A Bitcoin card built for France, with a tight scorecard and tight borders

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The Bitstack card is a Visa Classic debit card that spends euros from a Bitstack cash account, and the crypto angle is that you fund that cash account by selling bitcoin in the Bitstack app. It is registered as a French crypto-asset service provider, the card itself is issued by BPCE, and the e-money side is handled through Xpollens. That is the shape of the product: small, regulated, deliberately French. The card launched gradually in France and other EU residents are still on a waitlist rather than an active rollout.

I went through Bitstack’s public pages and the published fee schedule, and I also read what real users are saying in 2026. My overall score is 5.5 out of 10, and you will see why when I walk through eligibility, costs, top-up, and the everyday experience. The verdict section at the top of this review gives you the score breakdown; the rest of the page explains each piece in the order you would actually meet it if you were applying today.

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

Verdict: 5.5 out of 10

The score reflects what Bitstack does well and what it does not, and the cards on the scoreboard are honest about the trade-offs.

In plain English, Bitstack is a competent, well-regulated Bitcoin-on-ramp for people who already live in France, with a card bolted on so that euros can be spent. It is not a wide-coverage crypto card and it is not for anyone outside France yet. The cost line is genuinely friendly for a French cardholder who spends modestly abroad, but the top-up story is thinner than at multi-chain rivals. Reliability looks good on paper and on Trustpilot, with a small set of recurring complaints about delivery and identity-verification timelines that I will cover below.

If you are a French resident who already saves in bitcoin and wants a clean way to convert some of it into day-to-day euros, Bitstack fits. If you live anywhere else, want to spend stablecoins, or want a virtual card today, you are in the wrong place.

Who can get the Bitstack card

Bitstack states that the card is available exclusively to residents of France, including the overseas territories. The rollout is gradual: the order option only shows up in the Cash tab of the app once your account qualifies. Other EU countries appear on a waitlist per the starting data, but that is not the same as a confirmed launch date. The rule is residence-based, so what matters is where you live, not which passport you hold.

There is no published list of which documents you will be asked for. The official pages do not say which proof of address, identity document or minimum age Bitstack uses. What I can tell you from the help centre and the public terms is that the flow inside the app, once you qualify, is: open the Cash tab, choose to order the card, pick a PIN, enter a delivery address in France or the overseas territories, see the total (9.99 EUR for the card plus a delivery fee that depends on the address), and pay from your cash account, a bank card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. The cards I will discuss in the alternatives section use a more openly published KYC checklist, and Bitstack’s silence on that point is a small but real gap in the public documentation.

A Trustpilot reviewer from July 2026 reported a slow identity-verification process that ended in rejection, and Bitstack replied that decisions follow regulatory requirements and that specifics are not shared publicly. So even if your account qualifies for ordering, the back-office decision on whether to activate the card is not something you can predict from the marketing pages.

How to get the Bitstack card

You order the card from the app, not from a web form. After payment, production usually starts the day after confirmation. Delivery takes up to 10 business days in metropolitan France once production has started, and up to 3 weeks for the overseas territories. The delivery fee is variable and is shown at checkout, although the exact amount is not listed in the help article. What you actually receive is a physical Visa Classic debit card tied to your Bitstack cash account. A virtual card is planned but is not yet available at the time of writing, and there is no metal card option mentioned anywhere on the public pages.

In terms of payment methods for the order itself, you can pay the 9.99 EUR card price plus delivery from the cash account, from a bank card, via Apple Pay, or via Google Pay. That is convenient, but the practical question is what happens after the card lands in your letterbox. You will need to activate it in the app, and from that point on it spends euros from the Bitstack cash balance. If you want to spend bitcoin directly, the flow is: sell bitcoin in the app, the euros land in the cash account, and the card draws down that balance when you pay.

The card currency is euros. The card is denominated, settled and listed in euros across the fee schedule, and the help article on FX talks about converting foreign-currency transactions at the Visa rate. There is no multi-currency wallet feature on the card itself; if you travel outside the eurozone, the card converts at the Visa rate and the FX fee rules I cover next apply.

Fees and what a Bitstack payment actually costs

The pricing on Bitstack’s own pages is internally inconsistent, so I have pulled the numbers from the help-centre article on card costs and the publicly visible pricing page, and flagged where the two sources disagree.

The headline numbers are: the card costs 9.99 EUR, there is no monthly subscription, and the variable delivery fee is added at checkout. The pricing page describes a Standard plan at 14.97 or 14.98 EUR with delivery included, a Plus monthly plan at 9.99 EUR with free shipping, and a Plus annual option that includes both the card and delivery at no extra cost. The exact framing of Standard versus Plus shifts on different pages, so treat the help-centre figure (9.99 EUR plus delivery) as the one to plan around, and assume that a Plus subscription of 9.99 EUR per month removes the shipping fee and changes some limits and reward rates as I describe below.

