SharPay card: a European Mastercard for crypto users, weighed against its fees and restrictions

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

The SharPay card sits in an unusual corner of the crypto-card market. It is a Mastercard debit card, issued by a licensed electronic money institution in Lithuania, and it spends from a balance you can top up either with euros or with a range of cryptocurrencies. It also supports Apple Pay and Google Pay straight away, and it is available to non-EU residents, which is rarer than it sounds. On the other hand, opening the account is not cheap, loading the card is not cheap, and the foreign-exchange mark-up is in the steep part of the range. So the right question is not “is SharPay a good crypto card” in the abstract, but “is it a good crypto card for someone in your specific situation.”

This page walks through that question from the outside in. I start with a verdict, then look at who can actually get one, what sign-up looks like, what the card costs to run day to day, how you top it up, how it behaves when you pay with it, and what can go wrong. Near the end I compare it with three alternatives and finish with a FAQ for the questions people most often type into a search bar.

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

Verdict

SharPay scores 5.9 out of 10 in my reckoning, and that is after weighing the good and the bad honestly. The card is a real Mastercard that you can add to Apple Pay within minutes of ordering, it is run by a regulated e-money issuer, and it accepts a broad list of cryptocurrencies. Those are real strengths for a specific reader: someone outside the EU who wants a contactless Mastercard that draws on crypto and does not need a European bank account to get it.

The numbers pull the score down. Opening a payment account costs 10 EUR, the physical card is 1 EUR, monthly service is 3 EUR, loading the card from another card is 2 EUR plus 1.99 percent, and the foreign-exchange mark-up is 2.99 percent on the personal card. By the time you stack these, the cost of a 100 EUR coffee abroad can quietly approach 7 to 8 EUR in fees. For a card whose main pitch is “spend your crypto anywhere,” that hurts.

It is a useful card, but it is not an obvious one. It works best for non-EU residents who want a Mastercard with Apple Pay, who do not trade in and out of crypto often, and who can stomach the upfront fees in exchange for a regulated European setup. It works less well for someone in the EU, for someone who travels heavily and pays in many currencies, and for someone who wants cashback.

Who SharPay will give the card to

The headline rule on SharPay’s own pages is short and clear: you must not be a resident of a “restricted or prohibited country.” That is a rule by residence, not by citizenship. The site does not name a separate citizenship check, so the same restriction is meant to catch you whichever passport you hold, as long as you actually live in a listed place.

The list of prohibited places comes from SPEKA Payments Corp, which handles the payment services side of the product, and it includes Russia, Belarus, Crimea, the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Iran, Cuba and Syria, among others. The same document also states that crypto services are not offered to EU residents. EU residents can still use the payment side of the account, but they cannot hold a crypto balance or top up the card with crypto. This is one of those clauses that catches people out, because the card works in the EU for euro spending from a euro balance, just not for the crypto part of the offer.

For everyone else, the eligibility test is the identity documents you provide during sign-up. Non-EU citizens verify with a foreign passport; EU citizens can use a passport or a national ID card. There is no public page that names the minimum age, so assume the standard eighteen-and-over rule that applies to most regulated cards in this category. The exact list of accepted and rejected countries is not stated in the public materials, so the only reliable way to find out is to start the sign-up flow and see what your country dropdown contains.

A practical reading of all this: if you live in Western Europe, North America, the Gulf, much of Southeast Asia, or Latin America outside the prohibited list, you are very likely eligible. Residents of countries on the SPEKA prohibited list are not eligible. EU residents can use the card for euro spending but not for the crypto side, which makes the offer less interesting.

How to get a SharPay card

The sign-up flow lives entirely in the SharPay Wallet app and on the website, and it is a standard “know your customer” path for a regulated European card. You start by registering with a phone number, an email and a password. Then you complete a level 1 verification and, once that passes, a level 2 verification that is required to open a fiat account and order a card.

