The Pay card no longer issues new cards — here is what that means for you

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

If you are weighing whether to get a crypto payment card because an ordinary bank card is awkward for you — a blocked account, a country your bank will not serve, a need for a card that works online — then the name Pay probably came up in your search. It did for years, and it still will. That is the problem. This page is about a card programme that no longer issues new cards, and about what that means if you are the person holding one.

Here is the short version before the detail. The Pay card was a prepaid card inside a DeFi payments wallet app, and the route that supplied those cards has been switched off since December 2022. The app itself last shipped a version in February 2023. My score for it, out of ten, is 1.8 — but that number is mostly a description of a dead product rather than a verdict on a live one, and you should read the sections below before you take it at face value.

The review covers what happened to the programme and why, what you should do if you already hold the card, what can go wrong on the way out, what to take instead, and who I would actually recommend this to.

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

Verdict: 1.8 out of 10, and the score is mostly about closure

Pay is not a card you can apply for today. The programme is closed. Buying prepaid cards through Wyre was disabled on 2022-12-05 until further notice, and that notice never came. The last version of the app, 1.2.0, dates from 2023-02-18. So the honest answer to “should I get a Pay card?” is that the question has moved on: you cannot get one, and the interesting question is now what to do with the one you already have.

That said, you asked for a score, and here it is with the reasons attached rather than a bare number.

Two things about that table deserve a sentence each, because they change how you should read it.

First, the zero for “who can get it” and the zero for “everyday use” are not the same kind of zero. One is a closure — you cannot sign up because the door is shut. The other is a disclosure gap: even the pages that survive say nothing about physical delivery, so nobody can tell you from the record whether the old card ever came in the post. I could not find the issuer named anywhere. If you are holding one of these cards, that matters, and I will come back to it.

Second, the 5 out of 10 for cost looks like generosity. It is not. It is the absence of bad information rather than the presence of good: the app is free to download, and the single in-app purchase listed is “Account on Gnosis Chain” at GBP 0.99. What the card itself cost in fees is never stated anywhere in the public pages.

Who does this suit? Honestly, nobody seeking a new card today. If you read this page because you were planning to apply, stop here and read the alternatives section instead — there are live programmes with disclosed countries, disclosed fees and disclosed issuer arrangements.

And who does it not suit? It suits nobody as a choice. But it does suit one group by accident, and I want to be precise about this rather than flattering: holders of the old Card Pay wallet. That is you if you ever installed the app, loaded crypto into it, and were told at some point that a card was coming. Your situation is a different question from a buyer’s, and it deserves its own answer, so I have given it one below.

What happened to the programme

Here is the timeline, because a closed card usually closes in stages and each stage tells you something about where you stand.

• 2022-12-05, version 1.1.12: prepaid card purchases through Wyre are disabled “until further notice”. That is the moment new cards stopped being obtainable through the app.
• 2023-02-18, version 1.2.0: the last app release recorded.
• News reports, unofficial as to this card: MetaMask stopped supporting Wyre in January 2023 as Wyre was reportedly closing (Benzinga), and Wyre’s wind-down was announced in June 2023 (The Block). Nothing on Cardstack’s own pages links the company to these reports, so treat the connection as reported rather than confirmed by the card itself.

Read those two dates together and the shape of it is plain. The supply route was cut in December 2022 and never reopened; the app stopped being maintained a couple of months later; the partner that supplied the cards then wound down during 2023. This is not a card that had a bad year. It is a card whose distribution partner disappeared.

The app store listing itself still describes the product in the present tense, which is where most confusion comes from. It lists “Manage your prepaid cards” in a DeFi payments wallet, and the network and currency of the card are not stated anywhere. Version notes mention claiming “rewards” individually as of version 1.1.13, but no rate is given. Tiers are not stated. Currencies are not stated. Delivery is not stated — the listing talks about prepaid cards inside the wallet and never mentions a physical card arriving in the post.

Who was eligible is not stated. What identity verification involved is not stated. There is no published list of countries this card was for, which means if you are searching for “is Pay card available in {country}” you are not going to find an answer from the card itself. There never was one on the public pages, as far as they go.

On the app: it requires iOS 13.0+, macOS 11.0+ on Apple M1 or later, and visionOS 1.0+. The UK App Store rating is 5.0 out of 5 from 3 ratings, read on 2026-10-20. Three ratings is not a reputation; it is almost nobody. The Google Play situation is not stated.

Let me say once, plainly, the thing that governs the rest of this page: the card’s own public pages do not tell us who qualified, what the fees were, how top-ups worked, what limits applied, whether cash withdrawal existed, how you withdraw a card balance, or what happens to a balance after closure. Not stated. If someone — including me — appears to fill those gaps, they are guessing, or they are quoting a third-party site, and I will label it when I do.