To make that less abstract, here is what it looks like in three everyday situations.

A 60 EUR lunch in Paris paid in euros to a French merchant with the physical card: no FX conversion, no card fee, no ATM fee, just the underlying 1.5% bitcoin purchase fee (Standard) or 0.75% (Plus) when you originally sold bitcoin to top up the cash account. So the practical cost of the meal is the bitcoin-to-euro spread you paid when you funded the cash account.

A 120 EUR hotel in Tokyo, paid in yen at the Visa rate, falls inside the 1 000 EUR monthly FX-free band, so no foreign-currency fee is added by Bitstack on top of the Visa conversion. The all-in cost is again the bitcoin-to-euro spread you absorbed when selling bitcoin to fund the cash account, plus whatever spread the Visa rate itself shows on the day.

A 250 EUR cash withdrawal in Berlin from a third-party ATM: the first 200 EUR of monthly withdrawals are free, and you have used 4 of your 5 free withdrawals for the month, so the remaining 50 EUR is charged the higher of 1 EUR or 1%, which is 1 EUR here. The ATM operator may also charge its own fee, and that is shown on the ATM screen before you confirm.

Limits are fixed and cannot be changed, which is unusual for this category. Most crypto card providers let you nudge a daily or monthly cap from inside the app. Bitstack does not. If your monthly spend pattern crosses 5 000 EUR or your travel plans involve larger cash needs, the published caps will block you before anything else does.

Top up: how the cash account gets funded

The card is a debit card against a euro balance held inside Bitstack, and that euro balance grows when you sell bitcoin in the app. So in practice, “top up” means two different things and you need to be clear which one you mean.

The first is topping up the Bitstack cash account itself. There are two ways to do this on the published fee schedule. You can fund it by selling bitcoin that you already hold in your Bitstack account, and the bitcoin purchase (or in this case, sale) fee schedule applies: 1.5% under 250 EUR, 1.25% between 250 and 1 000 EUR, and 1% above 1 000 EUR on the Standard plan, or 0.75% flat on Plus. You can also load the cash account by depositing from a bank card via Apple Pay or Google Pay, which costs 0.70% on all plans, with an extra 0.70% if the deposit is not funded from the cash account itself. The minimum top-up amount is not stated on the public pages, and the help centre does not say which network or coin you would need to use if you were sending bitcoin in from an external wallet, because Bitstack does not publish a deposit address list for the card flow in the documents I read.

The second is converting bitcoin into euros for spending. This is where the card’s identity shows: Bitstack is built around a bitcoin savings habit, and the card is the spending complement to it. The 0.70% Apple Pay and Google Pay deposit fee is comparable to what you would pay on a card deposit at a multi-currency competitor, but the bitcoin sale spreads sit on top, and they are the dominant cost for most users.

There is no published list of supported networks, coins or stablecoins for the card funding flow. That is the single biggest feature gap compared with the alternatives I discuss later. If you earn in USDT on Tron or hold USDC on Solana, Bitstack does not tell you on its card pages what to do with them. The realistic reading is that Bitstack assumes the user already buys and holds bitcoin inside Bitstack, and the card exists to convert that bitcoin to euros for daily spending.

Withdrawal from the cash account back to a bank account is also not documented in the card pages. Trustpilot reviewers mention bank-transfer withdrawals handled through support, with no published fee or minimum-balance rule. Treat any withdrawal as a process you will need to raise with the help desk rather than a button you can press from the app.

Paying with the Bitstack card every day

The physical card is a Visa Classic, which means it works at any point-of-sale terminal that accepts Visa, including contactless and chip-and-PIN. The published limits (5 000 EUR per month on card payments, 200 EUR per week and 1 000 EUR per month on ATM withdrawals) are the only controls you have, and you cannot change them from the app.

Mobile wallets are where Bitstack is mid-rollout. Apple Pay is live, having been added on 30 June 2026 with app version 3.10.0. Google Pay is described as in development and not yet available. The iOS app has a France App Store rating of 4.79 from 11 152 ratings, which is a strong score for a French finance app. The Google Play rating was not read for this review.

There is no virtual card available yet, although it is on the roadmap. If your main use case is online checkout, you will be using the physical card for now, and you will need a 3-D Secure confirmation on most online payments because Bitstack’s payment flow uses Visa Secure.

