The virtual card that quietly lost its plastic

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Bit.Store is, at its core, a virtual crypto card: you create it in an app, load it from cryptocurrency, and spend the resulting balance through a mobile wallet. That is the whole product, and on that narrow promise it works. What makes it hard to recommend is everything around the promise. The physical card was discontinued in March 2026 after a regulatory event at the issuer, the company behind it is registered in Lithuania as a virtual-currency exchange rather than as a bank or an e-money institution, and third-party reporting of user complaints runs to suspensions of virtual cards and frozen balances. The costs are published only in fragments, and several of the numbers you would need to plan a budget simply are not there.

I scored it 5.0 out of 10. That is not a zero, and I want to be fair about why it is not lower: topping up is straightforward, a wide range of coins is accepted, and if your needs are narrow — a small virtual card for subscriptions and online spending, funded with crypto you already hold — the shape of the thing matches the job. It is not higher because the trust and compliance groundwork is thin in exactly the places that matter when your money sits with a provider rather than with you.

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

Before the sections, one framing point that saves you time later. Most of the hard facts about Bit.Store are not on the card’s own public pages. The card does not publish a complete fee schedule, a full country eligibility list, its identity verification requirements, or the name of the institution that issues the virtual card. What you will find instead — on third-party card comparison sites and crypto news outlets — is a set of figures that may or may not still be current. I have marked those as unofficial throughout, and I have said plainly where the card simply does not state something. Where the card is silent, treat any number you see elsewhere as something to confirm at signup rather than as a promise.

Who they will give you the card

The short answer is: from what third parties report, most of the world is listed as eligible, and eight named countries are not. Bit.Store’s own public pages do not publish a full list of countries whose applicants are accepted, so I cannot tell you authoritatively who qualifies — only what has been reported.

Unofficial reporting, dated August 2026, lists 54 countries as available and names these as restricted: Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and the United States. That list matters in two different ways depending on where you are. Russia and Belarus sit inside the restricted group, which means residents of those two countries are described as excluded rather than merely limited. Everyone else on the list faces a flat refusal, including the United States, which is broader than you might expect from a crypto card.

What the listing does not do is tell you how the rule is applied. It says nothing about citizenship versus residence — whether the screen follows your passport, your address, or both. That distinction is not a technicality. Nationality is recorded and screened separately from residence in this industry, because sanctions screening and issuer risk policy are applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as to country of address. A card provider can therefore refuse you on your passport even from an address in an eligible country. If your situation is anything other than straightforward, that is a question worth asking before you upload anything.

One practical thing to keep in mind while you read the rest of this page: an exclusion list is not the same as a licence. Being on the available list tells you the provider will try to onboard you; it does not tell you that a regulated institution stands behind the balance.

How to get it

The signup process itself is not documented on the card’s public pages — the verification requirements, the documents needed, the review time, all of it is not stated. What has been reported is thin but worth knowing.

Unofficial reporting describes a “Simple KYC verification” step on the virtual card page. At launch in 2023 the product was promoted as “KYC free”. Those two statements sit awkwardly together, and I would not build a plan on either without checking the current signup flow for yourself. The minimum age is also reported inconsistently: 18+ in the FAQ, 16+ in the User Agreement. When a provider publishes two different ages, assume the higher one applies until you see otherwise.

On the card itself: it is virtual, and unofficial reporting says you get a virtual Visa or a virtual Mastercard depending on which card type you pick. The physical card, when it existed, was a Mastercard issued through Paytend. At the 2023 launch it was a prepaid Mastercard virtual card.

What does that mean practically? You get card numbers in an app, you add them to Apple Pay or Google Pay, and you do not wait for anything to arrive in the post. There is no delivery process to think about because there is no physical card — it was discontinued in March 2026.

The identification checks themselves are not stated in terms of what you must upload. For context on what is normally required: in the EU, customer due diligence normally covers name, address, date of birth, nationality and identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and whether you are a politically exposed person. In the US, the customer identification programme requires name, date of birth, address and an identification number. If due diligence cannot be completed, EU rules require the institution to refrain from the transaction or the relationship, and where necessary to end it — which is why accounts get closed or frozen pending documents. Expect to hand over identity documents, and expect the application to stall rather than to be politely declined if something is missing.

