rules require. So the realistic flow is: open and verify the broker account, then request the card inside it.

Activation, delivery timing and replacement pricing are all things I want to give you an answer on and largely cannot. Not stated officially. What German reviews report — unofficial, and the kind of thing that can change without notice — is that a replacement costs the same as the original, 5 EUR for Classic and 50 EUR for Mirror, whether the card was lost, stolen or expired; that delivery time is not stated; and that a virtual card is usable immediately after the account is opened. That last point, if it holds for you, is the one to care about: a virtual card you can add to a wallet the same day changes the waiting period from an inconvenience into nothing.

Fees: what it really costs

The card is advertised as having no monthly fee, but that claim reaches me only through third-party reviews, and the official amounts are not stated. So the numbers below are unofficial figures from German financial press and comparison sites, not terms I can hold the bank to, and they are as of July 2026.

Card-specific fees are not mentioned in the press material. The trading cost, where it appears, is the help centre’s 1 EUR third-party cost per commission-free trade — that is the brokerage side of your account, not the card.

Here are three everyday payments, and which fees actually touch them.

A payment from a crypto balance is treated as a sale of the coin. The card fee is the only fee, and unofficial sources say there is none. What you are really paying is the crypto conversion: the coin is sold at whatever rate applies at that moment, and the difference between that rate and the price you could have got elsewhere is your real cost. Trustpilot reviewers do complain about Trade Republic’s crypto spreads generally, though I found no complaint theme specific to card spending. Add to that the tax reality: this is a disposal of the coin, and in a jurisdiction that taxes digital assets, each card payment is a taxable event.

A hotel in a non-euro country. Unofficially there is no currency surcharge and the official Visa rate applies, which is the good case and unusually clean for a card in this category. The ATM picture is different: card-page material says ATM withdrawals are free worldwide, while German reviews describe free withdrawals at Visa ATMs from 100 EUR and a 1 EUR fee below that, with no cap on amount or count reported. Cash-machine operators can still charge their own fee, which is the exception that catches people out.

A subscription, 9.99 EUR a month. Here the 1% top-up fee does not apply — that is on money going in, not money going out — but merchant category rules may. Gambling is the classic example: MCC 7995 covers casinos, betting and lotteries, and many issuers block it on specific cards by policy rather than by law, with the blocked list varying by issuer. A subscription service might also decline a card whose BIN lookup shows a prepaid or foreign-issued card, which is a real and under-discussed cause of “card declined” errors. Neither point is a Trade Republic-specific rule I can confirm from its pages; both are reasons the everyday-use score deserves a question to your own support team before you commit a recurring payment.

The limits matter more than the fees for anyone planning real spending. Unofficially: 1,500 EUR per day and 6,000 EUR per week, with no separate point-of-sale limit published. A weekly trip of any ambition hits that ceiling, and there is no published way to raise it.

Top up: how money gets onto the card

The confirmed fact is narrow and it is the central one: the press release states that customers can use crypto held with Trade Republic for card payments. Which coins qualify is not stated. That is the whole officially documented funding story, and for the intended user — someone already holding crypto on the platform — it is exactly the right feature, because the money never leaves the broker account in the way it would if you were bridging to a bank.

Everything else is unofficial. German reviews report that topping up by SEPA transfer is free and that topping up by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay costs 1% of the amount. They also report that the virtual card is usable immediately on account opening. What is not stated officially: the withdrawal process, the top-up mechanics from inside the app, and the coin list.

Two practical consequences. First, if you intend to pay this card from euros rather than crypto, you are in the SEPA-versus-card branch, and 1% on a card top-up is a real cost on a large balance — the free SEPA transfer is the route that reports favourably. Second, remember that crypto is the funding source as well as the spending source, and the chain itself charges network fees for on-chain deposits. Those go to the blockchain, not to the card provider.

Paying with it every day

Apple Pay and Google Pay are supported and the card is added in the app — unofficial, from German banking press, but it is also the kind of thing that would be strange to get wrong, and it matches the pattern of a German bank’s retail card. Virtual, Classic and Mirror are the three reported versions. Free ATM withdrawals worldwide appear on the card page; the tiering at 100 EUR and the possible operator fee come from other sources.

The rewards are where this card has been genuinely interesting and also genuinely unstable, so read carefully. The press release of 14 November 2025 announces card spending with crypto and a 2% Crypto Saveback, reinvested into a savings plan, up to 1,500 EUR of monthly spend. The card page says 1% Saveback on card payments. German reviews describe 1% into a savings plan of at least 50 EUR per month, capped at 15 EUR per month, not paid on transfers, ATM withdrawals, investments, top-ups, PayPal, gambling and quasi-cash. One review says crypto-funded payments earn 2% with a cap of 30 EUR, since the end of 2025, which is partly consistent with the official 2% figure. And GIGA has reported that Trade Republic changed its Saveback terms and a user lost the 1% — the date of that report I could not read.

