A French-run prepaid card with a euro balance and a real IBAN — useful, but you are buying a prepaid Visa, not a bank account

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Bitsa is not a bank account and not really a “crypto card” in the sense of something that taps into a self-custody wallet at the moment of payment. It is a prepaid Visa: you load it, the money sits as a euro balance behind a card number, and you spend that balance. What makes it more than a disposable gift card is the European IBAN attached to it, which means direct debits, salary payments and standing orders are at least on the table. The crypto part is the way you refill it.

That framing decides most of the questions people bring to this card, so I want to be clear about it before anything else. If your problem is “I cannot open a normal bank account”, this card is genuinely in a different category from a prepaid voucher card, and the IBAN is the reason. If your problem is “I want to spend Bitcoin directly from my own wallet, without touching an exchange or holding a balance with a provider”, this is the wrong card, because the balance sits with the provider until you spend it.

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

Verdict: 5.0 out of 10

I scored Bitsa at 5.0 / 10. That is a middle-of-the-road number, and I want to explain it rather than just drop it, because a single figure for a card like this hides more than it shows. The card does the basic job well — a physical and virtual Visa, a European IBAN, spending anywhere Visa is accepted — and that is genuinely more than most crypto cards offer. What drags the number down is the cost structure, the thin published detail, and the pattern of user complaints that came up when I looked.

The audience note that fits all of this: EU residents who want a prepaid Visa with an IBAN.

Where Bitsa suits you. You live in a supported European country, you have a stable-ish source of euros or crypto, you want a card that behaves like an ordinary Visa, and the IBAN matters to you — for a landlord’s direct debit, for a utility, for receiving a payment. If you are moving money from an exchange or a self-custody wallet and want a card-shaped way out of it, the crypto reloads are the sensible route rather than a workaround.

Where it does not suit you. If you hold long-term crypto positions and want them to stay yours, this card is wrong for you: what you load is converted to euros, and the crypto side is custodial. If you live outside the supported area — in the United States, Canada, the UK, Bulgaria, Croatia or Latvia, for instance — you are in restricted or unconfirmed territory. If you are sensitive to fees, the reload and foreign-payment percentages add up quickly. And if you need real, published support commitments, the published detail is thin, which is a practical problem in itself.

Who will they actually give the card to

The honest answer from the card’s own public pages is: not stated. Bitsa does not publish the list of countries it will onboard. What circulates on third-party sites is that the card is aimed at residents of supported EEA countries, with a list of 27 — 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, Sweden — and that Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Latvia, the United Kingdom and the United States are restricted or excluded. That third-party list is not confirmed by the card, and it is the kind of thing that can change.

Two things about the list itself are worth noting even as unofficial. First, it is an EEA-shaped list with three European countries carved out and three non-European countries carved out, which is the pattern of a provider hedging across licensing rather than a deliberate market strategy. Second, it is a list of *residents*, not citizens — nationality is a separate question, and for a regulated product the two are usually screened separately. If your address is in one of the 27 but your citizenship is elsewhere, that is exactly the kind of thing that gets a case held for manual review. I am not saying it will be refused; I am saying the official pages do not tell you, and you should treat this as a question to ask support before you send any documents.

What the card does publish is the product itself: “a prepaid Visa crypto card”, available physical and virtual, crypto converted to euros, with a European IBAN, managed in an iOS/Android app. That is the honest description, and it is worth reading closely — the euros are the thing you hold, and the crypto is the thing you loaded from.

How to get it

Short version: identity verification, an app, and either a virtual card straight away or a physical one in the post. The card’s own pages do not describe the verification steps, the document list, or the delivery times, so anything specific here comes from third-party material rather than from Bitsa.

What third-party sources describe: proof of residence in an eligible country plus identity verification; ages 16 to 17 handled through a “Bitsa Young” route with guardian authorisation inside the app; and the issuer reserving the right to suspend accounts where KYC fails, where fraud or anti-money-laundering risk is flagged, or where source-of-funds documents are missing.