A small but useful feature is Stackback, which is the cashback-style reward. Base rate with no opt-in: 0.1% on Standard and 0.15% on Plus, paid in bitcoin with a minimum of 1 satoshi. Boosted rate: up to 1% on Standard and up to 1.5% on Plus if you have set up automatic savings (recurring buys or round-ups), and the cap is the previous month’s savings, after which it falls back to the base rate. From 10 August 2026, round-ups have counted toward the Stackback tier. Excluded categories are P2P transfers and top-ups, ATM withdrawals, gambling and cash equivalents, loan repayments, government payments, and some securities purchases. The list is similar to what other cards exclude, but the categories are not exhaustive, so for any specific merchant it is worth testing before relying on the boosted rate.

If something goes wrong with a payment, the documented process is: optionally freeze the card in the app first, then call +33 9 69 32 00 61 to register the opposition (the line tells the agent that the card was issued by BPCE), then call +33 9 69 39 03 49 to open a contestation case handled by BPCE. The window for raising a dispute is 13 months from the payment settlement date, which is generous and matches the EU standard for card disputes.

What can go wrong: risks and complaints

Bitstack is a custodial service, so the first risk is the standard custodian risk: you do not hold the private keys, and your balance is only as safe as Bitstack, its banking partners, and the Xpollens e-money infrastructure. There is no built-in insurance on the funds, and the e-money safeguarding rules that apply to Xpollens are not the same as deposit guarantee schemes. That is a normal state of affairs for a regulated European e-money setup, but it is worth being clear that if Bitstack or Xpollens were to fail, the cash account balance would be a claim in an insolvency rather than a guaranteed deposit.

The corporate picture is reassuring on paper. Bitstack Digital Assets SAS is registered at the Aix-en-Provence trade register under number 899 125 090, with an office in Meyreuil, France. It is registered as a crypto-asset service provider with the AMF under number A2025-003, and operates as an agent of Xpollens, an electronic money institution authorised by the ACPR. The card itself is issued by BPCE (Banque Populaire Caisse d’Épargne), one of the largest banking groups in France. This is a properly licensed stack, not an offshore operation.

On the user-experience side, the Trustpilot score is 4.3 out of 5 from 1 417 reviews, which is strong. The themes that show up in the negative reviews are familiar from the category: delays in card delivery, slow support responses, slow or rejected identity verification, low limits, and some merchants declining the card. None of these are unique to Bitstack, and the regulatory setup means a complaint about a frozen account is likely to be about Bitstack’s KYC process rather than a payment failure.

The most likely real-world friction for a prospective user is the eligibility wall. If you are not a French resident, you cannot get the card today. If you are a French resident whose account does not yet qualify, you will see the order option appear in the Cash tab only once Bitstack has decided you can have it. That is a smaller surface for things to go wrong than a fully open sign-up, but it also means you cannot self-serve the application.

The second likely friction is the spend caps. The 5 000 EUR per month card limit, the 200 EUR per week ATM cap, and the 1 000 EUR per month international payment limit on Standard are tight if you travel or run business expenses through the card. The 3 000 EUR per month international cap on Plus is still tight.

The third is the funding surface. Because the card spends from a euro cash account that you top up by selling bitcoin (or by paying a 0.70% Apple Pay or Google Pay deposit fee), there is no direct stablecoin or altcoin top-up path described on the public pages. If your crypto is not in bitcoin, the friction of getting it onto the card is higher than at a multi-coin competitor.

What to take instead

I will keep this short because each alternative has its own review to read. The point is to show you what changes if the eligibility or the funding model does not fit.

The International Visa Card is a US-issued Platinum Visa that holds USD and converts at the Visa rate plus a 2% FX fee, with no fee on USD spending and free deposits of any kind, including USDC and USDT into a USD account. It is essentially a stablecoin-to-USD debit card with a small annual fee on the Pro and Max plans. The eligibility list is strict: residents of Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam are excluded, and purchases are blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. If you are in an EU country and want a US-dollar card without the Bitstack residency wall, this is the closer alternative, but the cost line is worse on FX.

UNi Card is a multicurrency Mastercard on the UNi.Global account, with no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, conversions at live OTC rates, and up to 3% in spend-to-earn rewards. The card is Mastercard rather than Visa, the KYC scope and funding flow are not detailed on the public card pages, and the headline rewards rate is competitive with Bitstack’s boosted Stackback.

Morse is a self-custody Visa prepaid card that holds a Morse Balance in any currency, with zero FX markup, real-time Visa exchange rates, and free online and contactless payments. The wallet is self-custodial and is available in over 140 countries, but the card itself is in a closed beta in a long list of countries (including the UK, Switzerland, Singapore, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Thailand, Türkiye, Serbia, Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man, Cape Verde, American Samoa and Western Sahara), and the public card page points to a cardholder agreement for fee details that I did not fully read. If you are outside France and want a self-custody option, Morse is the most direct alternative, but only if you are in a supported country.