If you already have the card

This is the section I would most like to be wrong about, because it is the one where you are exposed. Let me take your likely questions in the order you would ask them.

Can I still use the card in a shop? I cannot tell you, and neither can the public record. Everyday use scores zero because cards are no longer issued through the app and physical delivery is not mentioned. Your card may well continue to work against whatever balance remains on it, or it may already have stopped. The honest procedure is the boring one: try a small online payment, see what happens, and if it declines, treat the balance as if it is already gone and act accordingly.

Can I top it up? Top-up options are not stated, and with the programme closed there is no funding route published. The only purchase the listing ever contained is “Account on Gnosis Chain” at GBP 0.99 — which, as the name suggests, is an on-chain account, not card funding. One thing to know: Polygon was removed from the app in version 1.1.13. If you previously used that network, an existing balance or token there is now outside anything the app supports.

How do I withdraw the money? This is the one that will keep me up, so I will be blunt: the card’s pages say nothing about withdrawing a card balance, and nothing about what happens to a balance after closure. There is no published procedure. There is no published deadline. That is a real finding, not an omission on my part. What you have is indirect — version notes for 1.0.11 mention bug fixes for “Reward withdrawal”, and 1.1.13 says each reward is claimed individually — which tells you rewards existed and could be claimed, and tells you nothing whatsoever about cashing out a card balance.

So what do you actually do? In order:

• Contact the developer. The App Store names CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD. as the developer, and the Cardstack homepage footer names the Cardstack Foundation. Neither is the issuer — the issuer is not stated — so you are contacting the app’s operator, not necessarily the institution holding your money. That distinction matters legally and practically.
• Ask the app’s only official routes. The App Store listing links no support page at all: only the developer site cardstack.com and a privacy policy. If you get no answer there, there is no published escalation path.
• Get your transaction records. Screenshots of balances, transaction history, and the dates on which you used the card are what any future claim, complaint or regulatory route would be built on.
• Treat the balance as at risk. I am not saying the money is gone. I am saying no document I can find promises it is there.

Where do I complain? Here the finding is stark. There is no Trustpilot page and no Reddit threads for Card Pay; searches on 2026-10-20 returned unrelated companies. That does not mean no one has ever complained. It means there is no public complaint record to point at, and I am not going to invent one.

Disputes are not covered either — not stated. And since prepaid-card coverage varies by scheme and jurisdiction, and should not be assumed, do not plan around getting a chargeback. That is not me talking you out of pursuing something; it is me telling you not to build a plan on an assumption you cannot check.

What can go wrong

Even setting closure aside, several things go wrong here that you should understand rather than discover.

The first is the empty middle. Because the issuer is never named, you cannot tell which institution holds your funds, under which licence, with what safeguarding arrangement. That single missing fact affects everything else: who regulates them, which deposit or e-money protections might apply, who you complain to, and whether the card can be blocked without your involvement. This is not an unusual gap in principle — plenty of programmes are fronts for licensed issuers — but you should not have to guess, and here you do.

The second is that the partner moved first. Prepaid card purchases through Wyre were disabled on 2022-12-05, and Wyre’s wind-down was announced in mid-2023 according to The Block. Cardstack’s pages do not link to these reports, so the linkage is reported rather than confirmed by the card. The pattern to understand is the general one, because it has happened repeatedly in this category: when the card depends on a licence-holding partner, the partner’s failure ends your access even if the app keeps running. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX in November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing every WaveCrest-issued Visa programme.

The third is what a closure normally looks like, because it sets your expectations. Typically there is a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. One closure reported by a secondary source in 2026 had new loads end on 8 July 2026 and spending stop on 8 August 2026 — single source, unconfirmed, and I give it to you only as a shape, not as a fact about Pay. The point is that the sequence usually does not end with someone proactively finding you. It usually ends with a notice you have to be watching for.

The fourth is ordinary card mechanics that will bite any crypto card you might replace this one with, so that you evaluate the alternatives with them in mind:

• A card number starts with a 6- or 8-digit issuer identification number (BIN/IIN) identifying the card-issuing institution; the rest is an account identifier and a check digit. Merchants can look up that BIN to see which institution and country issued the card, and may apply extra scrutiny if the issuer country differs from the billing address. A card issued in one country can look “foreign” to a shop in another.
• Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs precisely because the lookup reveals the card type and issuer country.
• Address Verification Service compares the numeric parts of the billing address with issuer records; it is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines.
• A merchant category code is a four-digit number classifying a business under ISO 18245. MCC 7995 covers gambling — casinos, betting, lotteries — and many issuers block it on specific cards by policy rather than by law, with the blocked list varying by issuer.
• A declined authorisation may leave a hold on funds that can remain for several days, typically up to 7.
• On-chain network fees for your deposit are charged by the blockchain, not the card provider. And a deposit sent on a network the provider does not support can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee, because blockchain transfers are irreversible.

