Bitsa review: a prepaid Visa you load with crypto — useful, but the fine print is the whole story

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Bitsa is a prepaid Visa card with a European IBAN that you load with crypto — Bitcoin, Ethereum or USD Coin among them — or with ordinary money through a bank transfer or another card. The crypto is converted to euros and the card spends that euro balance. That is the shape of the product in one sentence, and almost everything else in this review is a consequence of it.

I scored it 5.0 out of 10. That is a middle-of-the-road score for a card that works competently as a payment card but sits in the weakest part of the crypto-card category: the part where you hand your money to a provider, the reviews are bad, and the issuer is not named on the pages most people actually read.

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

Who this card suits, and who it does not

Bitsa scores 5 / 10 on who can get it. The card’s own public pages do not publish a list of eligible countries — that is simply not stated. Third-party sites describe it as open to residents of the European Economic Area, with a list of 27 countries: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Those same sources say it is closed to residents of Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Treat all of that as unofficial: it is not confirmed by the card.

The card scores 9 / 10 on everyday use — the highest mark of the six. A physical and a virtual Visa, a European IBAN, and mobile wallet support reported in current help material. If your problem is “I cannot get an ordinary bank card, or I want to spend crypto without touching an exchange account every time”, this is squarely aimed at you.

It is not aimed at you if your main worry is the score of 3 / 10 on reliability and complaints, or if you need a card you can load large amounts through, because the plan limits run out well before the top ceiling suggests. And if you are outside Europe, or in one of the closed countries, the honest answer from what I could verify is that you are probably not getting one.

Here is the score card in full:

Will they give you the card?

Not stated — and that is worth pausing on. The card does not publish its list of eligible countries on the pages I read, so you cannot check eligibility yourself before applying. What exists is the unofficial list in the section above, which is a reasonable guide but not a promise.

What the card does state is the product itself: a prepaid Visa crypto card, available physical and virtual, with crypto converted to euros, a European IBAN, managed in an iOS or Android app.

Whether you need identity verification, and at what level, is also not stated in the card’s public material. Unofficial sources describe proof of residence in an eligible country plus identity verification, and describe ages 16 to 17 being handled through a “Bitsa Young” route with guardian authorisation in the app. The same sources say the issuer may suspend accounts for failed KYC, for fraud or anti-money-laundering risk, or for missing source-of-funds documents. That last one catches people out: it is not only about proving who you are, it is about showing where the money came from.

Delivery times and shipping details are not stated either, according to the same third-party review. That is a real gap when you are about to spend EUR 20 and wait.

How to get it

The shape of it is a standard prepaid card application: an app, identity checks, a virtual card you can start with, and a physical card in the post. Beyond that, the card does not spell out the sequence or the timing, and I would not pretend otherwise.

Two numbers are official. A physical card costs EUR 20. An additional virtual card costs EUR 2.50. Some unofficial sources suggest the physical card alone includes a virtual one on certain plans, with the numbers varying by tier — Free at one virtual and one physical card, Move at three and two, Pro at four and four — but that detail comes from third parties, not the card.

The practical thing to do before you apply is to accept that delivery is unspecified. If you need a card working next week rather than next month, this is the wrong card to plan around.

Fees: what it really costs

Cost scores 4 / 10, and the reason is visible in one table. There are three plans and the differences are almost entirely about limits, not price — the extra you pay buys you headroom, not cheaper spending.

Three numbers here deserve more attention than the rest.

The conversion spread is not stated. The card tells you what it charges to reload from an external card and what it charges to pay abroad. It does not tell you the spread it takes when it converts your crypto into euros. That is the number that decides what a crypto top-up really costs you, and it is the one you are least able to compute from what is published.

The 1.75% and 2% figures are international payment fees, not conversion rates. They apply to payments outside the euro zone and elsewhere. Your balance is in euros. When you spend in another currency, the Visa network sets the exchange rate and this percentage sits on top of it. Neither figure is a currency-conversion rate.

The transfer commission is EUR 1 on Free and Move, free on Pro. This is the line that decides whether the Pro plan is worth anything to you, and for anyone making regular transfers it is worth checking against how often you would actually move money.

Now three everyday payments, worked through.

Coffee in a euro-zone city. You tap EUR 4.50. No international fee applies, no crypto conversion happens because the balance is already euros. If you got to those euros by loading crypto, the only cost to you is the spread that is not stated — and if you reached them from a free plan, whatever reload fee applied at the time.

A EUR 30 subscription billed in dollars. This is where the 2% lands. Visa’s own rate for dollar to euro, plus 2% of the amount — roughly EUR 0.60 on a EUR 30 payment. The card does not state the Visa rate it uses, so treat EUR 0.60 as the visible fee, not the total.