What it really costs: Fees and limits

This is the weakest part of the picture, and the honest reason is that Bit.Store does not publish a complete fee schedule. What follows is assembled from unofficial reporting and from launch-era coverage, and I would treat every number as a starting point for your own calculation rather than as a fixed price.

The shape of that table is itself informative. Issuance being free and the annual fee being zero is a real, if small, positive. The monthly fee of $1 comes from a previously published schedule, which means it may no longer be the operative number. And the top-up fee has moved: it was 1.5% and is now 2.5%. A provider that raises a core fee by two thirds is telling you something about where its margins are.

The FX and purchase fees are the line that should make you pause before you plan a budget, because there is no complete public schedule. Depending on which card type you choose, the currency conversion cost differs — and you will not find the number in advance. Launch-era coverage also mentioned no purchase fees on transactions up to USD 10,000, which is a historical, unofficial claim about a past version of the product; I would not treat it as current.

Let me walk through three ordinary payments to make the arithmetic visible, using the reported rates and noting where a figure is missing.

A subscription you pay monthly. Say the service bills $10. The reported figure suggests no purchase fee below a threshold that was once USD 10,000 (an unofficial, historical claim), and the top-up fee of 2.5% is charged when you load, not when you spend. If you load exactly $10, the top-up fee costs you about $0.25. There is no FX element if the service bills in dollars. This is the case the product is genuinely good at.

An online purchase in a currency you do not hold. Here the cost stops being knowable in advance. The card converts, and the FX and purchase fee depends on your card type, with no published table. If the conversion markup is, say, 2% — a number I am inventing to show the shape of the problem, not one the card states — then a $50 purchase carries about $1 of hidden cost on top of whatever the merchant charges. You would be discovering that rate at the moment of payment, not at signup.

Anything at all, plus a failed payment. A declined authorisation may leave a hold on your funds that persists for several days, typically up to seven. Combined with a 2.5% top-up fee, a payment that fails after you have pre-funded the balance is the scenario where the economics quietly turn against you.

How to Top up

Topping up is the part of the product with the clearest path, and it is where the score is highest. Unofficial reporting says 10+ cryptocurrencies are accepted, with BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC specifically named, and that the crypto is converted into the card balance as you load it.

The reported fee is 2.5%. A minimum top-up of $15 appeared in a previously published flow (an unofficial figure, not confirmed by the card), and you should confirm the current minimum at checkout rather than assuming it still holds. Fiat top-up routes are not stated.

Now the part that catches people out, and I want to be direct about it because it is where money actually disappears: the networks are not named. When a provider does not tell you which blockchains you can deposit on, you are guessing. And in this category, guessing costs real money.

Here is why. Crypto transfers are essentially irreversible — the network cannot freeze or return funds. A deposit sent on a network the provider does not support, or sent to an address belonging to a different network, can be lost outright or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. Meanwhile the mechanics differ by chain: ERC-20 is the Ethereum token standard, and gas is paid only in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT and no ETH cannot send. Tron prices transactions in bandwidth and energy, often burning TRX. Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option on that network today. If the provider supports USDT on Ethereum but you send USDT on Tron, or send it without leaving ETH for gas, the deposit does not arrive.

So the practical rule is: send a test amount first, confirm it has landed, and only then send the rest. It sounds obvious. It is the single most common way people lose money with cards like this.

One more thing about stablecoins worth knowing, since USDT and USDC are the two most likely things you will load. Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC are US-dollar-pegged, and the BIS put roughly 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in these two as of July 2025. Circle says USDC is redeemable 1:1 for USD and fully backed by cash and cash equivalents, mostly in an SEC-registered government money market fund, with monthly reserve attestations. But “stablecoin” is a description of intent, not a guarantee: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, and USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. Loading a card with a stablecoin means taking a small, continuous risk that the peg moves against you at the moment you convert.

Paying with it every day

Day-to-day use is competent and unremarkable, which is roughly what you want from a payment card. Apple Pay and Google Pay have been advertised since launch, though whether they work for you can depend on the BIN, your device region and your wallet configuration. That last point catches people: a card can be perfectly valid and still refuse to enrol in a mobile wallet on a particular device.