That last point is not a throwaway clause. It is the single most important thing on this page for anyone who has been turned down by a bank before, because it means the same door you came through can close behind you for reasons that have nothing to do with your intentions.

On delivery, the card’s pages say nothing useful, so I will not invent a number. What is published is pricing rather than timing: the physical card at EUR 20 and an additional virtual card at EUR 2.50.

The practical sequence is the obvious one. Download the app, create the account, complete verification, pick the physical card, the virtual card or both, and then fund it. Which plan you pick at that moment matters a great deal, because the purchase and balance limits differ by tier — I cover those in the cost section, and they are the real decision here, not the monthly fee.

Fees: what it really costs

The headline numbers are moderate. The way they stack is not, and this is where the 4/10 for cost comes from. Here is everything published on price:

Now three everyday payments, and which of those lines actually touches them.

Groceries in a euro-zone supermarket. This is the cheapest case and there is no conversion layer at all — the balance is already euros and the shop is in the euro zone, so neither the 1.75% nor the 2% line applies. What you might still meet is the transfer commission, EUR 1 on Free and Move, if the purchase is routed as a transfer rather than a normal card authorisation. On the Move plan that EUR 1 is more than the monthly fee itself, which is the argument for Pro if you use the card heavily; on Free it is a real cost every time.

A hotel or a subscription billed in dollars. Here the 2% line bites, not the 1.75% one — that lower rate is for the non-euro part of Europe, and “the rest of the world” is priced higher. On a EUR 100 monthly subscription that is EUR 2 a month, which does not sound like much until you notice it is a permanent tax on the account rather than a one-off. Also relevant: a declined authorisation can leave a hold on the money for several days, sometimes up to seven, so a failed payment is not always just a failed payment.

Withdrawing cash abroad. The published formula is EUR 0.55 plus 1% of the amount, with a floor of EUR 0.75, and the daily ceiling outside Spain is EUR 450. Pull EUR 100 and you pay EUR 1.55; pull EUR 450 and you pay EUR 5.05. Third-party sources put a per-day allowance on top of that — one or two withdrawals up to EUR 350 on the lower plans, four up to EUR 900 on Pro — though the eurozone numbers conflict between the issuer’s terms and a newer guide, one quoting a flat EUR 2.50 and the other only the operator’s own fee. In Spain the full operator fee is passed through. If cash machines are a normal part of how you use a card, read that conflict as a live question for support, not as a settled rule.

One more cost that is easy to miss because it is not a fixed fee: the crypto conversion spread is not stated. When you sell Bitcoin or USDC to load the card, there is a conversion, and the card does not publish the margin. On the buy side the same third-party material lists 0% crypto buy fee on all plans, which is attractive until you notice it is the sell side that fills your balance.

How to top it up

Loading this card is the part that justifies calling it a crypto card at all. The card lists Bitcoin, Ethereum and USD Coin, and also a bank card, a SEPA transfer, a wallet and a voucher. That is a decent range — crypto for the committed, SEPA and card for the cautious — but it is also where the published detail thins out badly.

The networks are not named. This is the single most important thing to understand before you send anything, because crypto transfers are irreversible: if you send on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, the money can be lost or need manual recovery with no guarantee of either. The safe habit is to generate a fresh deposit address inside the app for each transfer, which third-party guides describe and which costs nothing to follow.

Some of the mechanics, unofficial and not confirmed by the card:

• Buying crypto inside the app is listed as available on all three plans.
• Loading from an external card is free up to an allowance, then 1.5%.
• Voucher reloads are listed in ranges.
• Crypto top-ups are capped at up to EUR 20,000 per day.