Withdrawing euros at an ATM in Spain. Unofficial sources say Spain passes the operator’s full fee through, and that its terms conflict elsewhere in the euro zone — one document quotes EUR 2.50 flat, a newer guide says only the operator’s fee applies. If you are outside the euro zone the official figure is EUR 0.55 plus 1% of the amount, minimum EUR 0.75, and withdrawals outside Spain are capped at EUR 450 a day.

That ATM row is where the fee picture gets genuinely murky, and it is not resolved by anything the card states. It is also where most people first discover the difference between a “no foreign transaction fee” claim and what actually comes out of the machine.

Top up: how money gets in

Top-up options score 5 / 10. The card names the assets: Bitcoin, Ethereum and USD Coin. It also names the rails: card, SEPA transfer, wallet and voucher. What it does not do is say which blockchain networks are supported for any of the three coins — not stated, and that gap matters more than it sounds.

Unofficial sources describe the wallet top-up flow as: generate a fresh address for each transfer, and send BTC, ETH or USDC to it. A new address each time is good practice on your side — it makes the transfer harder to confuse with another one. But without a published network list you are relying on the app at the moment of sending.

Consider what happens if you get it wrong. Blockchain transfers do not reverse. If you send on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, the funds can be gone or can sit in manual support recovery with no guarantee of return. This is not a Bitsa-specific weakness — it is how the technology works — but it is the single most expensive mistake available to someone new to these cards, and it is worth slowing down over.

The other top-up numbers, official:

• Non-free reload from an external card: 1.5%. Unofficial detail: free up to a per-plan allowance, then 1.5%.
• Voucher reload: unofficial, 0% to 6%, depending on the voucher.
• Crypto top-ups: unofficial 0% buy fee on all plans, with a maximum of EUR 20,000 per day.
• The free plan’s own top-up ceilings are the tightest: EUR 500 a day, EUR 1,000 a month, EUR 2,500 a year.

That last line deserves a second look. A EUR 2,500 annual top-up ceiling on the free plan is less than many people spend in a month on a card they use for everyday payments. The paid plans raise it to EUR 15,000 a year and Pro removes the ceiling entirely. So the free plan is a real free plan, but it is a free plan for light use.

Cashing out. The card’s own pages say nothing about withdrawals that I could read, so: not stated. Unofficial sources say the in-app crypto function is buy and sell only, that holdings cannot be sent to or received from external wallets, that card cancellation and balance management at expiry cost EUR 0, and that a third-party external transfer costs EUR 1.50. If sending crypto back out to your own wallet matters to you, verify this before you load — because “I can get money in but not out” would change how you should use the card entirely.

Paying with it every day

This is the strong part, and it is strong for ordinary reasons. You have a physical Visa and a virtual one, a European IBAN, and an app on iOS or Android. Wallets: Apple Pay and Google Pay are confirmed in current help material; Samsung Pay was announced earlier but there is no current setup guide, so treat that one as history.

Cashback is listed among the plan services — “cashback up to 15%” appears in the plan descriptions, with the Move plan mentioning cashback at favourite brands. What asset the cashback is paid in, and the conditions, are not stated. A headline percentage with no conditions attached is not something to plan a budget around.

Two things the card does not say: whether any merchant categories are blocked — not stated, and blocked categories are usually issuer policy rather than law — and what the app ratings are on the official pages I read. Unofficial figures for the Google Play listing were inconsistent within the same page, 2.8/5 in one place and 2.9/5 in another, with no number of ratings given. An app rating with no review count attached tells you very little.

One general thing worth knowing, since it explains the odd declines people report with these cards generally. A card number begins with six or eight digits identifying the issuing institution and country. Merchants can look that up, and some apply extra scrutiny or decline prepaid and foreign-issued cards when the issuer country does not match the billing address. That is not a trick anyone at the till is playing — it is the same lookup that makes anti-fraud systems work, and it is why a card issued in one country can look foreign in another. Address verification, which compares the street number and postal code the buyer typed against the issuer’s records, is mostly a US, Canadian and UK service and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which is another ordinary source of declines.

What can go wrong

Reliability and complaints scores 3 / 10, and this is the section that should decide the card for most people.

First, the issuer is not named on the pages I read. The card states that “BITSA is a simplified joint stock company (SAS) registered in the Nice Trade and Companies Register” in France. It links to “Card issuer conditions” and to a “Payment service provider” document, but those were not part of what I checked, so I cannot tell you what they say. Licences are not stated either. Unofficial sources name the issuer as Pecunia Cards EDE S.L.U. under the PecunPay programme, on Banco de Espana register 6707, with Bitsa SAS as programme operator. That is unconfirmed by the card, and it matters: when you load a prepaid card, you are trusting a named, licensed institution — and if you have to go to a third-party site to learn who it is, that is a gap.