What you cannot do is withdraw cash. There is no ATM function for a virtual card, so if cash is part of your life this is not a tool for it.

Some of the invisible machinery is worth understanding, because it explains the payments that fail for reasons that have nothing to do with your balance. When you pay, the merchant’s terminal looks up the BIN — the 6 or 8 digit issuer identification number at the front of your card number — to see which institution and country issued the card, and may apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from your billing address. This is precisely why a card issued in one country can look “foreign” to a shop in another. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs outright because the lookup reveals the card type and the issuer country.

Address verification makes this worse for foreign cards. The AVS system compares the numeric parts of the billing address the buyer typed against the issuer’s records, and it is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK. It is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which itself causes declines. Online payments add 3-D Secure, where the issuer assesses risk and either approves frictionlessly or challenges you with a one-time code or biometric; Visa’s brand is Visa Secure, Mastercard’s is Identity Check. Some issuers restrict tokenised numbers for specific channels — blocking the wallet token on magnetic-stripe, phone or website use.

Merchant categories are another quiet gate. A four-digit merchant category code classifies each business, and gambling sits under MCC 7995. Issuers block it on specific cards by policy rather than by law, and the blocked list varies by issuer — so a merchant category that works on one crypto card and fails on another is entirely normal. The specific blocked categories for Bit.Store are not stated.

Two further gaps. Rewards are not stated, so assume there are none unless you see otherwise. And the app, disputes and replacements are not described: if a transaction goes wrong, the replacement and dispute fees are not publicly itemised, so you have no published basis for what a chargeback will cost you or how long it will take. On dispute rights generally — a chargeback is a refund ordered by the issuer with a reason code such as fraud, duplicate billing or goods not received. Consumer reversal rights differ by country, and prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed.

What can go wrong

This is where the review turns serious, and where the 2/10 on reliability comes from.

The company is not a bank. Bitstore Europe UAB, registered in Lithuania with company number 306465386, was registered in 2024 as a virtual-currency exchange and depository-wallet operator. As of August 2026 it holds no bank or e-money institution licence and does not appear in the Bank of Lithuania’s EMI register. The former physical card was issued by Paytend Europe UAB. The issuer of the current virtual card is not publicly named.

That distinction is not pedantry. An electronic money institution in the EU can issue e-money, payment cards and wallets, but it cannot lend, and it must safeguard customer funds — segregating them in dedicated accounts or insuring them. Such funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by deposit guarantee schemes. If your provider is not one of those institutions, then a different set of protections, or a thinner one, is what stands between your balance and an insolvency. And the product may depend on two licences rather than one: MiCA covers the crypto side (custody, exchange, transfer) while the card itself is a payment service regulated separately.

Your money is held for you, not by you. The card is custodial — custody by Cobo is advertised. With a custodial wallet, the provider holds the credentials, so you must trust the provider completely. That is a different position from a self-custody-linked card, where funds stay in your own wallet until the moment of payment and you bear sole responsibility for key loss, phishing and malware that swaps copied addresses. Custodial platforms have a documented history of failure: Mt. Gox reported about US$350 million stolen across 2011–2014, Coincheck about US$400 million in 2018, and the Ronin Network US$625 million in 2022. An extra two-factor authentication layer was mentioned at the 2023 launch; there is no published statement of the current security posture.

The physical card is gone. It was discontinued in March 2026 following a regulatory event at the issuer, and no official incident notice was found. This is the kind of event that illustrates a structural feature of the category: Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves — they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. A licence sits above the product, and it can be pulled.

Users report suspensions and blocked balances. Reporting from late 2024 through 2025 describes virtual cards suspended for “maintenance”, balances that were unspendable or unwithdrawable, monthly deductions continuing, and slow support. Some users recovered their funds; others were blocked for months. Trustpilot shows 1.8 out of 5 from 23 reviews, with 82% one-star, with the same themes: suspended virtual cards, blocked balances, continued monthly deductions, slow support. That is a small sample and not a statistically meaningful verdict on anything — but a 1.8 average across 23 independent reviews is not noise either. Where support itself is slow, the recovery path for a frozen balance is exactly what you need and exactly what you would struggle to get.