A few category facts that matter more than they look. A stablecoin aims to hold a steady value against a currency but is not guaranteed to: TerraUSD collapsed in May 2022, and USDC briefly lost its peg in March 2023 during the US banking crisis. USDT and USDC are dollar-pegged, and the BIS put about 90% of stablecoin market capitalisation in those two as of July 2025; Circle says USDC is backed 1:1 by cash and cash equivalents with monthly reserve attestations. Circle listed USDC as natively supported on 38 networks as of 16 September 2026. If you send ETH on Ethereum, the gas fee is paid in ETH — a wallet holding a token but no ETH cannot send it, which is a common first-top-up failure. And if you route through Tron, note that Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option here. Whatever the network, the fee on your deposit is charged by the blockchain, not by Bitsa.

What you cannot do is the thing that surprises people. Third-party sources report that in-app crypto is buy-and-sell only: holdings cannot be sent to or received from external wallets. So this is not a wallet you can use as a treasury, it is an interface for converting into a card balance. Treat it that way.

Paying with it every day

This is where Bitsa scores best, and 9/10 is not generosity — it is that a physical and virtual Visa with a European IBAN is a genuinely useful thing to own, and most crypto cards offer neither.

Day to day you get the card, the app, and the euro balance. The IBAN means you are not limited to swiping: direct debits and incoming transfers are the reason this card is in a different category from a prepaid voucher. Third-party sources confirm Apple Pay and Google Pay in current help material; Samsung Pay was announced earlier but there is no current setup guide, so I would not plan around it.

Rewards are thin and vague. “Cashback up to 15%” appears among the plan services, with the Move plan mentioning cashback at favourite brands — but the payout asset and the conditions are not stated. Fifteen per cent of something, on terms nobody has published, is not a reason to choose this card.

The app is where you manage the card, and its reception is the weakest link in the daily-use picture. Third-party listings show Google Play at 2.8 or 2.9 out of 5, with the figures differing within the same page and no rating count given, and official pages do not carry ratings at all. For a card you would use as a primary spending surface, an app in that range matters more than it would for a card you touch twice a month. Reviews also mention login and app failures, which is a specific kind of problem: the money is fine and you cannot reach it.

A last practical note on declines. Merchants can look up the BIN and see which institution and country issued the card, and may apply extra scrutiny when the issuer country differs from your billing address — which is why a French-issued card can look foreign to a shop elsewhere. Address verification compares the numeric parts of the billing address you typed against issuer records, and it is mainly offered in the US, Canada and the UK, so it is often simply unavailable for a foreign-issued card and that can cause a decline. And some merchants decline prepaid or foreign BINs outright. If a card is rejected, this is often the reason, and it is not a fault in your account.

What can go wrong

Frozen accounts with money in them. This is the recurring theme in what users report, and it is the reason the reliability score is 3/10. A Trustpilot reading of the Bitsa page gives 1.3 out of 5 across 363 reviews, with 68% one-star, of which 68% were read on 20 October 2026. The themes: accounts frozen or blocked with funds withheld, in reviews running from September 2020 through September 2026, including May, July and September 2026; support unresponsive for weeks or months as of July 2026; repeated document and KYC demands through 2025; crypto top-ups partly or not credited in May and November 2025; login and app failures in September 2026; and an unexplained closure in January 2025. The company has not replied to negative reviews, and two reviewers claim regulator warnings — unverified claims, but the fact that someone felt the need to make them is itself worth noticing.

I want to be careful here about what this evidence is. It is user reports on a review platform, not a regulatory finding, and a low score with a high share of one-star reviews tells you a lot of people are unhappy without telling you precisely why or that the figure is audited. What I can say is that the pattern is consistent, spans six years, and centres on one specific thing: money going in and not coming out on request.

