Bitnovo

Bitnovo Review

A common argument for regular money (also known as fiat currency) as opposed to cryptocurrency is that you can’t use cryptocurrency to buy groceries and other everyday items. Well, through the use of a cryptocurrency debit card, you can. This is a review of Bitnovo (or more precisely, its card The Bitcard), one of the crypto debit cards out there.

General info

Bitnovo is the company standing behind two different cards: the Bitcard and the Bitsa Prepaid Card. This review focuses on Bitnovo's the Bitcard.

The following graphic shows quite distinctly how the card "works":

Bitnovo promotes the following factors as main advantages with the Bitcard. First, you don't need a bank account. Second, you can top it up in essentially whatever way you prefer. It is usable wherever (both online and in physical stores), and, finally, your bank history is irrelevant when applying to have this card. Bank history is otherwise something important when applying for a regular credit card for instance.

Another thing worth noting here under the general information chapter is that there is no binding time for this card. Whenever the customer wants to cancel it, he/she can cancel it.

You can achieve three different levels for the card: Basic Level, Level Plus and Premium Level. The main difference between the levels are that, as you climb the levels, you need to provide more and more personal data and KYC-information. In exchange for doing that, your spending limits, ATM-withdrawal options and deposit options are expanded. For more details, you can see the following overview of levels and their pros and cons here:

Picture of Cards

The following shows a picture of the Bitcard:

And here's a picture of the BITSA Card (in case you were interested). All of the information in the following parts of this review will however only relate to the Bitcard and not the BITSA Card.

Bitcard Fees

We think that Bitnovo charges competitive fees through their cards. This means that the fees with this card is not a disadvantage to using it.

The monthly fee is EUR 1.20.

There is an issuance fee set to EUR 25 (previously EUR 20.00). EUR 25 is above industry average (industry average is arguably around USD 15.00). However, when ordering a card from Bitnovo you will receive it in only 5 working days. This is very impressive indeed and is a possible explanation for the somewhat higher issuance fee.

ATM-usage results in a fixed fee of EUR 1.00 on the withdrawn amount.

Finally, the most important fee of them all, the commission on top-up/spending. Bitnovo charges you 5.00% for topping up your card, so this corresponds to a spending commission in all material respects. We have included this as the spending commission in our database. This spending commission is unfortunately quite high if you compare it with industry average. As a comparison, Binance Card only charges you 0.90% and Wirex Card charges you 1.50%.

Concluding remarks

If this is the crypto debit card for you, congrats!

If not, check out one of the other cards in our crypto debit card list. Good luck!