The fifth is the one that deserves the most space, because it is where closed programmes and your money meet. How custody works decides what you can do in a crisis.

• With a custodial wallet the provider holds the credentials, so you must trust the provider completely. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key or seed phrase.
• A seed phrase — typically 12 to 24 words — is an unencrypted form of the private key. Anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend its funds.
• Transfers are typically irreversible, and a stolen key has no built-in recovery: the network cannot freeze or return funds.
• Custodial platforms have a real record of failure: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), and Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022).
• Stablecoins are not censorship-proof. Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity.
• And stablecoins do not always hold their peg. TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022; USDC temporarily lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. “Despite the name, stablecoins are not necessarily stable.”

What the Pay listing says about all of this: self-custody is not stated. The listing does say transactions are confirmed with Touch ID or Face ID. That is a sensible device-level confirmation, and it is worth being precise about what it is worth — it protects a transaction already inside the app. It is not a custody model, and it does not tell you who holds the funds.

What to take instead

Here is where I can be most useful. Three live programmes, each with disclosed countries, disclosed fees and, in two cases, a named issuer. I am not ranking them against Pay — they are not comparable to a closed product. I am giving you what each one actually says about itself, so you can pick.

Some of those numbers deserve comment, because the shape of them matters more than the values.

MetaMask’s cashback has a footnote that the headline number does not convey: 3% applies to the first $10,000 of spend, then it drops to 1%. If you are reading the marketing line rather than the small print, you are reading the wrong number. Its “minimal fee for each transaction” is not quantified on the pages I read, which is exactly the disclosure gap I criticised Pay for — better than Pay’s nothing, but still a gap, and one you should price for yourself.

KAST’s structure is the most predictable and the most expensive. A flat 1%–1.75% FX fee on non-USD spending is the number that will bite a person who holds or earns in a currency other than dollars, and the 1 USD/month inactivity fee after a year is a quiet cost if you forget the account exists. Its membership tiers at 1,000 and 10,000 USD a year are steep for an individual. On the other hand, it is the only one of the three with a published physical card option, an explicit declined-transaction fee, and a stated rule that spending comes from your own balance rather than credit.

TokenPocket’s 1% deposit fee is unusual in that the card says it will be refunded later through rewards or reduced transaction fees. That is a promise about the future made in place of a published table of what the fees will be. Weigh it accordingly.

Two general points about comparing any of these, including against each other, before you commit.

On regulation, a crypto card usually depends on two licences, not one. MiCA, the EU’s markets-in-crypto-assets regulation, took legal effect in June 2023; its rules on asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens applied from 30 June 2024, and the remaining provisions including crypto-asset service provider rules applied from 30 December 2024. Under MiCA, e-money tokens may be issued only by a credit institution or an electronic money institution (Article 48). 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, white papers and non-compliant entities, and users can check a provider there. But the card itself is a payment service, regulated separately under e-money and payment-services law — MiCA covers the crypto side. An electronic money institution can issue e-money, payment cards and wallets but cannot lend, and it must safeguard customer funds by segregating them in dedicated accounts or insuring them; those funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not be covered by deposit guarantee schemes.

On the wallet side, be clear about who holds your keys. With a self-custody-linked card the 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. That is the trade: you get control and you take the risk. If you are choosing between these three, decide that question first and the fees second, because the fee differences here are smaller than the difference between a provider holding your money and you holding it.

And on the mechanics of funding: ERC-20 fees (gas) are paid only in ETH, so a wallet holding USDT but no ETH cannot send. Tron uses bandwidth and energy as internal resource pricing, often burning TRX. Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option. Circle lists USDC as natively supported on 38 networks as of 16 September 2026, including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon PoS, Avalanche, Arbitrum and Stellar, and Tether describes USDT as issued on networks including Ethereum, Tron, Solana, Polygon and Avalanche. Check the network before you send, because a wrong network can cost you the deposit outright.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend the Pay card to nobody as a way to get a card. That is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the actual state of the product, and if you have read this far you know why.

