Bitpay Card

Bitpay Card 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 Bitpay Card, one of the crypto debit cards out there.

General information

Bitpay Card primarily supports Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, but will most likely support even more cryptocurrencies in the future.

With respect to fiat currencies, Bitpay Card supports only USD.

The process for getting the card is quite standard. You get the app (on AppStore or Google Play), you load the Bitpay wallet in the app, and you then ask for a card to be issued. Bitpay has illustrated this straight-forward process by the following graphic on its site:

The company behind the Bitpay Card lists the following items as their primary advantages: instant reloads, flexibility, enhanced security and worldwide. Instant reloads is quite self-explanatory, it refers to the fact that it is easy for you to load the card through the wallet included in the Bitpay app. Flexibility is a bit more difficult to understand, but we interpret it as meaning that the Bitpay card makes you a flexible person in terms of your available payment methods. Enhanced security is also self-explanatory, and worldwide refers to the number of different places you can use it or withdraw money from it.

MasterCard and ApplePay

Bitpay Card is a Mastercard, meaning that you can use the card at any point of payment that accepts Mastercard. This is of course a great advantage, seeing that Mastercard (and VISA) are the most accepted cards in the world.

On 13 February 2021, BitPay Card announced that it had added support for Apple Pay. US-based holders of the Bitpay Card can now connect it to the Apple Pay app and make payments with cryptos that will be converted into fiat money.

US-investors

US-investors can use this card. 

Picture of Card

The following is a picture of the card (unfortunately a bit blurry, but it's the best we have found to this date):

Bitpay Card Fees

We think that Bitpay Card charges competitive fees. This means that the fees with this card is not a disadvantage to using it. There are cards with lower fees out there, but definitely also cards with higher fees.

This card has no monthly fees and the issuance fee is a quite average USD 10.00. This is below the industry average. There is a fee of 3.00% to cover the cost of currency conversion outside the US, but that’s it in terms of commission based fees.

ATM-usage results in a fee of USD 2.50 on the withdrawn amount (in the US, outside the US the fee is USD 3.00). This might be disadvantageous in countries where the normal ATM-machines only allow smaller withdrawals (USD 20 for instance). In such scenarios, in order to withdraw a larger amount you need to withdraw several times, thus triggering the fixed fee each time. Usually, however, you can go to a bank to withdraw higher amounts in a more efficient manner.

Furthermore, the most important fee of them all, the commission on spending. As mentioned above, Bitpay Card doesn’t charge any commission based fees other than the 3.00% to cover the cost of currency conversion outside the US. So if you’re in the US, you don’t have to worry about any commission based fees at all!

The following picture gives a nice overview of the fees involved with using the Bitpay Card:

Bitpay Card Limits

As for the limits, you can't withdraw more than USD 2,000 per withdrawal (maximum 3 withdrawals a day). So, effectively, your withdrawal limit is USD 6,000 per day. This seems like a more than adequate limit for most people. You can't load or spend more than USD 10,000 dollars a day and the maximum balance you are ever allowed to have on the card is USD 25,000.

If any of the above limits are not to your satisfaction, don’t worry. Just have a look in our crypto debit card list to find another card for you.

Concluding remarks

If this is the cryptocurrency debit card for you, congratulations.

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