Nobody will tell you who issues the card. Bitsa states that it is “a simplified joint stock company (SAS) registered in the Nice Trade and Companies Register” in France, and describes itself as a prepaid Visa. The issuing bank and BIN sponsor are not named on the pages I could read — the footer links to “Card issuer conditions” and “Payment service provider” exist, but they were not part of what was available. Third-party sources name the issuer as Pecunia Cards EDE S.L.U. under the PecunPay programme, Banco de España register 6707, with Bitsa SAS as the programme operator. Treat that as unofficial. But the distinction is not pedantic: you are trusting a balance to an issuer you cannot name from the card’s own materials, and licences are not stated on the pages I read.

Your money is held by someone else. The euro balance is custodial, and once funded, third-party sources describe it as sitting inside the PecunPay programme. In general terms that is what custody means: control of crypto belongs to whoever holds the private key, and a custodial provider holds the credentials, so you must trust them completely. Custodial platforms have a real record of failures — Mt. Gox at roughly US$350 million reported stolen between 2011 and 2014, Coincheck at about US$400 million in 2018, Ronin Network at US$625 million in 2022. Card balances are smaller exposures than those, but the structure is the same.

A provider programme can close. Visa and Mastercard do not issue crypto cards to consumers themselves; they license issuers, and they can suspend a programme. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down. WaveCrest, a Visa issuer that supplied crypto card brands, was suspended by Visa in Europe in 2018, closing all its programmes. Closures typically mean a notice period, then loading and spending stop, then you are asked to withdraw what is left — which is when an unstated withdrawal fee would hurt, and here the details are thin: third-party material lists balance management at expiry at EUR 0, and third-party external transfers at EUR 1.50, while the official withdrawal page was not read.

Limits will catch you out. Purchase limits are EUR 1,500 a month on Free, EUR 5,000 on Move, EUR 15,000 on Pro, with maximum balances of EUR 2,500, EUR 15,000 and unlimited respectively. Top-up limits are EUR 500/day, EUR 1,000/month and EUR 2,500/year on Free; EUR 1,200/day, EUR 5,000/month and EUR 15,000/year on Move; unlimited on Pro. If you are self-employed or bill a client monthly, the Free plan is not viable and the year-on-year pricing — EUR 69.99 for Pro against EUR 69.99 for Pro annually — is the difference between a reasonable card and an expensive one.

Sanctions and frozen addresses. Not a Bitsa-specific problem but a real one for anyone moving stablecoins. Tether says it disables tokens in wallets on the OFAC sanctions list and has frozen funds tied to illicit activity, so stablecoins are not censorship-proof.

It is not covered by deposit guarantee. Electronic money institutions must safeguard customer funds by segregating them in dedicated accounts or insuring them, but those funds are not the same as bank deposits and may not sit under a national deposit guarantee scheme. That distinction is worth holding onto whenever a prepaid card is described as being “like a bank account”.

Sanctions screening in the background. Regulated businesses must verify customers and screen them as part of anti-money-laundering law, including ongoing monitoring. In the EU that due diligence covers name, address, date of birth, nationality, identity documentation, a sanctions check, the purpose of the relationship, and politically-exposed-person status. If it cannot be completed, the institution is required to hold off, and where necessary to end the relationship — which is exactly why accounts are frozen pending documents. Nationality is screened separately from residence, because risk policy often applies to citizenship and country of birth as well as to the address.

What to take instead

Bitsa is not alone in the prepaid-Visa-with-crypto-topping space, and the honest comparison is not flattering to it on price. These are the closest alternatives on the same broad brief; each scores differently on the same kind of criteria.

Three observations as you read that table.

Stella is a physical and virtual Visa that works at what the site calls over 40 million Visa merchants globally, and it is custodial in a way that is simple: deposit crypto and the account tops the card automatically. It scores higher, at 6.5. Its drawbacks for many readers are that fees are not published on the card page, the country list is not stated, and US and European users are routed through affiliates — and its terms bar anyone under economic sanctions programmes. No cashback is stated on the card page; a separate Earn product handles yield. For a European reader who cannot find Bitsa’s country list, an affiliate structure is a reasonable thing to dislike on its own.