I would recommend it, unprompted, to exactly one kind of reader: someone who already has the card and is looking for permission to stop worrying. Look at the section for holders again, because the only honest advice available is defensive. Screenshot your balance and transaction history today. Contact the developer through the two routes the listing actually provides. Ask one specific question — what happens to remaining balances now that loading and spending are unavailable — and get the answer in writing if you can. Do not assume a chargeback exists, do not assume a claim route exists, and do not assume the money is recoverable just because the app still installs. None of those are things I can verify for you, and all of them are things I would want verified.

For everyone else reading this because they were looking for a card that works where ordinary banking does not: skip this page and go to the comparison table. Pick on the axis you care about — disclosed countries if you are in an unusual jurisdiction, custody if you are holding meaningful value, published fees if you intend to spend monthly — and check the current terms yourself before you fund anything.

If you take one general lesson from the Pay card rather than from the alternatives, let it be this. The most useful information in a card review is often not the fees or the rewards but the disclosure: who issues this, which licence covers it, where the money sits, what happens when the partner goes away. Pay scored 1.8 out of 10 largely because it answered none of those questions, and it cost its users nothing to learn that in advance. Every one of the three alternatives at least answers them.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Pay card?

The Pay card was a prepaid card that lived inside a DeFi payments wallet app rather than being handed out as a standalone product. The app store listing describes it as “Manage your prepaid cards” in a DeFi payments wallet, with the network and currency of the card never stated. The developer is CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD. The app is Card Pay. The programme no longer issues new cards, so today the name survives mainly in older listings and older app versions.

Is Pay a bank?

No — and this is an important distinction for anyone with money still on a Pay card. No bank is named anywhere on the card’s public pages. The developer is CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD., and the Cardstack homepage footer names the Cardstack Foundation, but the issuer is not stated. That matters because a bank deposit and a stored balance in a payment account are protected differently, and an e-money balance is not the same as a deposit.

Who owns Pay?

Ownership is not stated clearly on the card’s own pages. What is stated is the developer name on the App Store, CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD., and a footer on the Cardstack homepage naming the Cardstack Foundation. Beyond that, the partner that supplied prepaid cards was Wyre, whose purchases were disabled on 2022-12-05 and whose wind-down was reported in 2023 — reported, not confirmed by the card’s pages.

Can I still use my Pay card in a shop?

I cannot tell you, and neither can the public record. Everyday use scores zero because cards are no longer issued through the app and physical delivery is never mentioned. Limits, cash withdrawal and acceptance are all not stated. If it matters to you, test with a small online payment first, then treat any remaining balance as at risk while you wait for a written answer from the developer.

How do I withdraw money from my Pay card balance?

There is no published procedure, and that is the finding rather than a gap in my research. The pages say nothing about withdrawing a card balance and nothing about what happens to a balance after closure. Version notes mention “Reward withdrawal” bug fixes in 1.0.11 and say each reward is claimed individually in 1.1.13 — that is about rewards, not your card money. Contact the developer via cardstack.com, the only support route the listing offers.

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

Not stated — for either question. The card’s public pages say nothing about eligibility by country or nationality, and nothing about what identity verification involved. The programme is closed, so no new cards are issued, which means this cannot be tested now. If identity checking is your main concern, judge any alternative on its own published KYC rules instead.

What did the Pay card cost?

Card fees are not stated anywhere, which is why cost scores 5 out of 10 rather than anything more flattering — it is an absence of information, not a good deal. What is stated: the app is free to download, and the only in-app purchase is “Account on Gnosis Chain” at GBP 0.99. That is an on-chain account, not card funding. No fee schedule for the card itself is published.

Was the Pay card safe?

No safety claim can be made for a closed programme, and the custody question is unanswered. Self-custody is not stated; the listing only says transactions are confirmed with Touch ID or Face ID, which protects transactions inside the app but does not say who holds the funds. Holding value with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk — Mt. Gox, Coincheck and Ronin Network are the standard cautionary names here.

Is Pay better than MetaMask, KAST or TokenPocket?

No, and the comparison is not really available. Pay issues no cards, discloses no fees, names no issuer and publishes no eligibility rules. Those three name their issuer or card network, publish their fee structures, and state which countries can sign up — MetaMask across 45 listed countries and territories, KAST by residence list shown at KYC, TokenPocket across European and Asia-Pacific countries by card type.

Can I still install the Pay card app?

The app still appears in Apple’s App Store, which is why the confusion persists — the listing describes the product in the present tense. It requires iOS 13.0+, macOS 11.0+ on Apple M1 or later, or visionOS 1.0+, and shows a 5.0 rating from 3 ratings in the UK store as read on 2026-10-20. The last version was 1.2.0 on 2023-02-18. Installing it will not get you a card.

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