The pattern is legible: crypto-funded payments earn more than euro-funded ones, there are caps, there is an excluded list, and the terms have changed under people at least once. If the Saveback is why you are here, check the current terms inside the app before you transfer anything to the platform.

The everyday-use score is 9 out of 10, the highest of any criterion, and the reason is straightforward: a card that draws on crypto you already hold, in a mainstream wallet, with reportedly no monthly fee and clean currency conversion, is a genuinely pleasant way to spend. The deductions are the caps, the exclusions, the limits, and my inability to confirm the wallet support officially.

What can go wrong

The issuer is Trade Republic Bank GmbH, Brunnenstrasse 19-21, 10119 Berlin, named in the page footer as the card issuer. Licence and BIN sponsor are not stated in readable text. That matters more than it sounds: the whole reason a crypto card feels ordinary at the till is that a licensed bank sits behind it, and it is worth knowing which bank.

On complaints, the picture is better than the category average. Trustpilot, read on 20 October 2026, shows 4.6 out of 5 from 67,608 reviews, 11% one-star, with the most recent review dated 20 October 2026. Visible reviews are mostly positive, one says plainly “Card works worldwide”, and I found no complaint theme specific to the card. The familiar Trade Republic gripes are elsewhere: support that is slow or hard to reach, wide crypto spreads, account blocks that are hard to resolve. German press has reported rising BaFin complaints, though the date was unclear to me. In July 2026 there was a Portuguese complaint about a crypto deposit address with no network warning — the classic way to lose money with a crypto platform, and the reason to double-check the network on any deposit address before sending.

Three risks specific to spending from crypto, in order of how much they should worry you:

The conversion cost you cannot see at the till. A card payment clears as a normal payment. The coin sale happens behind it, at a rate you did not choose. Across a month of small purchases this becomes the largest recurring cost in your spending, and it is not on any fee table.

The tax line. Card spending is a sale of the crypto. Whether that produces a taxable gain for you depends on your jurisdiction and your holding period, and I am not going to advise you on it. What I will say is that it is a separate disposal each time, and people are routinely surprised by the volume of records they end up reconciling.

Blocks and closures. Programme closures are not hypothetical in this category: a 2026 closure reported by a secondary source ended new loads on 8 July and spending on 8 August, though that is a single unconfirmed source. A declined authorisation can also leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to seven. Support channels, languages and hours are on a separate page whose details I could not read.

On the positive side, and this is not nothing: the usual safeguards exist in this category — app-based two-factor authentication, instant card freeze, spending limits, 3-D Secure confirmation and tokenised mobile wallets. On the negative side, remember that the crypto is custodial. Trade Republic holds it. That means counterparty and hack risk, in a category with a real record of both, and blockchain transfers are irreversible by design, so a deposit to the wrong network is a support ticket, not a refund.

What to take instead

The alternatives in this category are not clones of each other, and the honest summary is that each one trades away something different.

RedotPay (6.9/10) publishes the most transparent list of whom it will not serve — a long KYC exclusion list covering, among others, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Serbia and the US, and a separate card-issuance list that adds India, Indonesia, Morocco, Nepal, Singapore and Turkey for residents. Note the wording conflict: the KYC list bars citizens of those countries, the card list bars residents of those areas. It is also the most expensive to enter: 10.00 USD for a virtual card, 100.00 USD for a physical one, neither cancellable or refundable once paid, with a 1.00% transaction fee and 1.20% outside your card’s default currency. In exchange you get the clearest rules in the category — which is worth something.

Bitpanda (6.5/10) is the plainest option. A physical Visa debit card in EUR only, one active at a time, free first shipment, reissue at 5.90 EUR. You spend from a chosen main asset — listed cryptocurrencies, precious metals or EUR — auto-converted to EUR at payment, minimum 1 EUR. Its non-euro FX fee is 0 EUR but Visa mark-ups apply, and its own pages disagree on cashback, with one saying 1% on crypto spending and the summary saying “up to 2%”. It is the least crypto-native and the least ambiguous.

Wirex (6.7/10) sits in the middle on price — issuance is free in the UK, EEA, APAC, Singapore and Australia, though the metal Visa Signature debit card costs 45 GBP in the UK and 45 EUR elsewhere — and on flexibility it goes furthest, with one physical and one virtual card at a time, crypto-and-cash balances, SEPA/Faster Payments/ACH/PIX deposits all free, and a “Worldwide (130+ countries)” service area. But its eligibility depends on your region in a way you have to look up per country, its FX fee is not published as a number, and its Cryptoback runs from 0.5% on Standard to up to 8% on Elite with a long exclusion list. A 30 GBP one-off administrative fee applies to accounts breaching its terms.