Whop Cards spends from a Whop balance, with a pending balance usable as soon as a payment arrives and standard withdrawals using settled funds. The starting data is stablecoin collateral from a linked wallet, and coins and networks are not stated. Cashback is 5% at select merchants, currently Uber. But it is built around the United States — 31 consumer states, explicitly listed — and that rules it out for most of the people reading a page about Bitsa.

UniFi Card is the least Bitsa-like of the four. It is a prepaid debit Visa issued by Lead Bank, in US dollars, funded through ACH, wire, SEPA or SPEI, with money-out to a USDC wallet and send-money routes to the Philippines, Mexico and the eurozone. A listing claims 3% rewards on balances, which is not the same as card cashback. If you are paid in dollars and move money to Latin America, it is worth a look; if you want a euro balance in Europe, it is not a substitute.

On the crypto-to-cash side generally, one structural point applies to all of these. Many crypto cards behave like prepaid cards — crypto converted and loaded as a fiat balance — because in the pre-loaded model you convert first and the card spends only that balance, which is also why the card cannot overdraw. If your requirement is the opposite — crypto stays in your own wallet until the moment of payment — then none of these four is right, and the trade-off you are making is self-custody risk: you become solely responsible for key loss, phishing, and clipboard-hijacking malware that swaps an address you copied. Transfers are typically irreversible and a stolen key has no built-in recovery, since the network cannot freeze or return funds.

Who I would recommend it to

Three groups, in order of confidence.

If you are in one of the 27 EEA countries, you want a euro balance with an IBAN for direct debits, and you are moving money from crypto or an exchange rather than from an employer, this card does what you need and I would not talk you out of it. The IBAN is the part that is hard to get elsewhere in this category, and the everyday-use score of 9/10 is not sentiment.

If you are self-employed or bill clients monthly, look at Pro and do the arithmetic on the annual figure, EUR 69.99 against the EUR 1,500-a-month purchase ceiling on Free. The unlimited purchase and balance headroom is the reason to pay, not the cashback, which is “up to 15%” on conditions nobody publishes.

If you are holding crypto long-term, or you live in the United States, Canada, the UK, Bulgaria, Croatia or Latvia, I would steer you elsewhere — and if you cannot get an ordinary bank card, look at a self-custody-linked card or a regulated exchange with its own card rather than a prepaid one.

And a caveat that applies to all three: read the issuer’s own terms, not the review pages. The most expensive mistake here is not the 1.75% or the 2% — it is loading money, then finding the support line unresponsive in the same week the app refuses to log in. If your plan requires a direct debit to land on this card every month, keep a second card as a backstop and ask support, in writing, for the issuer name, the withdrawal fee and the ATM terms before you load more than you can afford to have frozen.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Bitsa card?

Bitsa is a prepaid Visa available as a physical card, a virtual card, or both, with a European IBAN attached. You load it with euros or with crypto, and the crypto is converted to euros. What you hold between payments is a euro balance held by the provider, not a wallet of your own. It is managed through an iOS or Android app. It is not a bank account, and it does not behave like a debit card tied to a current account.

How does the Bitsa card work?

You top the balance by bank card, SEPA transfer, voucher, or by buying and selling Bitcoin, Ethereum or USD Coin inside the app. The crypto is converted to euros and becomes card spendable money. From then on it behaves like an ordinary prepaid Visa in stores, online and at cash machines, and the IBAN lets direct debits and incoming transfers reach it. Limits apply per plan, from EUR 1,500 a month on Free up to unlimited on Pro.

Is Bitsa a bank?

No. Bitsa describes itself as “a simplified joint stock company (SAS) registered in the Nice Trade and Companies Register” in France, and the card as a prepaid Visa crypto card. The pages I could read do not name the issuing bank or BIN sponsor, and the footer links to card issuer conditions and a payment service provider that were not available. Balance safeguarding by an electronic money institution is not the same as a bank deposit guarantee.

