Pay closed its card programme years ago; here is what that means for you

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

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18+ Only

If you landed here looking for the Pay card, the first thing to know is that you are late. This is not a card you sign up for any more. Prepaid card purchases through Wyre were switched off on 5 December 2022, and the last version of the app, 1.2.0, was published on 18 February 2023. Wyre, the partner the card ran through, announced its wind-down in June 2023. There is no queue to join, no waiting list, no country where this still works. What you are looking at now is the remains of a programme that ended, plus some general advice for anyone still holding one of the old cards.

That matters because the search terms people type — “how do I get a Pay card”, “is Pay card free”, “how do I top up” — all assume a live product. None of them have a live answer. So I have written this page for the two groups who are actually reading it: people who still have an old Pay card in a drawer or on an old phone, and people who were refused an ordinary bank card and are still looking for something that spends.

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

I should say up front what this review is not. I have not used this card, and I cannot test a closed product. Everything below is taken from what the card’s own public pages state and from publicly reported facts about the partners involved. Where the card’s pages are silent, I say so, and I do not fill the gap with a guess.

The score: 1.8 out of 10

A mark of 1.8 is not a judgement about whether the idea was sound. It is a measurement of how little is left to review. The “Who can get it” and “Everyday use” marks are zeros because there is no path to a card at all — not because the old cards were refused at checkout. Once a programme stops issuing, the practical questions collapse into one question: what happens to the money and the cards that people already hold.

What happened to the programme

The shape of this is unusually clear, which is useful, because “the card stopped working” is the sort of thing that leaves people guessing. Three dated facts do the work.

• On 5 December 2022, app version 1.1.12 turned off prepaid card purchases through Wyre, until further notice. That notice never came.
• Wyre, the card purchase partner, ceased support for MetaMask in January 2023 as Wyre was reported to be closing, according to Benzinga. Wyre’s wind-down was announced in June 2023, according to The Block. Neither source links Cardstack to this shutdown.
• The final app release, version 1.2.0, dates from 18 February 2023. After that the app stopped changing.

Two more details help you read the archive correctly. Polygon was removed in version 1.1.13, so networks that once worked quietly stopped working. And the App Store listing described the product as “Manage your prepaid cards” inside a DeFi payments wallet — which was always a management app for a stored balance, not a bank account in the ordinary sense.

Who issued the cards is not stated anywhere on the public pages. The developer is CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD. on the App Store, and the Cardstack homepage footer refers to the Cardstack Foundation. But an issuer is the licensed institution actually standing behind the card, and this one is not named. If someone tells you they know which bank issued the Pay card, treat that as unverified.

The version notes do contain one small clue about money that was once movable. Version 1.0.11 mentions “Reward withdrawal” bug fixes, and version 1.1.13 says each reward is claimed individually. So the app did once have a withdrawal function for rewards. Whether a card balance could be withdrawn after closure is a different question, and the public pages do not answer it. That is a real gap, not something I can reason my way past.

The App Store (UK) rating was 5.0 out of 5 from 3 ratings, read on 20 October 2026. Three ratings is not evidence of anything, and I would treat a perfect score from three people as decoration rather than data. The app required iOS 13.0+, macOS 11.0+ on Apple M1+, and visionOS 1.0+. Google Play is not stated.

The one thing the listing still advertises, in its own words, is claiming “rewards” individually. The rate is not stated. An unstated rate on a programme that ended is not a return, and it should not be counted as one.

If you already have the card

This is the section I would read twice if the card is physically in your wallet right now.

The honest starting point: the public pages say nothing about ATM withdrawals, spending limits, how to fund the card, top-ups, withdrawing a card balance, or what happens to a balance after closure. Not stated — all of it. So I am not going to invent a procedure for you. What I can do is tell you what is genuinely unknown and what you can still check yourself.

What the listing does say is that the wallet handled crypto balances, and that transactions were confirmed with Touch ID or Face ID. Self-custody is not stated. Which wallets were supported is not stated. So if you had funds in the old Card Pay wallet, the first question is not about the card at all — it is whether you can still reach the wallet itself. A card that cannot be used because the programme closed is one problem. A balance you cannot open is a second, larger one.