My own comparison, for what it is worth: if the deciding factor is *the crypto you already hold*, Trade Republic wins, because the card and the balance are one thing. If the deciding factor is *knowing exactly where you stand*, RedotPay wins on disclosure and Bitpanda on simplicity. If it is *breadth of countries*, Wirex is the one to check first — and then check yourself, because its availability is region-dependent.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend this card to a person who already uses Trade Republic as a broker, holds the coins they want to spend, lives in the EU, and has decided that the convenience of one balance is worth the cost of an on-the-spot coin sale on every purchase. For that person, this is an unusually good card: no monthly fee as far as the unofficial figures go, no currency surcharge, a metal option for the aesthetics, mainstream mobile wallets, and a platform whose Trustpilot record is strong.

I would not recommend it as a first card for someone who just wants to buy things. For that, an ordinary debit card from an ordinary bank does the same job with none of the conversion cost, none of the tax disposal, and none of the counterparty risk.

I would be cautious about it, and check before committing money, for four specific reasons: you are outside the EU; you plan to spend large sums weekly against the unofficial 1,500 EUR daily and 6,000 EUR weekly limits; you are chasing the Saveback rather than the convenience; or you cannot accept that the rate you get is the broker’s rate and nobody will warn you at the till.

Frequently asked questions

What is Trade Republic card?

It is a debit card issued by Trade Republic Bank GmbH in Berlin and attached to a Trade Republic brokerage account. Rather than drawing on a bank balance, it converts the crypto you hold into fiat at the moment of payment. Three versions are reported — virtual, Classic and Mirror (metal) — though the card’s own public pages do not set out the details in readable form.

How does Trade Republic card work?

You pay, and the card converts crypto from your Trade Republic balance to cover it. The platform treats that as a sale of the coin, which is why it has tax implications. Separately, crypto trading is commission-free with a 1 EUR third-party cost per trade according to the help centre. That conversion cost is the real price of using the card, not the card fee.

Is Trade Republic a bank?

Partly, and the distinction matters. The card itself is issued by Trade Republic Bank GmbH, Berlin, at Brunnenstrasse 19-21, 10119 Berlin, which is a bank. The crypto brokerage side is a separate business. So the money side sits with a bank; the crypto side does not. Licence details and the BIN sponsor are not stated in readable official text.

Who owns Trade Republic?

Trade Republic Bank GmbH in Berlin is named as the issuer, and the site operates German and Dutch language versions alongside English. It is a German and EU operation, not a global one — the site is en-de and en-nl, which tells you where it is actually built to serve. Any wider ownership structure is not something I can confirm from the pages available to me.

Is the Trade Republic card available in my country?

The country list is not disclosed on the official pages, so I cannot tell you. What is clear is that this is a Germany/EU product. The reliable test is the app’s own onboarding flow, which will tell you at the point of application. Do not assume availability from the brand being known internationally — the eligibility for card issuance and for identity verification are separate questions, as other providers’ own terms show.

Does the Trade Republic card require KYC?

Yes, in practice, and by law rather than by choice. EU customer due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documents, a sanctions check and a politically-exposed-person determination, with ongoing monitoring. The exact steps Trade Republic asks for are not stated in readable official pages. If the checks cannot be completed, EU rules require the firm not to proceed.

Is the Trade Republic card free?

There is no monthly or annual fee as far as unofficial German sources report, but there is a one-off card cost: virtual 0 EUR, Classic 5 EUR, Mirror metal 50 EUR. Topping up by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay costs 1%, while SEPA transfer is free. Official amounts are not stated on the card’s own pages, so treat these as reported rather than guaranteed.

Is the Trade Republic card safe?

The issuer is a German bank, which is the strongest thing about it, and Trustpilot shows 4.6 out of 5 from 67,608 reviews. But “safe” splits in two: your fiat is with a licensed bank, while your crypto is held custodially by the platform, which carries counterparty and hack risk. Known complaint themes concern slow support, wide crypto spreads and account blocks — not the card itself.

How do I add the Trade Republic card to Apple Wallet?

Apple Pay and Google Pay are both supported, and the card is added through the Trade Republic app — this is reported by German banking press rather than stated on the card’s official pages. Once in the wallet, the card number is replaced by a device-specific number in the Secure Element, and each payment uses a one-time code, so the tokenised card is safer to use online than the plastic.

Can I use the Trade Republic card abroad?

Yes — that is one of its stronger points. The card page says ATM withdrawals are free worldwide, and unofficial German sources describe free withdrawals at Visa ATMs from 100 EUR, with a 1 EUR fee below that. Foreign-currency purchases carry no surcharge and use the official Visa rate. Two cautions: ATM operators may charge their own fee, and a declined payment can leave a hold on your funds for several days.

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