Second, the reviews. A secondary aggregator, unverified and undated, reported a Trustpilot score of roughly 1.3 to 1.5 out of 5, with account freezes after deposits and support that did not respond. Reading the figures directly on 2026-10-20: Trustpilot for Bitsa shows 1.3/5 from 363 reviews, with 68% of them one-star. No official Bitsa Trustpilot page or Reddit threads were found, so this is one visible sample rather than a settled picture — but it is the sample that exists.

The themes in those reviews run from September 2020 through September 2026, and they are consistent rather than scattered:

• Accounts frozen or blocked with funds withheld, in reviews dated across 2020 to 2026, including May, July and September 2026.
• Support unresponsive for weeks or months, reported in July 2026.
• Repeated document and KYC demands, reported in 2025.
• Crypto top-ups partly or not credited, reported in May and November 2025.
• Login and app failures, reported in September 2026.
• An unexplained closure, reported in January 2025.
• The company has not replied to negative reviews. Two reviewers claim regulator warnings — unverified, 2025.

On the official side, no incidents were found. That is worth stating plainly as well: I did not find a documented regulatory action, a breach, or a published outage on the card’s own material. The problem is not a known scandal. It is a large volume of people saying the same three things — money held, support absent, identity demanded again.

Third, the custody question. Unofficial sources say the arrangement is custodial after funding, with the euro card balance held inside the PecunPay programme, protected by an SMS code plus a personal SCA secret for online purchases and sensitive changes, and with the ability to freeze the card in the app. If that is right, then control of the money sits with the provider, not with you, and the freeze reports above are the predictable failure mode of that arrangement rather than an unlucky run of incidents. Custody is not automatically bad — plenty of ordinary banks work the same way — but it means the provider’s solvency and the provider’s willingness to answer you become your problem.

Fourth, what is not stated. Security arrangements beyond that unofficial summary: not stated. Support channels and response times: not stated on the material I read, with reviewers reporting slow or absent replies. Which merchant categories are blocked: not stated. Whether the cashback has conditions: not stated. In this section the silence is itself the risk, because a reader has no way to distinguish “we have no such feature” from “we do not publish it”.

Two general warnings, not about this card. Blockchain transfers cannot be reversed, which is the top-up risk above. And a card programme can simply close: notice, then spending and loading stop, then you are asked to withdraw what is left. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down by its issuer; WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied several crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued programmes. Neither is a prediction about Bitsa. Both are reminders that the brand on the front of the card is not the institution standing behind it.

What to take instead

Three other crypto cards, scored on the same basis:

International Visa Card scores highest of the three and is the one I would look at first if a USD balance is workable for you. It is virtual only for now, which is the catch. Its exclusions are stated as residence or registration based — not available to residents or 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 — and purchases are blocked in North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela. Note it says residence or registration; citizenship is not mentioned.

UNi Card is the cheapest structurally: no annual fee, no foreign transaction fee, and assets converted at live OTC rates. Its eligibility is not stated, and so are its top-up methods, which is exactly the sort of gap that made me score Bitsa’s access section at 5.

Whop Cards looks appealing on paper — “no extra fees”, 5% cashback at select merchants — but the detail is thin: no issuance or monthly amounts listed, no conversion or FX amounts, and whether the card is virtual or physical and what currency it holds is not stated. It is open to consumers in 31 US states and businesses in 41, and unsupported in a long list of countries; whether eligibility is based on citizenship or residence is not stated either. On the evidence available it is hard to compare with anything.

The honest comparison is awkward for Bitsa: it is the only one of the four that publishes its euro balance mechanics, its plan tiers and its limits — which is genuinely useful — and it scores below all three alternatives. Disclosure and score are not the same thing, and a card that tells you more can still be the worse buy.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend it to someone in the euro area who wants a prepaid Visa with an IBAN, who spends from small balances, who has Apple Pay or Google Pay, and who is content to check the network on the app before every crypto transfer. Someone whose alternative is no card at all gets a lot from this: a Visa number, a European IBAN, wallet support, and a free plan that genuinely costs nothing. Cashback and the paid tiers are there if you outgrow the free ceilings.

I would not recommend it to anyone whose main asset is on-chain. The reported pattern — funds held, support silent, documents demanded repeatedly, credits not landing — is the cost of custodial crypto, and you would be choosing it knowingly. I would also pause if you need to move more than EUR 2,500 a year on the free plan, if you need to get crypto back out to your own wallet, if you live outside the EEA, or if you withdraw cash often and the conflicting ATM terms turn out to be the EUR 2.50 version.