For level 1, SharPay asks for a passport (full page, good quality; cropped copies are rejected) plus bank statements in English, and a short questionnaire about your expected turnover, source of funds, and whether you have any politically exposed person or US-person links. You also do a video selfie. The system rejects video selfies with poor light, hats, glasses or filters, so the practical advice is to do the selfie in daylight, face-on, without accessories, and to make sure the passport image is the full page including the photo, the machine-readable zone and the signature line.

After the standard checks, level 2 is the additional review for fiat accounts and cards. SharPay says this can take up to five days, while the initial document review is faster, between one hour and 72 hours depending on the queue. Once level 2 is approved, you order a card from inside the app and a virtual Mastercard becomes available immediately. A physical card, if you order one, is shipped and typically arrives within 15 working days, though delivery times vary by destination and the exact delivery cost is not stated on the public pages.

The account allows up to five cards per profile, according to the App Store listing and the homepage. The card itself is a Mastercard debit card in euros, branded “Flex Mastercard Debit” and issued by UAB Walletto. Replacement of a virtual card is 1 EUR; the cost of replacing a physical card is not stated, which is one of those gaps you only find out about if you actually need to replace a card.

What a SharPay card really costs

The single most useful question to ask of any crypto card is: what does it really cost me to put 100 EUR through it, from the moment I top it up to the moment I spend it? For SharPay the answer has a few moving parts, and they stack.

The headline costs from the fee page are these:

There is one tier and one plan, with no upgrade path; pricing is per product, not per subscription. The card opens in euros, and you can pay in any currency, but the 2.99 percent mark-up on the personal card is on top of any spread the system applies when the merchant’s currency is not euros. The spread is not stated on the public pages, so on a non-euro purchase the realistic all-in cost is the 2.99 percent mark-up plus whatever extra margin sits inside the conversion rate.

Let me walk through three everyday cases so the numbers make sense in real life.

Case one: you have 200 EUR on a euro-denominated bank account in your own country, and you want to spend it at a restaurant in Paris. You load the card from your bank card: that is 2 EUR plus 1.99 percent, or about 5.98 EUR in fees on 200 EUR. The purchase itself is in euros, so no FX mark-up. Net cost of the meal: about 3 percent of what you spent. If you are abroad and your bank charges a foreign-transaction fee on the same transaction, the two fees will stack, and you are worse off than using your bank card directly.

Case two: you hold USDT and you want to spend the equivalent of 100 EUR in Tokyo. You send USDT to your SharPay crypto balance, the system converts it at its own rate to euros, you spend in yen, and the personal card adds 2.99 percent on top. The on-chain network fee is charged by the blockchain, not by SharPay. The deposit itself, if you send USDC through Mastercard or Visa, costs 4 percent; if you send it on-chain, the cost is the network fee plus the system exchange rate. You are paying for the convenience of converting on the fly.

Case three: you take cash out of an ATM. SharPay says you can make ATM withdrawals, but the fee page does not list an ATM fee or an allowance. Treat that as “ask support before you rely on it.” If there is a fee, it will be in addition to whatever your ATM operator charges, and the cash will count against your daily and monthly limits.

The pattern across these three cases is that SharPay is expensive on the way in (the account fee, the monthly fee, the load fee) and middling on the way through (the FX mark-up is higher than the best in class but not the worst). The cheapest way to use it is to load it once, in euros, from a low-fee source, and spend mostly in euros. The most expensive way to use it is to load it in crypto through a card payment, spend abroad, and withdraw cash. Choose accordingly.

How to top up a SharPay card

Top-up is where SharPay is more flexible than many of its peers. You can load the card in euros from another card, in euros by SEPA transfer, or in crypto from a list that includes BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, XRP, USDT, USDC, and on the price page also DAI and TUSD. The list is wide, but the FAQ does not name the networks, and the app’s top-up screen says you “select the currency and network” once you start a top-up. For XRP and Stellar you also need a memo or tag so the transfer reaches your account, and forgetting it is one of the most common reasons a crypto top-up goes missing.

The minimum top-up is not stated on the public pages, which is unusual. SharPay says you will see the minimum in the top-up amount input field inside the app, so the only way to know is to start a top-up. In practice that means you can be in the middle of a transaction and discover that the amount you intended to send is below the threshold, which is a small friction point but worth being aware of.