My advice is to establish three things, in this order:

• Whether the app still opens on your device and whether it still shows a balance. If it does not, try the developer site cardstack.com linked from the listing before assuming anything.
• Whether any balance is still held, and in what form. Crypto in a wallet you still hold keys to is a very different situation from fiat sitting with a partner that has wound down.
• Whether your bank has any record. If you ever loaded this card from a bank account or card, you have a payment trail on your side of the transaction, which is worth more than anything the app might tell you.

Support is not stated, and this is worth dwelling on. The App Store listing links no support page — only the developer site cardstack.com and a privacy policy. That is thin. A privacy policy tells you how they handle data, not who to write to when a balance is stuck. There is no address, no phone number, no documented escalation path on the public listing.

On disputes and chargebacks: not stated. And this is where I would caution against optimism regardless of what any card used to promise. Card purchases are routed through a network and an issuer, and a chargeback is a refund ordered by the issuer. If the issuer is not named publicly, the person who would order that refund is not something you can point at. The usual rights that protect debit cardholders in the US come from Regulation E, and credit card rights from Regulation Z, but prepaid-card coverage varies and should not be assumed.

One practical note that applies to everyone reading this section, not just Pay holders: a declined authorisation can leave a hold on funds that stays for several days, typically up to 7. If you are trying to work out why money is missing from an account, that hold is often the boring answer.

What can go wrong

I want to be careful here. This is a closed programme, not a scam, and the absence of complaints is not evidence of safety.

The main official incident is the one I have already described: prepaid card purchases through Wyre were disabled on 5 December 2022 until further notice, and never re-enabled. Wyre announced its wind-down in mid-2023. What that pattern shows is dependency risk in its plainest form. A card like this is not one institution; it is a chain. The network routes the payment, a licensed issuer holds the programme, a partner supplies the crypto side, and the brand you see is often only the front. When one link at the end of that chain fails, the card stops working, and you cannot substitute a different link.

I found no user reports to describe — no Trustpilot page for Card Pay, no Reddit threads, and searches on 20 October 2026 returned unrelated companies. Given a 5.0 rating from 3 App Store ratings, this is not a card with a body of public experience, and silence here tells you about the size of the user base rather than about how people were treated.

Broader risks from the category, offered as things to check rather than things that happened here:

• Custody. If a provider holds the credentials to your crypto, you must trust it completely. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key or seed phrase, and a seed phrase — typically 12 to 24 words — is an unencrypted form of that key. Anyone who obtains it can restore the wallet and spend its funds.
• Irreversibility. Blockchain transfers are typically irreversible, and there is no built-in recovery: the network cannot freeze or return funds. A deposit sent on a network a provider does not support, or to an address of another network, can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee.
• Sanctions screening. Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity. Stablecoins are not censorship-proof, which cuts both ways.
• Declines at the till. A card number starts with a 6 or 8 digit issuer identification number that merchants can look up, along with the issuing country. Some merchants decline prepaid or foreign-issued cards precisely because that lookup reveals the card type. Address Verification Service is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is generally unavailable for foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines.
• Blocked categories. MCC 7995 covers gambling. Many issuers block it on specific cards by policy rather than by law, and the blocked list varies by issuer.
• The double-regulation trap. A card is a payment service regulated separately from crypto, so a crypto card often depends on two licences. If one of them is not named publicly, you are being asked to rely on an arrangement you cannot inspect.

None of these are accusations about this card. They are the standard failure modes of the category, and they are why I score “Reliability and complaints” at 1 rather than higher despite the clean public record.

What to take instead

If you came here because you cannot get an ordinary bank card, or because a bank card is not usable where you live, then the honest framing is that this category has moved on and these are the programmes with live products. All figures below are from the providers’ own pages as read for this review. Eligibility, country rules and fees change — check the provider’s own terms before you rely on any of it.

Reading across that table, three things stand out.

