Pay Card shut its card programme down in December 2022 — the app survives, the cards do not

Updated October 2026

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The Pay Card — a DeFi payments wallet from the Cardstack team that sold prepaid cards through Wyre — no longer issues cards. Buying prepaid cards inside the app was switched off on 5 December 2022 and the last app version dates from February 2023. If you are searching for a crypto-linked card today because an ordinary bank card is hard to get, this review is going to tell you plainly that Pay Card is not that option. What follows is what the programme’s own public materials say, what holders should consider, and which currently operating alternatives come with published terms.

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

Verdict: 1.8 out of 10

I scored the Pay Card 1.8 out of 10. That is not a rounding of a middling card — it is the score of a service that stopped doing the one thing you would want it for. Who does this suit? Almost nobody, in the simple sense: there is no way to become a new cardholder. Who does it not suit? Everyone looking for a crypto card right now, because the card side of the app has been dark since December 2022. The one audience it might still matter to is holders of the old Card Pay wallet, and even for them the card is the part that went away.

A word on the five-out-of-ten for cost. That is not praise. The app itself is free to download, and the only in-app purchase listed is an “Account on Gnosis Chain” at GBP 0.99. But the fees that would actually matter to a cardholder — what a purchase costs, whether there is a monthly or annual charge, what a foreign transaction costs — are simply not stated on the public pages. You cannot score a fee structure generously when the fee structure is missing; a mid mark reflects missing information rather than good value.

What happened to the programme

Here is the short version of the history, taken from the app’s own listing and version notes. On 5 December 2022, in version 1.1.12, prepaid card purchases through Wyre were disabled “until further notice.” That “until further notice” turned out to be the end. The listing still describes the product as a DeFi payments wallet in which you can “manage your prepaid cards,” but the last app version, 1.2.0, came out on 18 February 2023 and there has been nothing since. Around that same period, Wyre — the partner through which the cards were bought — was reported to be shutting down: MetaMask ceased Wyre support in January 2023 as Wyre was reportedly closing, and Wyre’s wind-down was announced in June 2023. The company’s own public pages do not link Cardstack to these Wyre shutdown reports, so the exact contractual relationship between the two was never spelled out for cardholders.

Other details from the listing help you picture what the app used to be. It was an iOS app (iOS 13.0+, macOS 11.0+ on Apple M1+, visionOS 1.0+), distributed through the UK App Store, where it carries a 5.0-out-of-5 rating — but from only three ratings, which is too small a sample to mean much. Transactions inside it were confirmed with Touch ID or Face ID. The listing mentions claiming “rewards” individually (in version 1.1.13), but no rate is stated. The card’s network and currency are not stated. Whether the cards were ever physically delivered is not stated either; the listing describes prepaid cards living inside the wallet.

Two things the app is conspicuously silent about: who the card issuer was, and what identity checks were required. Neither is stated anywhere in the public pages. When a programme winds down, the identity of the issuer is usually the single most useful fact for a holder, because that institution is the one that holds the balance and the one you would contact. Here, it is simply not stated.

If you already have the card or wallet

If you are reading this because you once had a Card Pay card or still have a balance in the old wallet, I want to be careful here, because the honest answer is that the public pages do not tell you what to do. Let me list what is stated and what is not.

What is not stated:

• No ATM information, no spending limits, no funding routes for the card.
• Nothing about top-ups — the listing mentions crypto balances and notes that Polygon was removed in version 1.1.13, but no funding method for the card itself is described.
• Critically, nothing about withdrawing a card balance, and nothing about what happens to a balance after the programme closes. The version notes mention “reward withdrawal” bug fixes in 1.0.11 and, in 1.1.13, that each reward is claimed individually — but those are about rewards, not about getting your own money out.
• No dispute process, no support page: the App Store listing links only the developer site and a privacy policy, with no support channel and no issuer contact.
• No self-custody statement; the app says only that transactions are confirmed with Touch ID or Face ID.

So if you are an existing holder, the practical advice is not “here is what to do” but “here is what to establish for yourself.” Two things matter and neither is documented publicly: whether the issuer is still operational, and what mechanism, if any, remains to withdraw a balance. Both are questions for the issuer or, failing that, the developer — not for me. I would not send funds into this app in the hope of activating a card, because the card activation path was closed in December 2022 and has not reopened.

What can go wrong

The single most important risk here is not subtle, and it deserves to be stated plainly. There is a lesson in how this programme ended that applies far beyond Pay Card.