Who owns Bitsa, and who issues the card?

Bitsa itself is the French company registered in Nice. The issuer is not named on the card’s public pages I read; third-party sources name Pecunia Cards EDE S.L.U. under the PecunPay programme, Banco de España register 6707, with Bitsa SAS as programme operator. I would treat that as unofficial until the card’s own issuer conditions confirm it. Licences are not stated on the pages available to me.

Does Bitsa require KYC, and can I use it in my country?

The card’s own pages do not state the verification requirements. Third-party sources describe proof of residence in an eligible country plus identity verification, with ages 16 to 17 handled through “Bitsa Young” with guardian authorisation in the app. The same source lists 27 supported EEA countries by name and says Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Latvia, the UK and the US are restricted. None of that list is confirmed by the card, so check before sending documents.

What does it cost to get a Bitsa card, and is it free?

The physical card costs EUR 20 and a virtual card EUR 2.50, and a virtual card is effectively the free way in. The Free plan has no monthly fee, Move costs EUR 0.99/month or EUR 8.99/year, and Pro EUR 9.99/month or EUR 69.99/year. Spend is not free of fees even on the free plan: EUR 1 per transfer on Free and Move, and 1.75% or 2% on payments outside the euro zone depending on where.

How do I top up the Bitsa card, and which networks?

You can top up by bank card, SEPA transfer, wallet or voucher, and with Bitcoin, Ethereum or USD Coin inside the app. The networks are not named in the card’s published material, which is the part to be careful about: blockchain transfers are irreversible, and sending on an unsupported network or to the wrong address can lose the money. Generate a fresh deposit address for each transfer, and note that Ethereum gas must be paid in ETH.

Is Bitsa safe, and can I lose money to it?

It is custodial, so your euro balance sits with the provider rather than with you, which carries counterparty and hack risk. There is also a specific, repeated complaint pattern: user reviews describe accounts frozen with funds withheld, slow or absent support, repeated document requests and uncredited top-ups, with a Trustpilot reading of 1.3 out of 5 across 363 reviews at which 68% were one-star. Those are user reports rather than regulatory findings, but they are consistent and recent enough to plan around.

Can I use the Bitsa card in Apple Pay or Google Pay?

Third-party sources confirm Apple Pay and Google Pay in current help material, and the app supports iOS and Android, so both wallets are the practical route for spending. Samsung Pay was announced earlier but has no current setup guide, so treat it as unavailable. A tokenised wallet number is a separate credential from the plastic card, and the issuer can restrict it to certain channels.

How do I withdraw from Bitsa, and what happens at expiry?

The card’s withdrawal page was not available to me, so I will not guess at the schedule. Third-party sources say in-app crypto is buy and sell only, that holdings cannot be sent to or received from external wallets, and that balance management at expiry costs EUR 0 while a third-party external transfer costs EUR 1.50. Withdrawals outside Spain are capped at EUR 450 a day, and cash machine withdrawals abroad cost EUR 0.55 plus 1% with a EUR 0.75 minimum.

Is Bitsa worth it, compared with alternatives?

Against Stella, Whop Cards and UniFi Card on the same brief, Bitsa scores 5.0 against Stella’s 6.5, Whop’s 5.2 and UniFi’s 4.7. Bitsa’s edge is the combination of a euro balance, an IBAN and EEA-wide availability; its weakness is published opacity on the issuer, the country list and withdrawal terms, and a fee stack that adds up. If you need the IBAN in Europe it is worth it; if you want dollars and send money to Latin America, look at UniFi instead.

How do I close or delete a Bitsa account?

I have no reliable detail on the closure process, and I am not going to invent one. What is clear from the complaint pattern is that it is worth checking the outcome of your remaining balance and any outstanding card first, rather than assuming an in-app delete does everything. Because accounts have been reported closed without explanation and balances withheld, ask support in writing for the closure procedure and the withdrawal terms, and keep a record of what you sent.

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