And the check I would make first, before any of that: read the issuer conditions and the payment service provider document the site links to, and confirm who the issuer is and under which licence. Everything else in this review rests on that one question, and the card’s main pages do not answer it. If you want an independent second opinion on the recent reviews, ESMA maintains an interim public register of authorised crypto-asset service providers — Bitsa is a payment card programme rather than a crypto-asset service provider, so it may not appear there at all, but the register is the right place to check anything crypto-related that you are about to trust with money.

Frequently asked questions

What is Bitsa card?

Bitsa is a prepaid Visa card with a European IBAN that you load with crypto — Bitcoin, Ethereum or USD Coin — or with ordinary money by bank transfer or another card. The crypto is converted into euros and the card spends that euro balance, like a gift card that refills. It comes as a physical card and a virtual one, managed through an iOS or Android app. Because the balance is euros, the card behaves like any other Visa at the till.

Is Bitsa a bank?

Not exactly, and this is the most important question on the page. Bitsa states that it is a simplified joint stock company registered in the Nice Trade and Companies Register in France. The issuer behind the card is not named on the main pages I read; unofficial sources name Pecunia Cards EDE S.L.U. under the PecunPay programme. E-money funds are safeguarded but are not bank deposits, so they do not carry deposit guarantee coverage. Your money sits with a payment institution, not with a bank.

How do I get a Bitsa card?

The card does not publish a list of eligible countries, and delivery times and shipping details are also not stated, so you cannot check either before applying. Unofficial sources point to residents of 27 EEA countries, with residents of Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, the UK, the US and Canada excluded. What is official: the physical card costs EUR 20 and an additional virtual card EUR 2.50, and there are three plans — Free, Move at EUR 0.99 a month and Pro at EUR 9.99.

Does Bitsa card require KYC?

The card’s own pages do not say, which is not reassuring either way. Unofficial sources describe proof of residence in an eligible country plus identity verification, and ages 16 to 17 handled through “Bitsa Young” with guardian authorisation in the app. The same sources say accounts can be suspended for failed verification, fraud or anti-money-laundering risk, or missing source-of-funds documents — so expect to be asked where the money came from, not just who you are.

How do I top up the Bitsa card?

The card names Bitcoin, Ethereum and USD Coin as crypto options, and also card, SEPA transfer, wallet and voucher for fiat. Which blockchain networks are supported is not stated, so check the app before you send. Unofficial sources say you generate a new address for each transfer. Watch the free plan’s ceilings: EUR 500 a day, EUR 1,000 a month, EUR 2,500 a year. Transfers on the wrong network cannot be reversed.

What does Bitsa cost to use?

The physical card is EUR 20 and an extra virtual card EUR 2.50. Plans are Free at EUR 0, Move at EUR 0.99 a month or 8.99 a year, and Pro at EUR 9.99 a month or 69.99 a year. Reloading from an external card beyond the free allowance costs 1.5%. Payments outside the euro zone cost 1.75% and elsewhere 2%, on top of Visa’s own rate. ATM withdrawals abroad are EUR 0.55 plus 1%, minimum EUR 0.75.

Is Bitsa card safe and is Bitsa a bank?

Treat the safety question as two questions. The card’s technical safeguards are described only by third parties: an SMS code plus a personal SCA secret, and instant card freeze in the app. The bigger risk is custody — after you fund it, the balance is held by the provider. Trustpilot shows 1.3/5 from 363 reviews with 68% one-star, with repeated reports of frozen accounts, withheld funds and unanswered support, up to September 2026. No official incident is on record.

Can I add the Bitsa card to Apple Wallet?

Apple Pay is confirmed in current help material, alongside Google Pay. Samsung Pay was announced earlier but there is no current setup guide, so do not plan around it. Both wallets work by replacing your card number with a device-specific number stored on the phone, with a fresh one-time code per payment. Note that some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards, and that address verification is mostly unavailable outside the US, Canada and UK.

How do I withdraw money from Bitsa?

Cash at an ATM is straightforward, with a daily cap of EUR 450 outside Spain. Getting crypto back out is the open question: the card’s own pages say nothing I could read, and unofficial sources say the in-app crypto function is buy and sell only, so holdings cannot be sent to external wallets. If sending crypto back to your own wallet is part of your plan, confirm this first — it would change how you use the card.

Is Bitsa card worth it?

Worth it for a euro-area resident who wants a prepaid Visa with an IBAN, spends from modest balances, and tops up in crypto without touching an exchange every time. The free plan costs nothing but caps at EUR 2,500 a year of top-ups. Not worth it if your main asset sits on-chain, if you need larger volumes, or if you cannot get a straight answer about who the issuer is. I scored it 5.0 out of 10, below all three alternatives I compared.

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