Programme shutdowns are how crypto cards usually end. This is a well-trodden pattern in the category, not a one-off. WaveCrest, a Visa card issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. More recently, Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022, and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer. And this card’s own supply line — Wyre — followed the same arc. The general pattern in these closures is: a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. One 2026 closure, reported by a secondary source and unconfirmed, had new loads ending 8 July 2026 and spending stopping 8 August 2026. Treat that as a shape, not a prediction.

The lesson is worth taking with you to whichever card you do choose. When a crypto card depends on a partner — an issuer, a card processor, an exchange — the failure of that partner can strand your money even if the app in your pocket still opens. Ask of any card: who is the issuer, and what is the withdrawal route if the app disappears?

Beyond the closure itself, several other things can go wrong, and they are general to crypto cards rather than specific to Pay:

• Declines from the merchant side. Merchants can look up the BIN — the 6- or 8-digit issuer identification number at the start of a card number — and see which institution and country issued the card. If that country differs from your billing address, a shop may apply extra scrutiny. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs outright for this reason, which is why a card issued in one country can look “foreign” to a shop in another.
• Fee traps on a card with no published fee table. Card payments also involve fees that are easy to overlook: declined authorisations can leave a hold on your funds for several days, typically up to seven. Address Verification Service, which compares the numeric parts of your billing address against issuer records, is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards — another common cause of declines.
• Deposits on the wrong network. Blockchain transfers are irreversible. A deposit sent on a network the card provider does not support, or to an address belonging to another network, can be lost or need manual support recovery with no guarantee. Network fees for your deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by the card company, and you pay them in the chain’s own token — on Ethereum that means ETH, so a wallet holding USDT but no ETH cannot send.
• Custody risk, if you ever did hold funds here. Custodial platforms have a real record of failures: Mt. Gox (about US$350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about US$400 million, 2018), Ronin Network (US$625 million, 2022). Holding funds with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk; holding them yourself in a self-custody wallet moves that risk to you — key loss, phishing, malware that swaps copied addresses. Note that the Pay listing does not state whether it was self-custody.
• No chargeback safety net to rely on. A chargeback is a refund ordered by the issuer to settle a dispute. US debit card rights come from Regulation E and credit card rights from Regulation Z, but prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed. Under 3-D Secure, liability for a fraudulent online payment can shift from the merchant to your bank — or, per critics, to you.

None of these make a working card a bad choice. They make the questions worth asking.

What to take instead

If what you actually need is a card that spends from crypto or a stablecoin — because a bank card is hard to get, or because you want to spend without an exchange account sitting in the middle — the Pay Card is not where that lives today. Three currently operating alternatives come with published terms. Here they are side by side.

MetaMask is the strongest of the three on paper, and the one I would look at first. Sign-up is open in 45 listed countries and territories — Andorra, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, Uruguay among them — though other regions join a waitlist and US/UK sign-ups are temporarily closed per the FAQ. It issues a virtual Mastercard instantly (free, no annual or maintenance fee) with a metal card pre-orderable in the app at $199 a year after approval; one card per user; the issuer is Monovate. It spends directly from the connected wallet across Linea, Base, Monad and Solana, using tokens including mUSD, wETH, EURe, GBPe, USDC and USDT. On fees it claims a “minimal fee for each transaction” with no additional MetaMask fees and no foreign transaction fee, but the actual amount is not stated on the pages I read, so do not treat that as zero. Cashback is 1% in mUSD on Virtual; on Metal the headline is 3% but the footnote caps that at the first $10,000 spent, after which it drops to 1% — read the footnote, not the banner.

KAST is the most unusual of the three, in both good and unhelpful ways. It runs a tiered membership — Standard free, Premium 1,000 USD/year, Private 10,000 USD/year, billed annually upfront with no monthly option — and issues Visa cards up to ten per user, from Platinum Standard to Infinite metal and gold-plated Private, with other designs for Pengu, Solana and Bitcoin. It is transparent about its fees in a way most card products are not: 0% stablecoin top-up, 0% USD card spend, 0% transaction fee, 0% for Apple/Google Pay, 0.10 USD on non-USD transactions under 25 USD, 0.50 USD on a declined transaction for insufficient balance, and a 0.5%–1.75% foreign-exchange fee depending on your residence country, transaction country and card programme. But its eligibility rules are a puzzle: the country list is not published, it shows a residence-based list only at KYC, and it states plainly that living in a supported country is not enough if your ID is from a restricted region. A VPN does not bypass this, only the account holder’s own ID is accepted, and you can create an account in an unsupported country but the KYC stays locked.