If you load the card in crypto and the receiving card balance is in a different currency, SharPay automatically exchanges the funds at its own system exchange rate. That rate is not disclosed in the public documents and is not the same as the mid-market rate you would see on a price feed. Think of it as the cost of convenience, because that is what it is.

Withdrawals work the other way too. You can send euros to a SEPA account, to another card, to an e-wallet, or in crypto, and SharPay says the processing time is between one minute and 60 minutes. There is one practical catch: you can only send a card transfer back to a card that you used to top up the account in the first place. That is a normal anti-fraud rule, but it is worth knowing before you try to send funds to a friend’s card or to a new card in your own name. If you close the account, SharPay charges 25 EUR for a personal closure and 100 EUR for a business closure, and the public pages do not say what happens to the balance at that point, which is a small but real gap in the documentation.

Paying with SharPay every day

Once the card is in your hand, or in your phone, day-to-day use is the strong point. The virtual card is active the moment you order it, which means you can be online buying something within minutes of finishing your level 2 check. The physical card takes about 15 working days, with delivery times varying by destination, and it is a Mastercard so it works anywhere Mastercard is accepted.

The contactless story is the real differentiator. SharPay supports Google Pay and Apple Pay. With Apple Pay, the card number is replaced by a device-specific number stored in the Secure Element on the device; the actual card number never sits on Apple’s servers, and each payment uses a one-time dynamic code. The practical effect is that you can have the card on your phone before the plastic arrives, and that you can pay at any contactless terminal with a tap of the phone or the watch. That alone saves many readers the trouble of waiting for the card to come through the post.

The card works online, in store, and at ATMs. SharPay’s blocked-merchant list is taken from SPEKA’s prohibited-activities list, which covers illegal gambling services (including illegal online casinos and sports betting), adult content, and a few other categories. Standard, regulated gambling and betting are not on the list. The 3-D Secure 2 protocol runs in the background for online payments, so the issuer can challenge a transaction with a one-time code or biometric prompt if it looks risky. The card supports spending limits (10,000 EUR a day and 30,000 EUR a month on POS and e-commerce) and the app lets you freeze and unfreeze cards instantly.

Two things that the public pages do not say. First, there is no cashback or rewards program in the materials I read, and the score on the rewards criterion is “not stated” rather than “zero,” because the absence of a program is a fact, and a quiet fact at that. Second, the app’s store ratings and number of ratings are not shown in the text I read, although the homepage claims “15k+” users. If app quality matters to you, check the current ratings on the App Store and Google Play before you commit, because that is the part of the experience you will live with daily.

For disputes, SharPay charges 40 EUR to process a chargeback, whether you win or lose, and the refund policy PDF is linked from the site but the time frames are not stated in the body text. If your account is debited twice for the same payment, SharPay says the duplicate is reversed automatically, which is a small but reassuring detail. For everything else, you raise the dispute in the app and pay the 40 EUR handling fee.

What can go wrong with SharPay

The cleanest way to look at risk on a card like this is to split it into four questions: who runs the money, how safe is the technology, what happens if the company fails, and what happens if something goes wrong with a payment.

Who runs the money: the website and app are designed and operated by GTM Exchange Ltd, a company registered in Cyprus. The card itself is issued by UAB Walletto, an electronic money institution authorised by the Bank of Lithuania under e-money licence number 33. The payment services are provided by SPEKA Payments Corp., a money services business registered with FINTRAC in Canada under MSB registration number M22046940, and SPEKA explicitly says the crypto services are “outside the EU and not to EU residents.” That separation is normal in the industry: the brand you see in the app is the front end, the issuer is a regulated entity that holds the licence to issue cards, and the payments processor is a separately regulated entity that moves the money. The advantage is that your funds sit with a regulated institution. The disadvantage is that if the brand disappears, the card programme can in principle be wound down, and the experience of other programmes in this category (FTX’s Visa programme in 2022, WaveCrest’s European Visa programmes in 2018) shows that this is not a theoretical risk.