Fees can move without much warning. The top-up fee went from 1.5% to 2.5%. A provider that is not an EMI is not obviously bound by the same disclosure and conduct expectations as one, and the FX fee schedule is not published at all.

Stablecoins are not censorship-proof, and transfers are final. Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity. Blockchain transfers do not reverse. Both facts cut against you if you are the one affected, and they are reasons to keep only what you can afford to have unavailable on a given day.

If you want a general check on the provider rather than just on this card: ESMA maintains an interim register of authorised crypto-asset service providers, white papers and non-compliant entities, and it is worth looking there before you fund an account.

What to take instead

None of the alternatives below is unambiguously safer — they have their own gaps, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But each answers the “who is behind this” question differently, and that is the axis on which Bit.Store is weakest.

CardFlow — scored 4.9/10. Aimed explicitly at Nigeria (“Nigeria’s smartest fintech card platform”) and at “Nigerians and global users”, with no country list and no exclusions stated. The card is a virtual USD Mastercard created in minutes. Creating a virtual card is described as completely free; the monthly fee is not stated. Funding is Bitcoin, USDT, ETH or a Naira bank transfer, with networks not stated. Fees and rewards not stated. Its appeal is speed and a clearly stated home market; its weakness is the same thinness of published detail.

HyperCard — scored 4.7/10. Official pages state no country list at all; the App Store listing says the card works in “more than 176 countries”, which is a statement about acceptance rather than about eligibility — a distinction worth holding on to throughout this category. It is a prepaid card with the balance in USD or EUR, funded by depositing crypto such as USDT, BTC or ETH in the app and converting to USD or EUR on the card. Networks are not stated, and the App Store page lists no fees, which is silence rather than a promise of zero.

Card.fi — scored 6.6/10, the highest of the four, and the one with the most published detail. Cards ship to “200+ countries”, and its terms bar residents of, or orders from, a country subject to sanctions that would prohibit the service. It offers Virtual Classic and Virtual Premium, physical Classic and Premium, and a metal option, with every physical order including a virtual card, issued under licence from the relevant card schemes. Costs are one-off: Virtual Classic $49, Virtual Premium $249, with no monthly, annual, inactivity or minimum-balance fee. The recurring costs are explicit — top-up 1.5% plus $1.00 on Classic and 1% on Premium, FX fee 3.5% on Classic and 2.5% on Premium, with the conversion fee shown before each top-up. Funding covers 32 coins across 5 networks (Ethereum, Base, BNB Chain, Solana, Kaanch) with a deposit address per card, converted at market rate on arrival; sending on the wrong chain risks permanent loss. Rewards are cashback on spending only: 0.8% on Classic capped at 10 USDT a month, 1% on Premium, and 1.2% or 2% on Metal depending on cap tier, with a headline 10% at coffee shops capped at 10 USDT a month.

The comparison worth drawing is this. Card.fi charges more upfront and less on the way in: 1.5% plus $1.00 to top up a Classic card, versus 2.5% flat, and it tells you the FX fee before you commit. Bit.Store charges nothing to issue a card and then takes 2.5% on every top-up with no published FX table. If you load in small amounts repeatedly, the difference compounds quickly.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend this card, cautiously, to exactly one kind of person: someone who already holds crypto, needs a small virtual card number for online payments and subscriptions, and can comfortably lose the balance if it is frozen for a few months. Under those conditions it is a reasonable tool. Ten-plus coins, a 2.5% top-up fee, mobile wallet support, no issuance cost and no annual fee — that is a workable setup for someone who treats the balance as spending money rather than as savings.

I would not recommend it if any of the following are true of you:

• You need cash. There is no ATM function.
• You need to know what a payment will cost before you make it. The FX and purchase fee schedule is not published, and depends on which card type you hold.
• You live in or hold citizenship from a restricted country, or your status is unusual. Eight countries are named as excluded and there is no published statement of how the rule treats citizenship versus residence.
• You are putting meaningful money in. This is not a bank, not an e-money institution, and not in the EMI register. Your funds sit with a custodial provider.
• You cannot tolerate a frozen balance with slow support. That is the most common complaint theme in the reporting.
• You need to know who stands behind the card. The virtual issuer is not publicly named.