MetaMask is the strongest of the three on the marks, and its structure is the most interesting. There is no pre-loaded balance: the card spends directly from your connected wallet, so there is no balance to strand and no credit involved. What you give up is simplicity and predictability — the published fee is described only as a “minimal fee for each transaction” with the amount not stated on the pages read, and a fee table is linked instead. Solana-only wallets cannot withdraw credit. If your problem with bank cards is that a shop will not accept them, notice the useful line in its own FAQ: ineligible regions limit sign-ups, not spending.

KAST is the most explicit about fees, and that is worth something after reading a page that says “not stated”. Zero on stablecoin top-up, zero on card spend in USD, zero transaction fee, zero for Apple and Google Pay. The costs that do exist are a membership ladder running from free to 10,000 USD/year, an inactivity fee of 1 USD/month after 12 months, renewal and reactivation fees whose amounts are not stated, 40 USD delivery for a Standard physical card, and non-USD FX between 0.5% and 1.75%. Its cashback is tiered and capped per month — 1.5% on the first 2,000 USD/month at Standard, 2% on the first 10,000 USD/month at Premium, 3% on the first 40,000 USD/month at Private — which is a genuinely different shape from a flat rate. There is also a conflict in its own documents worth knowing about: the Terms say acceptable tokens are “currently USDT and USDC”, while the app lists PYUSD and RLUSD as well.

Zeal is the one I would read most carefully before drawing conclusions from, because so much is not stated. Its fee schedule is not published. Its FX position is the cleanest of the three: no additional FX fee, conversion at the Visa wholesale rate, with Gnosis Pay fees such as ATM possibly still applying. Its cashback is the highest headline number here at up to 4%, but it is paid in GNO, and GNO must be held in the card Safe to qualify — so the reward is partly a nudge to hold a token that moves with the market. Rates can change. It also advertises up to 5% variable APY on EUR/USD balances.

Two general facts belong with this comparison rather than inside it. Neither Visa nor Mastercard issues crypto cards to consumers; they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. In November 2022 Visa said it had “terminated our global agreements with FTX”, and the FTX US debit card programme was wound down by its issuer. Separately, WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all WaveCrest-issued Visa programmes. The two networks you see on the cards above are not guarantors of the companies putting their name on them.

And a pattern worth recognising: programme closures typically run in a fixed order — a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then users are asked to withdraw remaining balances. So when you read about any card winding down, look for that order. It tells you which stage you are actually at.

Who I would recommend it to

Honestly, to nobody as a card to get. I score it 1.8 out of 10 because there is nothing to get: no new cards, no disclosed fees, no disclosed top-ups, no named issuer, and a partner that closed. Recommending a closed product would be advice dressed up as helpfulness.

I would recommend this page to three groups instead.

If you hold an old Pay card, read the holders section and work through it in order. Check whether the app opens and shows anything, check the developer site cardstack.com from the listing, and establish whether any balance is a crypto balance you still hold keys to or a fiat balance sitting with a company that no longer publishes fee terms. Do not assume a refund is coming, and do not assume the worst either — go and look.

If you were refused an ordinary bank card, the reason usually has nothing to do with crypto, and it is worth knowing that before you spend money or time. KYC rules exist because of anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing law, and they cover name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documents, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and politically exposed person status. In the EU, if due diligence cannot be completed, rules require the institution to refuse the transaction or relationship and, where necessary, end existing relationships — which is why accounts get closed or frozen pending documents. Nationality is screened separately from residence, because sanctions screening is often applied to citizenship and country of birth as well as country of address. Cards in this category inherit those rules; they do not offer a way around them, and any provider promising you one is telling you something about itself.

If you simply want a crypto card that works today, start from the comparison above and pick on structure rather than on the headline cashback. Ask three questions of each candidate: who is the named issuer; what exactly is the fee, since “minimal” and “not stated” are not the same as a number; and what happens to my balance if the partner disappears. Those three questions are what this card’s public pages would not answer.

One more thing to hold on to, because it outlives any card choice: the IRS treats digital assets as property, so exchanging them for goods, services, dollars or other digital assets generally produces a taxable gain or loss. For personal or investment holdings the result is a capital gain or loss, short-term if held a year or less, and gain is measured in local fiat currency using the fair market value on the date of the transaction — which means each card payment funded from crypto may be a separate disposal. I am not giving tax advice and you should take your own position on your own situation, but I would not want you to discover this rule after a year of spending.