How safe is the technology: the platform is custodial, which means your euro balance and your crypto balance sit with the provider, and you do not hold the private keys. SharPay uses one-time passcodes and two-factor authentication at login, you can block and unblock cards in the app, and 3-D Secure 2.0 is enabled for online payments. SharPay may ask for a “proof of funds” document at any point, and that is an anti-money-laundering requirement, not a sign that anything is wrong. What is not stated is whether customer funds are safeguarded in a segregated account or insured, and that is the part of the safety story that an EU electronic money institution is normally expected to handle as a matter of licence. If you want to be sure, ask the support team for the safeguarding statement before you load a large balance.

What happens if something goes wrong with a payment: the 40 EUR chargeback fee is the cost of opening a dispute, and the 25 EUR personal account-closure fee is the cost of leaving. There is no cashback, no insurance, and no compensation scheme for the card itself in the materials I read. If your card is compromised through no fault of your own, you may not be made whole, and a payment that fails because of a network mismatch or a wrong memo is your problem to chase. Cryptocurrency transfers are irreversible at the protocol level, and stablecoins can be frozen by the issuer on sanctions grounds, which is part of the design of these systems and not a SharPay-specific feature. A deposit sent on a network the card provider does not support, or to an address of another network, can be lost or stuck in support with no guarantee of recovery.

The complaints picture is, for once, the cleanest part. I checked Trustpilot and Reddit on 2026-10-20 and found no dedicated SharPay review page, no user reports, and no news stories. That is not the same as a clean record, but it is the absence of evidence of problems, and at this point in the lifecycle of a relatively new card programme, that is what you would expect to see if there were no major issues.

SharPay versus three alternatives

The honest way to compare cards in this category is to put them next to each other on the dimensions that matter most to the reader: who can get one, what it costs, what coins and networks it supports, and what it gives back in rewards. The three alternatives below are drawn from the same research pool as SharPay, and they each have a distinct profile.

The International Visa Card is a U.S.-issued Platinum Visa, currently virtual only with a physical card “coming soon.” It blocks residents and legal registrants of Belarus, mainland China, North Korea, Cuba, India, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam, with FATF grey-list countries reviewed case by case. It holds a USD balance, and you can fund it with USDC or USDT at 1:1, with USD, EUR, SEPA, SWIFT and FedNow deposits also listed. The 2 percent FX mark-up is lower than SharPay’s 2.99 percent, and the absence of a monthly fee is a clear win for low-spend users. The main gaps are the lack of a physical card right now and the long restricted-country list.

UNi Card is a multicurrency Mastercard that draws on a UNi.Global account balance. There is no stated annual fee, no foreign-transaction fee, and assets are converted at live OTC rates, which the brand advertises as “no hidden exchange fees.” The Spend-to-Earn program returns up to 3 percent, which is the strongest rewards number in this group. The things it does not say out loud are whether a physical card is available, what the funding paths are, and which countries it serves. If those matter to you, you will have to ask.

Whop Cards is a Visa issued through Whop, and it spends from a Whop balance. The big differentiator is geography: it is available to consumers in 31 US states (the homepage lists Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming) and to businesses in 41 states, with a long list of unsupported countries that includes Belarus, mainland China, Cuba, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam. Cards can be issued to team members, which is unusual in this group, and the rewards are 5 percent cashback at select merchants, with Uber first on the list. The gaps are the absent physical/virtual split, the missing conversion and FX numbers, and the lack of stated funding coin details.

If I had to pick the closest competitor to SharPay on use case, it would be UNi Card: both are multicurrency Mastercards, both spend from a crypto-linked balance, both support contactless payments, and the rewards program on UNi is the main edge. If you are outside the EU and the priority is a low-fee USD card, the International Visa Card is the more natural fit. If you are a US-based business that wants to issue cards to a team, Whop Cards is the only one of the four that does that out of the box.

Who I would recommend SharPay to

After walking through every part of the offer, the recommendation comes down to whether the use case lines up with the fee structure.