The honest summary is this: Bit.Store is a narrow, cheap, functional product attached to an unsettled operator, and the two halves are moving at different speeds. The card half works. The regulatory half is still being written. If your money is spending money, that is an acceptable trade. If it is anything else, put your trust in an institution whose licence you can look up.

Frequently asked questions

What is Bit.Store card?

Bit.Store is a virtual crypto payment card. You create a card number in its app, load it from cryptocurrency, and spend the resulting balance through Apple Pay or Google Pay. Unofficial reporting names BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC among 10+ accepted coins. There is no physical card — the plastic version was discontinued in March 2026 after a regulatory event at its issuer, leaving a virtual-only product.

How does Bit.Store card work?

It works as a prepaid card. You convert or top up a balance from crypto, and the card spends only that balance, so it cannot overdraw. Behind the scenes, a card network routes the payment and an issuer holds the programme, while Bit.Store acts mainly as the front end you interact with. Note that the balance is custodial — custody by Cobo is advertised — so the provider, not you, holds the credentials.

Is Bit.Store a bank?

No. The operator, Bitstore Europe UAB in Lithuania (company number 306465386), was registered in 2024 as a virtual-currency exchange and depository-wallet operator. As of August 2026 it holds no bank or e-money institution licence and is not in the Bank of Lithuania’s EMI register. The current virtual card issuer is not publicly named either, which is the question to ask if the balance matters to you.

Is Bit.Store card available in my country?

Unofficial reporting lists 54 countries as available and eight as restricted: Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Syria and the United States. The card does not publish a complete applicant-country list, and the reporting does not explain whether eligibility follows your citizenship, your residence, or both. Check with the provider before uploading documents if your situation is not straightforward.

Does Bit.Store card require KYC?

Reported as “Simple KYC verification” on the virtual card page, while the 2023 launch described the card as KYC free. The current requirement is not stated on the public pages. The minimum age is also inconsistent — 18+ in the FAQ and 16+ in the User Agreement. In the EU, customer due diligence normally covers name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documents, sanctions screening and politically-exposed-person status.

How much does Bit.Store cost?

Issuance is reported as free, with a $1 monthly fee and $0 annual on a previously published schedule (unofficial, not confirmed by the card). The top-up fee is 2.5%, up from 1.5%. FX and purchase fees depend on your card type and there is no complete public schedule, which is the number you will most want and the one least available. Launch-era coverage mentioned no purchase fees under USD 10,000, but that is an unofficial, historical claim about the product as it was.

How do I top up the Bit.Store card?

You send cryptocurrency and it is converted into your card balance on loading. Ten-plus coins are accepted, with BTC, ETH, USDT and USDC named, and the fee is reported at 2.5% with a $15 minimum in a previously published flow (unofficial, not confirmed by the card). The supported networks are not stated anywhere I could find, so send a small test amount first — a transfer on an unsupported network, or without ETH for gas on Ethereum, can be lost permanently.

Is Bit.Store card safe?

That depends on what you mean. The operator is not a bank or an e-money institution, so the usual deposit protections do not apply, and your balance is custodial. Reported Trustpilot standing is 1.8 out of 5 from 23 reviews, with themes of suspended cards, blocked balances and slow support. Bitcoin itself is unforgiving: transfers are irreversible, so a mistake or a compromised wallet is not recoverable by the network.

Can I use Bit.Store card in Apple Pay?

It is advertised as supporting Apple Pay and Google Pay since launch, and Apple Pay is the normal way to use this card day to day since there is no plastic. Whether enrolment works can depend on the BIN, your device region and your wallet settings, so a card that is perfectly valid can still refuse to add. Apple Pay stores a device-specific number in the Secure Element, and each payment uses a one-time dynamic code, so the card number itself is not exposed to Apple.

Is Bit.Store card worth it?

For someone who already holds crypto and wants a small virtual number for subscriptions and online spending, with a balance they could afford to have frozen, the economics are defensible: no issuance fee, no annual fee, 2.5% per top-up. For anyone who needs cash, needs predictable FX costs, or is putting real money in, the missing fee schedule and the unresolved licensing question make it hard to recommend. Compare the top-up rate against Card.fi, at 1.5% plus $1.00 on Classic.

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