Frequently asked questions

What is Pay card?

Pay card was a prepaid card managed inside a DeFi payments wallet, described in its App Store listing as “Manage your prepaid cards”. It converted or held crypto balances and let you spend from them like a stored-balance payment card. The developer was CARDSTACK SERVICES PTE. LTD. on the App Store, with the Cardstack Foundation named in the homepage footer. The issuing institution is not stated on the public pages, and the programme no longer issues cards.

Is Pay a bank?

No, and it was never presented as one. A prepaid card draws on a stored balance rather than on a bank account, and the product described here was a wallet app managing prepaid cards, with no issuer named publicly. Card payments generally involve a network that routes messages and sets rules, a licensed issuer that holds the programme, and a crypto brand that is often only a programme manager or front-end. Pay sat at the front end, and the layer that actually issued the cards is not disclosed.

Why did the Pay card programme close?

Prepaid card purchases through Wyre were disabled on 5 December 2022, until further notice, and that notice never came. Wyre ceased support for MetaMask in January 2023 as it was reportedly closing, according to Benzinga, and announced its wind-down in June 2023, according to The Block. Neither source links Cardstack to this shutdown. The last app release was version 1.2.0 on 18 February 2023, and Polygon had already been removed in version 1.1.13.

I still have a Pay card — can I use it?

Nobody can tell you from the public pages, and I will not invent an answer. Card fees, spending limits, ATM access, how to fund the card, and what happens to a balance after closure are all not stated. The listing links no support page, only the developer site cardstack.com and a privacy policy. Start by opening the app, check cardstack.com, and establish whether any balance is a crypto balance you still hold keys to or a fiat balance with a partner that has wound down.

Can I top up the Pay card?

Not through the programme as it ran, and not now. Top-up methods are not disclosed, and the only paid item listed is the in-app purchase “Account on Gnosis Chain” at GBP 0.99, which is not a card top-up. Prepaid card purchases through Wyre were switched off in December 2022, so the mechanism that loaded the card is gone rather than hidden.

Is Pay card free?

The app was free to download, and that is the only free thing anyone can confirm. The only in-app purchase listed is “Account on Gnosis Chain” at GBP 0.99. Card fees are not stated — neither a monthly fee, nor a spend fee, nor an FX fee. An unstated fee is not a zero fee, and for a programme that closed, it is unlikely to have become clearer since.

Is Pay card safe?

I would not put it that way, because there is no product left to make a promise about. Self-custody is not stated, and the listing only says transactions are confirmed with Touch ID or Face ID. Control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key or seed phrase, transfers are typically irreversible, and custodial platforms have a real record of failures. None of that was specific to Pay — it is the category’s baseline risk, and I have not found any user reports either way.

What are the best alternatives to Pay right now?

Three live programmes come out of this review ahead of it: MetaMask at 7.1 out of 10, spending directly from your connected wallet on Mastercard with no pre-loaded balance; KAST at 6.1 out of 10, with the most explicit fee schedule, a free-to-10,000 USD/year membership ladder and tiered cashback; and Zeal at 6.1 out of 10, converting at the Visa wholesale rate with no added FX fee. All three inherit ordinary KYC rules, so residency and citizenship still matter.

Is Pay card available in my country?

No country is listed, because the programme stopped issuing cards. Who could get it is not stated on the public pages at all, and that is not a gap in my research — the card’s own pages do not say. For context on the category generally: prepaid and debit cards are generally available to adults 18 and over, some issuers set higher limits, and residency, nationality and identity documents are screened separately for anti-money-laundering reasons.

Is it worth deleting my Pay account?

The public pages say nothing about closing an account, refunding a balance, or what state a dormant wallet ends in. Given that no support page is linked and no fee terms are published, my concern would be the opposite of tidiness — check what balance or holdings remain before you close anything. I cannot tell you what closing does, and I would not want you to find out by doing it.

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