SharPay is a good fit if you are a non-EU resident who wants a regulated European Mastercard that supports Apple Pay and Google Pay, who can fund the card with euros once and then spend those euros, who does not switch currencies on the card very often, and who is willing to pay 36 EUR a year in monthly service fees plus a one-off 10 EUR account fee in exchange for the convenience. The card is also a sensible option if you are paid in USDT or USDC and you want a way to convert and spend without going through a centralised exchange each time, as long as you understand the 2.99 percent mark-up and the network fee on the deposit.

SharPay is a poor fit if you are an EU resident, because the crypto side of the product is not available to you and the euro-only account costs more than a basic European bank card. It is also a poor fit if you travel heavily and pay in many currencies, because the 2.99 percent mark-up adds up quickly. It is the wrong product if you are a heavy ATM user, because the fee and allowance are not stated, and it is the wrong product if you want cashback, because there is no stated rewards program. Finally, if you are risk-averse on crypto custody, the lack of a public safeguarding statement should make you pause before loading a meaningful balance.

In short: SharPay is a card for a specific reader, and it does that reader’s job reasonably well. It is not the cheapest card in the category, and it is not the most flexible, but it is a real Mastercard from a real European issuer with a real mobile-wallet story, and that combination is rarer than the marketing would suggest.

Frequently asked questions

What is the SharPay card?

The SharPay card is a Mastercard debit card issued by UAB Walletto, a Lithuanian electronic money institution, and it draws on a SharPay account that you can fund with euros or with cryptocurrencies such as USDT, USDC, BTC, ETH, XRP, LTC and BCH.

How does the SharPay card work?

You open an account, complete level 1 and level 2 verification, order a card in the app, and either load it in euros from another card or in crypto from a wallet. The card converts the balance to euros and spends it like a regular Mastercard, including through Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Is SharPay a bank?

No. SharPay is not a bank. The brand is GTM Exchange Ltd in Cyprus, the card is issued by UAB Walletto under a Bank of Lithuania e-money licence, and payment services run through SPEKA Payments Corp in Canada, so funds sit in an e-money account rather than a bank deposit.

Who owns SharPay?

The SharPay website and app are designed and operated by GTM Exchange Ltd, a company registered in Cyprus. The card programme is run by UAB Walletto in Lithuania, and the payment services are run by SPEKA Payments Corp in Canada.

Is the SharPay card available in my country?

SharPay is not available to residents of restricted or prohibited countries, including those named on the SPEKA prohibited list. Crypto services are not available to EU residents, although euro spending from a euro balance may still work. The full country list is not stated on the public pages.

How do I apply for a SharPay card?

You download the SharPay Wallet app, register with a phone number, email and password, complete level 1 verification with a passport and a video selfie, complete level 2 verification, and then order a card from inside the app.

Does SharPay require identity verification?

Yes. SharPay is a regulated card and requires a passport, bank statements in English, a video selfie, and a short questionnaire on turnover, source of funds and PEP or US-person links. The standard check takes between one hour and 72 hours, and the level 2 check for cards and fiat accounts can take up to five days.

How do I top up my SharPay card?

You can top up in euros from another card or by SEPA transfer, or in crypto by sending BTC, ETH, LTC, BCH, XRP, USDT, USDC, DAI or TUSD to the deposit address shown in the app. Card-to-card top-ups cost 2 EUR plus 1.99 percent, USDC deposits through Mastercard or Visa cost 4 percent, and on-chain deposits cost the network fee.

How do I add the SharPay card to Apple Wallet?

Open the SharPay Wallet app, go to the card details for the virtual card, and choose “Add to Apple Wallet.” The card will appear in Apple Pay and can be used at any contactless terminal that supports Apple Pay, including through the iPhone and the Apple Watch.

Is the SharPay card safe?

SharPay uses one-time passcodes and two-factor authentication at login, supports instant card freeze and unfreeze in the app, and runs 3-D Secure 2 for online payments. The funds are custodial, meaning SharPay holds them rather than the user, and the public pages do not state whether the funds are safeguarded in a segregated account.

Content created by the «cryptocardcheck» team