The honest summary is that none of the three alternatives lines up perfectly with Bitstack’s niche of bitcoin-to-euro for French residents. The International Visa Card is closer on the stablecoin-to-fiat model, UNi Card is closer on the multicurrency Mastercard side, and Morse is closer on the self-custody side. If Bitstack’s residency rule is a blocker, Morse is the most relevant alternative; if the residency rule is fine but you want a USD card, the International Visa Card is the most relevant alternative.

Who I would recommend the Bitstack card to

If you are a French resident who already saves in bitcoin inside Bitstack and wants a clean, regulated way to convert some of it to euros for daily spending, the Bitstack card is a sensible fit. The fee line is friendly for modest monthly spend, the FX-free band of 1 000 EUR a month covers most short trips, the Stackback rewards are a small bonus if you have automatic savings set up, and the corporate stack (Bitstack Digital Assets SAS, AMF registration, Xpollens as e-money agent, BPCE as card issuer) is the kind of regulated plumbing that I would want to see in a French payment product.

If you live outside France, including in other EU countries that are on the waitlist, the card is not for you today. The waitlist is real, and even the help-centre wording suggests gradual rather than imminent expansion. If your main crypto holding is not bitcoin, the lack of a published multi-coin deposit flow is a real friction. If you want a virtual card, an unlimited-spend card, or a card that pays in a non-euro currency from the issuer side, Bitstack is the wrong choice.

The single most important thing to check before you commit is whether your use case is “spend modest euros from bitcoin savings in France” or “spend widely across borders and currencies from a multi-coin balance.” If it is the first, Bitstack works. If it is the second, the alternatives above will fit better.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Bitstack card?

The Bitstack card is a physical Visa Classic debit card that spends euros from a Bitstack cash account. You fund the cash account by selling bitcoin inside the Bitstack app, and the card draws down that euro balance when you pay. The card is issued by BPCE and the e-money side is run through Xpollens, with Bitstack Digital Assets SAS acting as the crypto-asset service provider registered with the AMF under A2025-003.

How does the Bitstack card work?

You buy bitcoin in the Bitstack app, sell some of it into the cash account when you want to spend, and the card then pays merchants in euros from that balance. Foreign-currency payments are converted at the Visa rate, with no Bitstack FX fee on the first 1 000 EUR of cross-border spend per month, and about 1% on the excess.

Is Bitstack a bank?

No. Bitstack is a crypto-asset service provider registered with the French AMF, and it operates as an agent of Xpollens, an electronic money institution supervised by the ACPR. The card itself is issued by BPCE, a French banking group. Bitstack does not take deposits and does not offer current-account services.

Who owns Bitstack?

Bitstack is operated by Bitstack Digital Assets SAS, a French société par actions simplifiée registered at the Aix-en-Provence trade register under number 899 125 090, with an office in Meyreuil, France. The card-issuing partner is BPCE and the e-money partner is Xpollens.

Is the Bitstack card available in my country?

At the time of writing, the card is available exclusively to residents of France, including the overseas territories. Other EU countries appear on a waitlist, and the order option in the app’s Cash tab appears only once your account qualifies. Residence is the rule that matters; citizenship is not part of the published eligibility criteria.

How do I apply for the Bitstack card?

You apply inside the Bitstack app. Once your account qualifies, you open the Cash tab, choose to order the card, pick a PIN, enter a French delivery address, see the 9.99 EUR price plus delivery, and pay from the cash account, a bank card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. Production usually starts the day after confirmation.

Does the Bitstack card require KYC?

Bitstack does not publish a list of KYC documents on the card pages, and the public help articles do not state the minimum age or the proof of address that will be requested. A Trustpilot reviewer from July 2026 reported a slow identity-verification process that ended in rejection, with Bitstack replying that the decision follows regulatory requirements.

How do I top up the Bitstack card?

You top up the cash account by selling bitcoin in the Bitstack app or by depositing from a bank card via Apple Pay or Google Pay, with a 0.70% fee on the Apple Pay and Google Pay route. The minimum top-up amount is not stated on the public pages, and the help centre does not list deposit addresses or networks for external bitcoin transfers.

Is the Bitstack card free?

The card itself costs 9.99 EUR plus a variable delivery fee, and there is no monthly subscription on the Standard plan. Foreign-currency spending is free up to 1 000 EUR a month, ATM withdrawals are free up to 200 EUR or 5 per month, and the all-in cost of a euro payment is essentially the bitcoin-to-euro spread you paid when you sold bitcoin to fund the cash account.

Is the Bitstack card safe?

Bitstack operates as a registered French crypto-asset service provider, holds customer funds through a regulated e-money institution, and has the card issued by BPCE. The standard custodial risks apply, there is no built-in insurance on balances, and Trustpilot shows a 4.3/5 score from 1 417 reviews, with typical complaints about delivery, support and identity-verification timelines rather than lost funds.

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