Zeal is the simplest of the three. A Visa card — virtual for online use, addable to Apple Pay — spending from balances in the card Safe in EUR, USD or GBP, on Gnosis Chain and Celo per the docs, with exact coins not stated for Zeal. It works in 150+ countries, with the card programme live in the EU, UK, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. It charges no additional foreign-exchange fee of its own and converts at the Visa wholesale rate, though Gnosis Pay fees such as ATM charges may still apply. Rewards are up to 4% cashback paid in GNO, but you must hold GNO in the card Safe to qualify and the rates can change. No fee schedule is published, so treat that as an open question.

Who I would recommend it to

Straightforwardly: nobody, for new sign-ups, because new sign-ups are not possible. The card programme closed. If you were considering Pay Card as a way to get a crypto-spending card, take one of the three above instead, and choose by where you live and what you hold rather than by reward rate — the reward headlines in this category are the least reliable part of any comparison.

If you already hold a Card Pay card or balance, my advice is to establish two facts for yourself before doing anything else: whether the issuer is still operating, and what route, if any, remains to withdraw a balance. The public pages state neither. I would not top up, and I would not trust an app that still opens as evidence that the service still runs.

And if your interest is broader — if you are simply someone who wants to understand this corner of fintech before committing to anything — then the Pay Card is a genuinely useful case study. It illustrates the central fragility of crypto cards: the card is usually the most durable-looking part of the product in your hand, but it sits on top of partners — an issuer, a processor like Wyre here — whose failure can switch off the card without ever touching your wallet. That is a lesson worth carrying into any choice you make next, including with the cards that are still running.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Pay Card?

The Pay Card was a prepaid card offered through the Cardstack Pay app, a DeFi payments wallet that let you manage cards funded from crypto. Buying the prepaid cards went through a partner called Wyre. The app still exists in the App Store, but it no longer issues cards — the card-purchase function was disabled in December 2022 and the app has not been meaningfully updated since February 2023.

Why was the Pay Card discontinued?

The card-buying function was switched off “until further notice” on 5 December 2022, around the time its Wyre partner was shutting down. Wyre’s wind-down was announced in June 2023, after MetaMask had already stopped supporting it in January 2023. The company’s own pages never publicly tied the two events together, so the precise contractual reason is not stated — only the sequence is.

Can I still apply for a Pay Card?

No. New cards are not issued. If you have found a sign-up flow or a “get card” button, it is either a leftover screen from the old app or something else entirely — the card programme itself is closed, and I would not enter funds expecting it to work. For a card you can actually be issued today, look at MetaMask, KAST or Zeal instead.

Do I need KYC to get a Pay Card?

You would have needed it, but the card’s public pages never stated what identity checks applied — KYC requirements are simply not stated for this programme. KAST, by contrast, shows a residence-based country list at sign-up and states that only your own ID counts, not a VPN.

What happened to the rewards?

The listing mentions claiming “rewards” individually as of version 1.1.13, but no rate is ever stated. Version notes also reference “reward withdrawal” bug fixes in an earlier version. Whether any rewards remain claimable, and whether they survive the closure, is not stated anywhere on the public pages.

Can I withdraw money from a Pay Card balance?

This is the big unknown. The public pages state nothing about how — or whether — a cardholder can withdraw a card balance, and nothing at all about what happens to a balance after the programme closes. If you are in that position, the issuer or the developer is the only route to an answer, and you should establish that yourself rather than waiting on the app.

Is the Pay Card safe to use?

The question is moot for new users because no cards are issued. For a general principle: crypto cards usually rest on third-party partners — issuers and processors — and those partners fail. WaveCrest’s Visa programmes closed in 2018, and the FTX US debit card was wound down after Visa terminated its agreements in November 2022. Card issuers can be suspended and programmes closed, and a balance can be stranded when that happens.

Is the Pay Card free?

The app is free to download. The only in-app purchase listed is an “Account on Gnosis Chain” for GBP 0.99. But the fees that would matter to a cardholder — purchase fees, monthly charges, foreign transaction fees — are simply not stated on the public pages, so there is no way to judge whether it was good value.

Which card is the best alternative to Pay Card?

It depends on where you are. MetaMask offers an instant free virtual Mastercard and a $199 metal card, in 45 listed countries. KAST runs a free-to-$10,000/year tiered membership with unusually clear fee disclosure but an unpublished eligibility list. Zeal is a straightforward Visa working in 150+ countries with no added FX fee. Compare them by eligibility and fees first, not by cashback.

Is Pay the same as Cardstack?

No, not exactly. The app is published by an entity called CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD., while the Cardstack homepage footer names the Cardstack Foundation. The card issuer is not stated at all, which is part of the difficulty: when a card programme closes, the issuer is usually the party that holds your money and the one you would contact, and here that party is never named.

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